As I reflect on a year of Quanta biology stories to decide which of the many excellent ones to recommend, I am relying on memory. But what exactly does that mean? “Memory” is a slippery word. It means one thing to a person striving to recall places, people or moments from the past, and another to someone searching their mind for a fact they swore they knew. A neuroscientist might consider a… Source As I reflect on a year of Quanta biology stories to decide which of the many excellent on...

Programmers often want to randomly shuffle arrays. Evidently, we want to do so as efficiently as possible. Maybe surprisingly, I found that the performance of random shuffling was not limited by memory bandwidth or latency, but rather by computation. Specifically, it is the computation of the random indexes itself that is slow. Earlier in 2025 , I reported how you could more than double the speed of a random shuffle in Go using a new algorithm ( Brackett-Rozinsky and Lemire, 2025 ). However, I...

I find this sort of thing fascinating. I looked for detailed info before my own surgery because I like to know what I’m getting into. If you’re grossed out by surgical/medical descriptions or photos, skip this one.  So I had this spot — like a pimple or small wart — appear under my right eye years ago. 2017, 2018? Sometime in there. It was very small, directly under/partially on the lash line near the inside corner of my right eye. Not really noticeable, didn’t hurt or itch or gro...

Like last year’s overview of a happening 2024 in global lunar exploration , I present to you a comprehensive, curated, and contextualized linked rundown of lunar technology and science developments across 2025, organized by country or region. There is also a section on progressive cooperative & collaborative international efforts—because these are the gems we need more of—as well as a section discussing shortcomings in the same. Each linked article in the overview explains the importance ...

ONE The following headline confused me:                     Trump, 79, Deletes Weird AI Video Shilling Magic Beds  (see  here ).  Was Weird Al selling magic beds? Magic beds? ! How does that relate to President Trump? What’s going on? The problem is the font: a capital I (as in AI) can look like a lowercase l (as in Al). So the headline should really be: Trump, 79, Deletes Weird Artificial Intelligence Video Shilling Magic Beds. This case is particularly confusing because: a) We...

I’ve been moving all my MCPs to skills, including the remaining one I still used: the Sentry MCP 1 . Previously I had already moved entirely away from Playwright to a Playwright skill. In the last month or so there have been discussions about using dynamic tool loadouts to defer loading of tool definitions until later. Anthropic has also been toying around with the idea of wiring together MCP calls via code, something I have experimented with . I want to share my updated findings with...

Back in 2017 I wrote about a technique for creating closures in C using JIT-compiled wrapper. It’s neat, though rarely necessary in real programs, so I don’t think about it often. I applied it to qsort , which sadly accepts no context pointer. More practical would be working around insufficient custom allocator interfaces , to create allocation functions at run-time bound to a particular allocation region. I’ve learned a lot since I last wrote about this subject, and a recent arti...

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 ....

I love thinking about the use of colour in painting. Impressionist paintings never cease to make me smile; their colour illuminates me as it does the places they depict (oh! how wonderful art can be!). I also love paintings that use grey and white, both sparingly and as part of a broader theme. A Lady in Grey , which I saw at the National Gallery of Scotland this weekend, depicts the daughter of the artist, Sir. Daniel Macnee, sitting outdoors in a grey dress. When I first saw this painting, ...

The thing that separates life from non-life is information. - Paul Davies ...

I recently came across JustHTML , a new Python library for parsing HTML released by Emil Stenström. It's a very interesting piece of software, both as a useful library and as a case study in sophisticated AI-assisted programming. First impressions of JustHTML I didn't initially know that JustHTML had been written with AI assistance at all. The README caught my eye due to some attractive characteristics: It's pure Python. I like libraries that are pure Python (no C extensions or similar...

It’s been too long since I last shared my photos, so here’s a crow I saw a couple of months ago. I love watching the local birds. The sparrows in my neighbour’s hedge, the starlings that like to perch up high in their tree, the crows and the magpies playing on the roofs, the occasional blackbirds skittering around on the ground... they all bring me just so much joy. Olympus OM-20, Soligor 400mm f/6.3, Kodak Ultramax 400 Olympus OM-20, Soligor 400mm f/6.3, Kodak Ultramax 400...

About two weeks ago I entered a discussion with the docs.rs team about, basically, why we have to look at this: When we could be looking at this: And of course, as always, there are reasons why things are the way they are. In an effort to understand those reasons, I opened a GitHub issue which resulted in a short but productive discussion. I walked away discouraged, and then decided to, reasons be damned, attack this problem from three different angles. ...

Throughout the years, I’ve been part of a few medium- to large-scale system migrations. As in, rewriting old logic in a new language or stack. The goal is usually better scalability, resilience, and maintainability, or more flexibility to adapt to changing requirements. Now, whether rewriting your system is the right move is its own debate. A common question that shows up during a migration is, “How do we make sure the new system behaves exactly like the old one, minus the icky parts?” A...

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...

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...

I realised recently my favourite bloggers have sites that are distinctive and personal. Mine looked like a default theme you’d get in a WordPress blog, so in the words of Paul and Linda McCartney and sung by Joe English, I decided I must do something about it . Hey look, this turned into a Music Monday . Therefore, introducing Rubenerd Houndstooth . Feel free to browse the site if you subscribe via RSS, though maybe it’s best you don’t. It’s a mashup of the following themes: ...

Since I’ve decided to use TOON instead of JSON, I’ve benchmarked the performance of serialization of 2 Go TOON libraries compared to JSON built-in serialization. Here are the results using current version of the libraries and go 1.25: % go run . goos: darwin goarch: arm64 pkg: bench_toon cpu: Apple M3 Pro BenchmarkJSONMarshalCompact-11 3488496 322.3 ns/op BenchmarkJSONMarshal-11 767379 1546 ns/op BenchmarkToonMarshal-11 669687 1...

It’s that time of the year, and we’re proud to announce the NEW song of ice and fire calendar for 2027 with some amazing digital art provided by Tyler Jacobson.   Here’s a link to some of Tylers artwork: www.tylerjacobsonart.com And while Tylers art won’t be available till next year don’t forget that Tom Kidd’s Knight of the Seven kingdoms 2026 calendar is ready and waiting just in time for the holiday season. TOM KIDD’S WEBSITE LINK TO PURCHASE CALENAR 2026  All of Tom...

Taking apart a Boeing 747 to build the 747 house . Via Inhabitat . Welcome to the reading list, a weekly roundup of news and links related to buildings, infrastructure, and industrial technology. This week we look at Boom Supersonic’s gas turbine, the reliability of learning curves, a fake bridge collapse, using coal mines for geothermal energy, and more. Roughly 2/3rds of the reading list is paywalled, so for full access become a paid subscriber. Boom announces a gas turbine Supersonic jet ...

This is my entry for December’s IWC hosted by V.H. Belvadi . If you have thoughts on the subject, make sure to write a blog post before the end of the month, and join the carnival. I’m not good at making predictions, so I don’t really know what the IndieWeb is gonna look like in 5 years. If I had to guess, I’d say it will probably look very much like it looks now, only with more AI-generated nonsense sprinkled throughout. But rather than making predictions, let me write about hope...

🐒🦴➡️🛸🖥️🔴🚀🌌👁️⭐👶✨ 2001: A Space Odyssey :: Arthur C. Clarke 👨🏻‍🌾🌾💰📈📉👩🏻❤️💪😤💔💀🌾 The Good Earth :: Pearl S. Buck 👽🛸💥🏚️☢️🔦🎒💰💀😱🙏🟡 Roadside Picnic :: Arkady & Boris Strugatsky ☯️💧🌊🔄💭❓💪=💧🔄❌✅♾️ Tao Te Ching :: Lao Tzu 🌶️👨🏻🎺📜✍️😤🍩👩🏻‍🦳😩🎭🤡🌀 A Confederacy of Dunces ...

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...