Today Raspberry Pi launched their new $130 AI HAT+ 2 which includes a Hailo 10H and 8 GB of LPDDR4X RAM . With that, the Hailo 10H is capable of running LLMs entirely standalone, freeing the Pi's CPU and system RAM for other tasks. The chip runs at a maximum of 3W, with 40 TOPS of INT8 NPU inference performance in addition to the equivalent 26 TOPS INT4 machine vision performance on the earlier AI HAT with Hailo 8. Today Raspberry Pi launched their new $130 AI HAT+ 2 which includes ...

In 1998, astronomers discovered dark energy. The finding, which transformed our conception of the cosmos, came with a little-known consequence: It threw a wrench into the already daunting task of finding a version of string theory that describes the universe we live in. Dark energy is a “positive” energy that causes our universe to expand at an accelerating rate. But the best-understood models… Source In 1998, astronomers discovered dark energy. The finding, which transformed our concep...

In late 2025 the company behind MinIO decided to abandon it to pursue other commercial interests. As well as upsetting a bunch of folk, it also put the cat amongst the pigeons of many software demos that relied on MinIO to emulate S3 storage locally, not to mention build pipelines that used it for validating S3 compatibility. In this blog post I’m going to look at some alternatives to MinIO. Whilst MinIO is a lot more than 'just' a glorified tool for emulating S3 when buildin...

It's not every day that one of my open problems is solved, especially one that I asked about over three decades ago. Matt Kovacs-Deak, Daochen Wang and Rain Zimin Yang just posted a paper  showing that if you have a Boolean function \(f\) and two polynomials \(p\) and \(q\) of degree at most \(d\) such that \(f(x)=p(x)/q(x)\) for every \(x\) of length \(n\) then \(f\) has decision tree complexity at most \(2d^4\). Noam Nisan and Mario Szegedy had this beautiful paper in the early 90s show...

Something I believe wholeheartedly is that writing simple little programs is good, and writing the same simple little programs many times is even better. I've been reading Niklaus Wirth's Compiler Construction recently and I think Wirth's whole deal really embodies this. Wirth is notable for his belief that simple methods of implementing ideas are better than complex ones. This sounds sort of like a standard programming platitude; "simple is better than complex," that doesn't really mean any...

While I was writing “ Publishing my citation preferences ”, I consciously decided that the blog post should include a screenshot of the website feature described in the post – the new “Reference this post” section on my blog pages. I knew that I might change the design of the widget I designed in the future. If I did, how would that affect the readability of my blog post? I thought to myself. By including a screenshot of the widget I had designed in my blog post, I knew that there wo...

Artemis updates galore Three of four Artemis II astronauts are seen here practicing entering their Orion spacecraft for a pre-launch countdown test on December 20, 2025. Image: NASA / Joel Kowsky The US Senate voted and confirmed Jared Isaacman as NASA’s administrator on December 17, 2025, closing a long drawn process of having the entrepreneur, pilot, astronaut, and Trump’s original but later withdrawn nominee be the person leading NASA. In parallel, the US White House issued an E...

I love writing software, line by line. It could be said that my career was a continuous effort to create software well written, minimal, where the human touch was the fundamental feature. I also hope for a society where the last are not forgotten. Moreover, I don't want AI to economically succeed, I don't care if the current economic system is subverted (I could be very happy, honestly, if it goes in the direction of a massive redistribution of wealth). But, I would not respect myself and my int...

For several years I’ve recommended people use KeePassXC as a cross-platform password storage system. I’ve used it on FreeBSD, Linux, and macOS, and its vault files have been used on iOS. I’ve donated financially to the project, and it’s been a regular feature on recommended tool lists and my Omake . Last November the project announced its use of gen-“AI”. A long post clarifying their position did little to assuage concerns . I could explain how deeply irresponsible this is for ...

Sometimes, people tell me that there is no more progress in CPU performance. Consider these three processors which had comparable prices at release time. The AMD Ryzen 7 9800X3D (Zen 5, with up to 5.3 GHz boost) was released in 2024. The AMD Ryzen 7 7800X3D (Zen 4, with up to 5.1 GHz boost) was released in 2023. The AMD Ryzen 7 5800X3D (Zen 3, with 3.4 GHz base) was released in 2022. Let us consider their results on on the PartialTweets open benchmark (JSON parsing). It is a sing...

Jim Highsmith notes that many teams have turned into tribes wedded to exclusively adaptation or optimization. But he feels this misses the point that both of these are important, and we need to manage the tension between them. We can do this by thinking of two operating modes: explore (adaptation-dominant) and exploit (optimization dominant). We tailor a team's operating model to a particular blend of the two - considering uncertainty, risk, cost of change, a...

Adding a “first of” operation to asimpy required a pretty substantial redesign. The project’s home page describes what I wound up with; I think it works, but it is now so complicated that I’d be surprised if subtle bugs weren’t lurking in its corners. If you (or one of your grad students) want to try using formal verification tools on ~500 lines of Python, please give me a shout . Adding a “first of” operation to asimpy required a pretty substantial redesign. The project’s ...

New year, new builds, right? This time for me it's a workbench that is highly practical and suited for what I need. Space for me is extremely limited, but I am lucky to have the option to mount structures to my walls. This build is for my garage setup, with several different components involved. Make sure to check out the video link below where I talk about this build! Limited Space I feel lucky to have somewhat conditioned spaces after fighting with the seasons in a garage with no insulatio...

This is an event post. My individual talk page is here: Get your tickets while they last! This is an event post. My individual talk page is here: Get your tickets while they last! This is an event post. My individual talk page is here: Get your tickets while they last!

Yesterday I read Code and Let Live , an article covering fly.io's new(ish) Sprites offering. Sprites (sprites.dev) offers persistent VMs that feel like ephemeral VMs—offering ~1s latency to fresh shells, state snapshotting, and a CLI that makes remote code execution a breeze. I created an account, received an API token, installed the Sprites CLI, then ran the example quick-start commands: Post-install quick-start commands available after signup on sprites.dev Since AI is hot right now, my fir...

My coworkers really like AI-powered code review tools and it seems that every time I make a pull request in one of their repos I learn about yet another AI code review SaaS product. Given that there are so many of them, I decided to see how easy it would be to develop my own AI-powered code review bot that targets GitHub repositories. I managed to hack out the core of it in a single afternoon using a model that runs on my desk. I've ended up with a little tool I call reviewbot that takes GitHu...

0.0 Context Setting Wednesday, 14 January 2026 in Portland, Oregon where while the conditions in the U.S. may not be argued to be fascist as such (i.e. the government is losing in courts and appears to be following, to a certain degree injunctions), it’s not as if the government isn’t trending in a fascist direction. Sure the water’s not boiling, but it’s also not getting hotter, and just because there are still institutions that are slowing things down, slowing things down is differ...

Turns out you can just port things now. I already attempted this experiment in the summer, but it turned out to be a bit too much for what I had time for. However, things have advanced since. Yesterday I ported MiniJinja (a Rust Jinja2 template engine) to native Go, and I used an agent to do pretty much all of the work. In fact, I barely did anything beyond giving some high-level guidance on how I thought it could be accomplished. In total I probably spent around 45 minutes actively with ...

Linux in the Air by Sal Sal talks about how Linux is going through somewhat of a revival at the moment, as well as some of his own thoughts on the whole Mac vs Windows vs Linux debacle. Read Post → I think a lot of this Linux revival is thanks to a perfect storm going on in the OS space, namely: Microsoft forcing many users to buy new hardware because of arbitrary hardware requirements, as well as forcing users to have an online accounts. Apple c...

New from Anthropic today is Claude Cowork , a "research preview" that they describe as "Claude Code for the rest of your work". It's currently available only to Max subscribers ($100 or $200 per month plans) as part of the updated Claude Desktop macOS application. I've been saying for a while now that Claude Code is a "general agent" disguised as a developer tool. It can help you with any computer task that can be achieved by executing code or running terminal commands... which covers almost ...

A week ago, after chatting with Kev about his own findings , I created a similar survey (which is still open if you want to answer it) to collect a second set of data because why the heck not. Kev’s data showed that 84.5% of responses picked RSS, Fediverse was second at 7.6%, direct visits to the site were third at 5.4%, and email was last at 2.4%. My survey has a slightly different set of options and allows for multiple choices—which is why the % don’t add up to 100—but the resul...

The other day I went to an AI hackathon organized by my friends Lucia and Malin . The theme was mech interp , but I hardly know PyTorch so I planned to do something at the API layer rather than the model layer. Something I think about a lot is cognitive architectures (like Soar and ACT-R ). This is like a continuation of GOFAI research, inspired by cognitive science. And like GOFAI it’s never yielded anything useful. But I often think: can we scaffold LLMs with cog arch-inspire...

Last year's annual review post observed that cargo-semver-checks ' lint library is undergoing exponential growth, doubling each year: 30 lints at the end of 2022, 57 lints in 2023, and 120 at the end of 2024. We bring 2025 to a close with 242 lints, more than doubling last year's total — and that's just one facet of what we accomplished. Let's look at the full picture, and the path for 2026 and beyond! Last year's annual review post observed that cargo-semver-checks ' lint library is unde...