I'm trying to get an idea on how people consume the waffle I put out, it should only take 5 seconds to respond, and I'd be very grateful. It’s well publicised that I don’t run any kind of analytics on this site . For me, engagement is far more important. But I’m trying to better understand how you fine people consume the waffle I spit out into the world. The only reason I want to do this is that I think it will be interesting to know. I could temporarily add tracking to the site, ...

For the new year, a resolution How small that is, with which we wrestle, what wrestles with us, how immense; were we to let ourselves, the way things do, be conquered thus by the great storm,— we would become far-reaching and nameless. What we triumph over is the Small, and the success itself makes us petty. The Eternal and Unexampled will not be bent by us. …growth is: to be the deeply defeated by ever greater things. from  The Man Watching by Rainer Maria Rilke Fo...

I entered the new year holding an inconsolable, shrieking baby while London set off an armageddon of fireworks around us. So goes parenthood. The baby is fine, just congested and teething. I am as “fine” as anyone can be after months of chronic sickness, broken sleep, and parental troubleshooting. I am very tired and full of stoic perspective, but still savouring the baby babble sounds, tiny fingers on my face, and three-teeth grins. When people ask me how parenting is going, I've taken to...

Watching as condensation drips from the window panes – the inside being so warm, and the outdoors being almost freezing – I notice the pink sky which signals that, soon, the sun will set. My first instinct when seeing the pink sky – the colour of the sky only intensifying as the minutes pass – was how much the colours of the sky means to me, not just this year but in general. At sun rise and sunset, the boundaries are gradients: the sky changes between many colours. There are magical mom...

This week on the People and Blogs series we have an interview with V.H. Belvadi, whose blog can be found at vhbelvadi.com . Tired of RSS? Read this in your browser or sign up for the newsletter . The People and Blogs series is supported by Sebastián Monía and the other 130 members of my "One a Month" club. If you enjoy P&B, consider becoming one for as little as 1 dollar a month. Let's start from the basics: can you introduce yourself...

This is the third in my annual series reviewing everything that happened in the LLM space over the past 12 months. For previous years see Stuff we figured out about AI in 2023 and Things we learned about LLMs in 2024 . It’s been a year filled with a lot of different trends. The year of "reasoning" The year of agents The year of coding agents and Claude Code The year of LLMs on the command-line The year of YOLO and the Normalization of Deviance The year of $200/...

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"The Origins of Political Order: From Prehuman Times to the French Revolution" by Francis Fukuyama - while reading this book it occurred to me that domains of study like political sciense must be incredibly difficult and frustrating. Imagine trying to match a model onto a set of data; the model has thousands of parameters, but you only have dozens or a couple of hundred of data points. This is what political sciense is like; there's a huge number of parameters and variables, far more than actual...

Leeza SOHO tower under construction, via Federico Italiano on Twitter . Happy new year, and welcome to the reading list, a weekly roundup of news and links related to buildings, infrastructure, and industrial technology. This week we look at automated code checkers, meranti wood, shifting snowfall patterns, launching spacecraft with bullwhips, and more. Roughly 2/3rds of the reading list is paywalled, so for full access become a paid subscriber. Automated code checkers I’ve previously writte...

Like the dawn of the blaze of a lander over the grays touches your light and spans the open lunar sky A descent energetic yet graceful methodical and careful Spawned from the blue marble verse you bring the best in us. Shadow of Firefly’s Blue Ghost Moon lander performing its final descent before touching down on the Moon. Image: Blue Ghost landing video Poem notes:  I’ve had the privilege and pleasure of working with amazing bosses and managers over my space writing career across organi...

I may have a (somewhat irrational) fascination with lifts, or elevators for my North American friends. Lifts are interesting because they’re intricate, complicated mechanical devices that are otherwise not thought about much. Our buildings have these towering empty tubes we regularly propel ourselves through thanks to the wonders of hydraulics and/or electricity, and save for a few novely glass lifts and those older ones in warehouses, we see barely any of it. The purpose of this post howe...

Testing the Mono Gateway, a custom-built 10 Gbps Router Last month, the stars aligned for me to bring the Mono Gateway (a 10 Gbps router that YouTuber Tomaž Zaman and his team at Mono built from scratch) on a trip to Phoenix, and test it with one of the most OP network test boxes I've ever seen, at the ServeTheHome HQ. In this video, Patrick (from STH) and I put Gateway through a real-world torture test using CyPerf: Jeff Geerling January 2, 2026 Testing ...

Previously: 2024 , 2023 , 2022 , 2021 , 2020 , 2019 , 2018 , 2017 A surprisingly persistent personality quirk I have is that I care a lot about the changeover of the new year. I quite like consuming yearly predictions, year-in-reviews, and so on, and use the calendar transition as a time for reflection. Work I’ve now been at Databricks for a little over 3.5 years, and it’s been quite a fun ride. In most ways, it’s exceeded my expectations from when I joined. I’ll hopefull...

I’ve been working on so many projects in 2025, I thought it was important for me to make a recap, if only just to clear my head. There are many, many, many things to go through and we don’t have a sponsor today, so I’m gonna start right away with facet! facet facet is a project that I started working on in March of this year — that’s right, it’s only been ten months, yet it feels like an eternity. ...

There are numbers every Python programmer should know . For example, how fast or slow is it to add an item to a list in Python? What about opening a file? Is that less than a millisecond? Is there something that makes that slower than you might have guessed? If you have a performance sensitive algorithm, which data structure should you use? How much memory does a floating point number use? What about a single character or the empty string? How fast is FastAPI compared to Django? I wanted to ta...

I am in the process of updating my résumé. Not because I’m looking for a job [1] , but because I like to feature my résumé on my website and the current published copy doesn’t reflect my pivot from engineering management to an individual contributor role two years ago . I feel a little bit weird about the misrepresentation, and would rather update the document than take it down. While working on some edits, I was reflecting on how things have been going, and decided to write this “wha...

This document curates the most common questions Shreya and I received while teaching 700+ engineers & PMs AI Evals. Warning: These are sharp opinions about what works in most cases. They are not universal truths. Use your judgment. 👉 Want to learn more about AI Evals? Check out our AI Evals course . It’s a live cohort with hands on exercises and office hours. Here is a 25% discount code for readers. 👈 Listen to the audio version of this FAQ If you prefer to listen ...

The Betty White Award  goes to people who die at the end of the year--- too late to be on those articles with titles like                                                              people we lost this year. The  point of the award is that news outlets and blogs should WAIT until Jan before having any articles that look back on the prior year. (I tell Lance we should have our end-of-the-year post in January just in case someone solves P vs NP the last week of D...

It’s time for a yearly review again. Time flies. Nerdy things I enjoyed I read a few books this year. The whole Dungeon Crawler Carl series was absolutely amazing and it quickly jumped up to one of my favorite series of all time. I can’t be held accountable for everything I’ve ever said to a stripper. Princess Donut Board games are great. I still don’t play nearly as much as I’d like to but my kids are quickly growing up and to my eternal joy they’re...

We are experiencing one of the most significant technological breakthroughs of the last few decades. Call it what you will: AI, generative AI, large language models… But where does it come from? Academics will tell you that it stems from decades of mathematical efforts on campus. But think about it: if this were the best model to explain what happened, where would the current breakthroughs have occurred? They would have happened on campus first, then propagated to industry. That’s the line...

TL;DR: 2026 is going to be The Year of The Linux Desktop for me. I haven't booted into Windows in over 3 months on my tower and I'm starting to realize that it's not worth wasting the space for. I plan to unify my three SSDs and turn them all into btrfs drives on Fedora. I've been merely tolerating Windows 11 for a while but recently it's gotten to the point where it's just absolutely intolerable. Somehow Linux on the desktop has gotten so much better by not even doing anything differe...

Software above some complexity level tends to sport an extension language, becoming a kind of software platform itself. Lua fills this role well, and of course there’s JavaScript for web technologies. WebAssembly generalizes this, and any Wasm-targeting programming language can extend a Wasm-hosting application. It has more friction than supplying a script in a text file, but extension authors can write in their language of choice, and use more polished development tools — debugging, test...

Dear Team, As we near the end of the calendar year, I want to take a moment to reflect on everything we’ve accomplished together. 2025 was an extraordinary year for Shield AI, marked by record-breaking achievements with the Coast Guard, the launch of a new autonomous aircraft, and countless milestones in between. At every step, each of you played an essential role in making 2025 the year it was. I came into Shield AI in May with a background in building business in tech, not defense. Despi...