World’s largest ring forging, via Chinese Academy of Sciences . Welcome to the reading list, a weekly roundup of news and links related to buildings, infrastructure and industrial technology. This week we look at 3D printed legos, exploding wire detonators, the David Taylor model basin, multi-point metal forming, and more. Roughly 2/3rds of the reading list is paywalled, so for full access become a paid subscriber. No essay this week, but I’m working on a more involved piece about internati...

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 ...

Even in a world where large language models (LLMs) and AI chatbots are commonplace, it can be hard to fully accept that fluent writing can come from an unthinking machine. That’s because, to many of us, finding the right words is a crucial part of thought — not the outcome of some separate process. But what if our neurobiological reality includes a system that behaves something like an LLM? Source Even in a world where large language models (LLMs) and AI chatbots are commonplace, it can b...

This was news I wasn’t expecting over my Friday morning coffee. Legendary computer memory manufacturer Crucial is exiting the consumer electronics business. Parent company Micron issued this press release . “The AI-driven growth in the data center has led to a surge in demand for memory and storage. Micron has made the difficult decision to exit the Crucial consumer business in order to improve supply and support for our larger, strategic customers in faster-growing segments,” said Su...

In part 1 we covered how durable function trees work mechanically and the importance of function suspension. Now let's zoom out and consider where they fit in broader system architecture, and ask what durable execution actually provides us. Function Trees and Responsibility Boundaries Durable function trees are great, but they aren’t the only kid in town. In fact, they’re like the new kid on the block, trying to prove themselves against other more established kids. Earlier this year I wrot...

The RAM Shortage Comes for Us All Memory price inflation comes for us all, and if you're not affected yet, just wait. I was building a new PC last month using some parts I had bought earlier this year. The 64 Gigabyte T-Create DDR5 memory kit I used cost $209 then. Today? The same kit costs $650 ! Jeff Geerling December 4, 2025 The RAM Shortage Comes for Us All Memory price inflation comes for us all, and if you're not affected yet, just wait. I ...

InnovatiON 2022 AI Flame Graphs GPU Flame Scope Harshad Sane SREcon APAC Cloud strategy Last day I've resigned from Intel and accepted a new opportunity. If you are an Intel employee, you might have seen my fairly long email that summarized what I did in my 3.5 years. Much of this is public: AI flame graphs and released them as open source GPU subsecond-offset heatmap Worked with Linux distros to enable stack walking Was interviewed by the WSJ about eBPF for secur...

The Orbital Index Issue No. 346  | Dec 3, 2025 🚀 🌍 🛰   ...

Programming note : Bits about Money is supported by our readers . I generally forecast about one issue a month, and haven't kept that pace that this year. As a result, I'm working on about 3-4 for December. Much financial innovation is in the ultimate service of the real economy. Then, we have our friends in crypto, who occasionally do intellectually interesting things which do not have a locus in the real economy. One of those things is perpetual futures (hereafter, perps), which I find fasci...

For various reasons, I find myself working on a laptop with no external screen, mouse, or separate keyboard for a time. Of course, since I don’t normally use this setup, I obviously needed an entirely new Linux setup to celebrate the occasion and so that I could spend the requisite day of setup before going back to real work. This time I’m on a minimal kick and so started with Ubuntu Server with the minimize option to have basically nothing, and build up just the parts I want and need. For ...

It’s Saturday morning, and I’m sitting here at my desk, working on client projects and sipping my coffee. While taking a break, I was clicking around the web, as one does, and found a post titled “ Is Pixelfed sawing off the branch that the Fediverse is sitting on? ” by Ploum ( also featured on P&B ). I find this topic quite interesting, so I’m gonna take a moment to share my thoughts. I don’t have skin in the game, I’m not on any of these social media platforms, and I frankly do...

I keep a Google Doc titled "Notes". I look at it every day. I feel guilty when I look at it. I feel guilty because Notes has my TODO list. Notes has a log of how slowly I do things, if I do them at all. I haven't had a job for one third of a year and I am not rich yet; and I don't deserve to be. I'm not doing much of anything at all. When the year ends, I will have been unemployed for 136 days. August Summary One Week of Unemployment Two Weeks of Unemployment In August, I read a lot of books. I ...

By default, SQLite tables have a special rowid column that uniquely identifies each row. This rowid exists even if you have a user-specified PRIMARY KEY on the table. How this rowid column behaves is influenced by your PRIMARY KEY type. Integer Primary Keys : If you have an integer primary key, then the primary key column becomes an alias for the special rowid column. The rowid and your user-defined primary key are literally just the same column. Taking an example: CREATE ...

Inspired by Daniel Litt's X Post Started asking mathematicians whose career started before the internet if they think Google, email, etc. have sped up the pace of math research. Wide variety of opinions but the broad consensus seems to be “yes,” among those I’ve spoken to. — Daniel Litt (@littmath) October 30, 2025 and Bill's recent post  on finding papers on the web I would tell the story of the before times. In the 1980s if you wanted to read a paper, you either had to find it in...

The Launch Vehicle Mark III (LVM3), India’s most powerful rocket to date, mounted on its launchpad in Sriharikota. Image: ISRO Before we begin, I’m very happy to welcome globally published space writer & author Gurbir Singh  as a sponsor of both my  Moon Monday  and  Indian Space Progress  newsletters for the third year! 🚀 Not sponsored: Among his several books, India’s Forgotten Rocket Pioneer is most relevant to this edition of Indian Space Progress. I also encourage you to c...

EA’s planned “take private” by a triumvirate of investors consisting of Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund, private equity giant Silver Lake, and Jared Kushner’s Affinity is, in many ways, straightforward. At the time of the deal, EA’s stock was up 14.1% year-to-date and since January 1, 2021, it had grown only 17.2%, spending most of that four-and-a-half year period underwater. EA’s stock price doldrums reflected several challenges. For example, a series of unconsummated talks ...

The one constant that I have observed in my professional life is that people underestimate the need to move fast. Of course, doing good work takes time. I once spent six months writing a URL parser. But the fact that it took so long is not a feature, it is not a positive, it is a negative. If everything is slow-moving around you, it is likely not going to be good. To fully make use of your brain, you need to move as close as possible to the speed of your thought. If I give you two PhD stud...

I have been thinking about redesigning my website for a while. I wrote a bit about one of the design directions I explored recently. I loved doing the design part of the project, but knew there would be several hours of work to integrate the new style into my website. Today I came back to the metaphorical drawing board – aka, browser developer tools – and started tinkering around with designing only a new home page. This gave me room to play while also not committing myself to redesigning ...

Jamais plus. Jamais plus. Jamais plus.

Rob Bowley summarizes a study from Carnegie Mellon looking on the impact of AI on a bunch of open-source software projects. Like any such study, we shouldn’t take its results as definitive, but there seems enough there to make it a handy data point. The key point is that the AI code probably reduced the quality of the code base - at least if static code analysis can be trusted to determine quality. And perhaps some worrying second-order effects This study shows more than 800 popular Gi...

With the recent spate of high profile npm security incidents involving compromised deployment workflows, I decided that it would be prudent to do a full inventory of my npm security footprint (especially for 11ty ). Just in the last few months: November 2025 : Shai Halud v2 (PostHog) (and PostHog post-mortem ): Worm infected ×834 packages. Propagated via preinstall npm script. September 2025 Shai Halud ( @ctrl/tinycolor , CrowdStrike) : Worm infected ×526 packages. Propagated...

I didn't expect a parable about a fisherman to smack me in the face with such clarity, but here we are. While reading Grow slowly, stay small on Herman’s blog, I learned about The Fisherman and The Businessman , which goes like this: A businessman meets a fisherman who is selling fish at his stall one morning. The businessman enquires of the fisherman what he does after he finishes selling his fish for the day. The fisherman responds that he spends time with his friends and family...

Shield AI Expands into Space Domain through Partnership with Sedaro WASHINGTON (December 3, 2025) — Shield AI and Sedaro today announced a strategic partnership to advance autonomous operations in orbit. The collaboration establishes Shield AI’s Hivemind Pilot as Sedaro’s preferred autonomy software for on-orbit demonstrations, extending the company’s proven edge autonomy from air and sea into space. Under the agreement, Shield AI will use the Sedaro Platform as its primary enviro...