In August, a team of mathematicians posted a paper claiming to solve a major problem in algebraic geometry — using entirely alien techniques. It instantly captivated the field, stoking excitement in some mathematicians and skepticism in others. The result deals with polynomial equations, which combine variables raised to powers (like y = x or x2 − 3xy = z2). These equations are some of the… Source In August, a team of mathematicians posted a paper claiming to solve a major problem in al...

OpenAI reportedly declared a "code red" on the 1st of December in response to increasingly credible competition from the likes of Google's Gemini 3. It's less than two weeks later and they just announced GPT-5.2 , calling it "the most capable model series yet for professional knowledge work". Key characteristics of GPT-5.2 The new model comes in two variants: GPT-5.2 and GPT-5.2 Pro. There's no Mini variant yet. GPT-5.2 is available via their UI in both "instant" and "thinking" modes, p...

We’ve spent a lot of time examining the problem of construction productivity in the US — the fact that, across a variety of different metrics, construction never seems to get any more efficient (in terms of how much output you get for a given amount of input), or any cheaper. A paper I wrote about by Goolsbee and Syverson , for instance, titled “The Strange and Awful Path of Productivity in the US Construction Sector,” looked at a variety of different productivity metrics and found that...

Remember recently when I wrote that we all had our own first programming book ? Even if that first wasn’t our “first”, we all remember the first one that resonated. For me it was the Llama Book, aka Learning Perl that made me fall in love with Larry Wall’s language, and programming more broadly. Flight Simulator 98 was that “first” for me when it came to 3D gaming. We were still a few years away from the release of Train Simulator which would consume my life, so my formative e...

How I fixed it: Sunshine issues on NixOS Nix Linux Posted on 2025-12-11 Background I’ve got a couple of computers in the home. One machine in particular is a semi-powerful gaming machine. The weird thing about this machine is that it’s stowed away in a storage room, not a very suitable place to sit and actually use it. To be honest, I’m not really much of a gamer, and so I mostly use its capabilities for work and other heavier tasks. But it’s alwa...

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 ...

There's an old compiler-building tutorial that has become part of the field's lore: the Let's Build a Compiler series by Jack Crenshaw (published between 1988 and 1995). I ran into it in 2003 and was very impressed, but it's now 2025 and this tutorial is still being mentioned quite often in Hacker News threads . Why is that? Why does a tutorial from 35 years ago, built in Pascal and emitting Motorola 68000 assembly - technologies that are virtually unknown for the new generation of progra...

In 2023 Robb Knight started the defaults trend, covering what people used as their default apps for specific purposes. I did a 2023 version, and while I mentioned planning to do a late 2024 version in my 2024 year end wrap up post, I never wound up getting to it. I’ve got a 2025 edition of my default apps below, with changes in bold. PC Tablet Phone Mail Client Proton Web N/A Proton App Mail Server ^ ^ ^ Notes Joplin Joplin Joplin Tasks N/A N/A Tasks (org. In 2023 Robb Knight started the defa...

To tell the story of your life would take another life of equal length.  There is no such thing as a true story because every story, to be told, must leave out something. And every something left out matters. It’s all the somethings that lead us to one point and then another; it’s all the somethings that merge into reality; it’s all the somethings , subconscious and conscious, that make up our experience.  I can tell you a story, I can tell you my stories, I can tell you many ve...

Why does AI write like… that (NYT, gift link). Sam Kriss delves into the quiet hum of AI writing. AI’s work is not compelling prose: it’s phantom text, ghostly scribblings, a spectre woven into our communal tapestry.  ❄                ❄                ❄                ❄                ❄ Emily Bache has written a set of Test Desiderata, building on some earlier writing from Kent Beck. She lists the characteri...

While 2023 was an  incredible year  for ISRO in terms of execution of space missions and projects, and 2024 was about those successes giving the Indian government’s Department of Space (DOS) the confidence to plan an ambitious next decade , 2025 can be characterized more by slower progress, shortfalls, and delayed updates amid the same budget . Below is a linked rundown contextualizing India’s developments across domains of space. Like every year’s review, I’ve made a conscious ...

Watching Mathematicians at Work (AI generated) The Smithsonian Natural History Museum has a FossiLab  where visitors can peek through windows watching scientists prepare fossils for conservation. Maybe we should have a similar exhibit at math museums or universities. How else can we learn what mathematicians do?  In 2025, artificial intelligence has achieved gold medal status at the International Mathematical Olympiad but so far has only contributed modestly in finding new theorems. Of co...

Probably not a popular thing to say today. The zeitgeisty thing to say is that we should all log off and live terrible cottagecore solarpunk lives raising chickens and being mindful. I wish people were more online and more public. I have rarely wished the opposite. Consider this post addressed to you, the reader. Your Writing I will often find a blog post on Hacker News that really resonates. And when I go to check the rest of the site there’s three other posts. And I think: I wish you...

When people think about autonomy in aviation, they often focus on what it can do — flying complex missions, reacting to dynamic environments, making intelligent decisions in real time. But the real challenge isn’t getting autonomy to work , rather it’s proving that it can be trusted.   For autonomous flight to scale across aircraft and mission sets, it must meet the same airworthiness expectations we apply to human pilots. This isn’t just paperwork; it’s the difference between a de...

Are Two Heads Better Than One? You're playing a game with your lying friends Alice and Bob. Bob flips a coin and shows it to Alice. Alice tells you what she saw - but she lies 20% of the time. Then you take your best guess on whether the coin is heads or tails. Your best strategy is to trust whatever Alice says. You're right 80% of the time. Now Bob joins in. He makes up his mind independent of Alice, and he _also_ lies 20% of the time. You were right 80% of the time by trusting Alice. How m...

Early microprocessors were very slow when operating with floating-point numbers. But in 1980, Intel introduced the 8087 floating-point coprocessor, performing floating-point operations up to 100 times faster. This was a huge benefit for IBM PC applications such as AutoCAD, spreadsheets, and flight simulators. The 8087 was so effective that today's computers still use a floating-point system based on the 8087. 1 The 8087 was an extremely complex chip for its time, containing somewhere betwee...

I recently encountered a fun performance problem. Consider the following: You need to distribute a key-value dataset with string keys and opaque value blobs in the 100B - 1MB range. There are on the order of 10k keys to distribute. Critically, you are in a constrained memory environment where you do not have enough memory to load all the blobs into memory at one time. You do, however, have enough memory to load all the keys and a small amount of metadata, if you want. The key access p...

CM0 - a new Raspberry Pi you can't buy This little postage stamp is actually a full Raspberry Pi Zero 2, complete with eMMC storage and WiFi. But you can't get one. Well, not unless you buy the CM0NANO development board from EDAtec , or you live in China. This little guy doesn't have an HDMI port, Ethernet, or even USB. It's a special version of the 'Compute Module' line of boards. Little Raspberry Pi 'System on Modules' (SoMs), they're called. Compute Modules are ent...

This week on the People and Blogs series we have an interview with Nick Heer, whose blog can be found at pxlnv.com . Tired of RSS? Read this in your browser or sign up for the newsletter . The People and Blogs series is supported by James and the other 127 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? My name is Nick...

Following my posts on determinism and durable function trees , this installment advances this blog post series “The Theory of Durable Execution”. Durable execution engines (DEEs) talk about “workflows”, “activities”, “virtual objects”, “handlers”, and “functions”, but they’re often describing the same underlying execution patterns. This post proposes a model that extends the generic durable function into three forms: stateless functions, sessions , and actors ....

The Orbital Index Issue No. 347  | Dec 10, 2025 🚀 🌍 🛰   ...

For a while, I have had an idea for Artemis – the calm web reader I maintain – to have a page that shows your feed and feed settings on the same page. I am interested in this idea because there is presently a distance between the settings to customise your reader and the reader itself. You need to click back-and-forth to see the impact of a change in settings to your feed. As a user, I would prefer to be able to immediately preview the impact of changing my feed and reader interface, befor...

Elon Musk is not happy with the EU fining his X platform and is currently on a tweet rampage complaining about it. Among other things, he wants the whole EU to be abolished. He sadly is hardly the first wealthy American to share their opinions on European politics lately. I’m not a fan of this outside attention but I believe it’s noteworthy and something to pay attention to. In particular because the idea of destroying and ripping apart the EU is not just popular in the US; it’s popu...