Grumman X-29. Welcome to the reading list, a weekly roundup of news and links related to buildings, infrastructure, and industrial technology. This week we look at gathering robot training data, “love letters” sent to home sellers, the Napier Deltic diesel engine, jumps in electricity demand from electric teakettles, and more. Roughly 2/3rds of the reading list is paywalled, so for full access become a paid subscriber. Robot training We’ve previously noted that one major bottleneck in ma...

<iframe src="https://www.googletagmanager.com/ns.html?id=GTM-PKGWQMKL" height="0" width="0"></iframe> 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 ...

I had just wrapped up a project and wanted to do something small/fun before I started the next one. The Flash runtime is being reimplemented in Rust , and I've enjoyed re-enabling the Flash on my site . That had me thinking about my Flash projects again. I decided to try to revisit an unsolved mystery from one of my Flash projects. Back in 2010, I wrote an article about procedurally generating wilderness maps using Voronoi polygons , and I made a demo in Flash. The authors of Realm of t...

I gave an opening keynote at the FIDO Alliance’s “Authenticate” conference a few weeks ago! Although it featured timely strategies and tips for professionals deploying passkeys, my primary goal was to explain, as clearly as I can, why passkeys are important and how we should use them to reduce the harm that passwords cause. [ YouTube link ] I’m really proud of this talk and I hope you’ll watch it and share it with others. I put care in to making it approachable while still deliveri...

Illustration of the LRO spacecraft orbiting our Moon. Image: NASA / GSFC / Chris Meaney At over 1.6 petabytes , NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter ( LRO ) mission hosts by far the largest dataset from any planetary science spacecraft ever launched. LRO’s high-resolution lunar imagery and topographic data has been the bedrock for selecting landing sites of most Moon missions launched this century from around the world. Many of these landers though were planned as short or mid duration miss...

We're seeing an attack on capitalism on both ends of the political spectrum with with the election of Democratic Socialist Zhoran Mamdani as mayor of New York, and Donald Trump trying to direct the economy through tariffs, less independency of the Federal Bank and partial government control of companies such as a nearly 10% ownership of Intel and the "golden share" of U.S. Steel. Now I'm not an economist and there are many arguments for and against socialism and capitalism, especially in their p...

The Orbital Index Issue No. 343  | Nov 5, 2025 🚀 🌍 🛰   ...

All systems have rules. Understanding and applying the rules well is different than memorizing and obeying the rules perfectly.  Too much faith is the worst ally. When you believe in something literally, through your faith you'll turn it into something absurd. One who is a genuine adherent, if you like, of some political outlook, never takes its sophistries seriously, but only its practical aims, which are concealed beneath these sophistries. — Milan Kundera There are lots of syst...

My recent FLP02 review must have escaped containment, because I’ve had a flurry of emails and comments on Mastodon asking questions that were already answered in the post, and another who even took them time to ask this: sure but tell me whats [sic] the point??? Poe’s Law ensures I can’t tell if they’re doing a bit, or whether they’re genuine. I’ll give them the benefit of the doubt, and answer sincerely. Let’s start with the basics, and we’ll work our way up from there. ...

I'm upgrading various plugins for compatibility with the new Datasette 1.0a20 alpha release and I decided to record a video of the process. This post accompanies that video with detailed additional notes. The datasette-checkbox plugin I picked a very simple plugin to illustrate the upgrade process (possibly too simple). datasette-checkbox adds just one feature to Datasette: if you are viewing a table with boolean columns (detected as integer columns with names like is_active or...

Converting hot dog plasma video to sound with OpenCV When you ground a hot dog to an AM radio tower, it generates plasma. Your browser does not support the video tag. While the hot dog's flesh is getting vaporized, a tiny plasma arc moves the air around it back and forth. And because this tower is an AM tower, it uses Amplitude Modulation , where a transmitter changes the amplitude of a carrier wave up and down. Just like a speaker cone moving up and down, the pla...

Archive or Delete? by Chris Coyier When it comes to email, are you an archiver or a deleter? Chris talks about his approach, and some of what others do. I thought I’d add my approach to the pile. Read Post → When it comes to email, I’m extremely anal. I’m a zero inbox kinda guy - my inbox is a place for emails to temporarily live before I deal with them. Once they’re dealt with, they either get archived or deleted. Right now I have 5 emails in ...

At Current 2025 in New Orleans this year we built a demo for the Day 2 keynote that would automagically summarise what was happening in the room, as reported by members of the audience. Here’s how we did it! The idea for this came from the theme of the conference—“Be Ready”—, some planned “unplanned” interruptions, and of course, the desire to show off what it’s possible to build with Kafka and Flink on Confluent Cloud. My colleague Vik Gamov built a very cool web front end...

CINCINNATI – November 5, 2025 – GE Aerospace (NYSE: GE) and Shield AI have agreed to collaborate on propulsion technologies for Shield AI’s new X-BAT vehicle program. Through the Memorandum of Understanding (MOU), the F110-GE-129 engine, featuring the advanced Axisymmetric Vectoring Exhaust Nozzle (AVEN), has been selected to power the X-BAT. GE Aerospace will provide propulsion and testing support for the X-BAT program.   “We’re excited to pair GE Aerospace’s proven experience...

Unmesh Joshi finds LLMs to be a useful tool, but explains why their help becomes illusory if we use them to shortcut the learning loop that's an essential part of our professional practice. more… Unmesh Joshi finds LLMs to be a useful tool, but explains why their help becomes illusory if we use them to shortcut the learning loop that's an essential part of our professional practice. more… Unmesh Joshi finds LLMs to be a useful tool, but expla...

Recall last week, we talked about how to take a SQL query and turn it into a lower level plan, so this week I want to talk about how we can generate SQL queries. Having a high-quality query generator is an important component of testing SQL engines, because a lot of techniques for testing SQL engines can be reduced to generating queries that you then manipulate for testing purposes . In a system that processes a language, remember we have multiple stages of processing: Each stage (before ...

A century ago, the strange behavior of atoms and elementary particles led physicists to formulate a new theory of nature. That theory, quantum mechanics, found immediate success, proving its worth with accurate calculations of hydrogen’s emission and absorption of light. There was, however, a snag. The central equation of quantum mechanics featured the imaginary number i, the square root of −1. Source A century ago, the strange behavior of atoms and elementary particles led physicists to ...

Reply to this months IndieWeb carnival hosted by Alex on Cycles and fluctuations This is a really fitting topic for an autumn month and a month so close to the end of the year! I don't really have a solid vision of where this post is gonna go, just some general thoughts that could be connected to the topic. But since I haven't done the Carnival in a while (I had a short story planned that happened to really fit in with the topic last month, but of course I didn't get around to writing...

Great # indieweb sessions at # btconf # Berlin ! Yesterday, Sacha Judd ( @sachajudd.com ) reminded us to “teach someone …. something about building for the web”, and to “take back control of your feeds, your attention, and … go exploring again”. She encouraged us to “build healthy online neighborhoods”. That’s a great metaphor and very complementary to rebuilding your own home(page) on the web with perhaps a digital garden as well! Today, Ana Rodrigues ( @anarodrigu.es @ohh...

This week on the People and Blogs series we have an interview with Robb Knight, whose blog can be found at rknight.me . Tired of RSS? Read this in your browser or sign up for the newsletter . The People and Blogs series is supported by Luke Harris and the other 124 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? I'm a ...

Since sending out my last update few days ago, I have been getting emails from many of you offering kind words and some asking for what's next. Given all the positive feedback, I am making a few changes to the site: The Etsy store has been retired, I will keep moving content slowly to Github as a backup. I'm going to focus fewer builds, possibly yearly, especially has some of these builds get bigger and more complex. I'm moving this from a business to a hobby, so support is still appreci...

Error Codes for Control Flow Nov 6, 2025 Two ideas today: Displaying an error message to the user is a different aspect of error handling than branching based on a specific error condition. In Zig, error sets are fancy error codes, not poor man’s sum types. In other words, it’s worth thinking about diagnostic reporting and error handling (in the literal sense) separately. There are generally two destinations for any error. An error can be bubbled to an isolation boundar...

Preparing a new mail and xmpp service 2025-11-04 08:45 I will open a new mail and xmpp service for free, soon. message.casa is a free, privacy-focused email and instant messaging service built on smolweb principles: lightweight, intentional, and respectful of your digital space. In an era of unlimited storage and constant notifications, message.casa offers something different: deliberately constrained email and messaging services that encourage mindful communication. I believe limitat...