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...

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 ...

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...

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...

So, I guess there goes 2025. I’m a bit late on the wrap up post, though as much as I’d like to blame a cold I’ve been dealing with for a while (lol I wrote that several days ago when drafting, and I’ve still just now gotten around to posting my finished draft), it’s mostly just laziness. All things considered, it’s been a pretty eventful year for myself - namely that I left my job and returned to my home state. So, I guess there goes 2025. I’m a bit late on the wrap up post, thoug...

I use a laptop as my work computer. As such, I need a place to dock it when at my desk. Nobody will sell me a proper laptop dock like the chonky ones my dad used to use in the 1990s, so instead I have to stand it on a table and plug in a few cables for the monitor, keyboard, and USB coffee warmer (wait, what?). For years I used the Twelve South BookArc, as seen in this press image below. I haven’t owned this device for a few weeks now, for reasons that will soon become apparent: Looks sl...

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...

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...

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...

As a follow-on to yesterday’s post , I’m trying to figure out why the code in the tracing-sleeper branch of https://github.com/gvwilson/asimpy actually works. The files that actually matter for the moment are: src/asimpy/environment.py : the simulation environment with the main event loop and the _Sleep action (described below). src/asimpy/actions.py : the base class for actions (described below). src/asimpy/process.py : the base class for active processes. examp...

Introduction Donald Knuth wrote his 1989 paper “A Simple Program Whose Proof Isn’t” as part of a tribute to Edsger Dijkstra on the occasion of Dijkstra’s 60th birthday. Today’s post is a reply to Knuth’s paper on the occasion of Knuth’s 88th birthday. In his paper, Knuth posed the problem of converting 16-bit fixed-point binary fractions to decimal fractions, aiming for the shortest decimal that converts back to the original 16-bit binary fraction. Knuth gives a program nam...

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 ...

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...

I wanted to have the most accurate timepiece possible mounted in my mini rack. Therefore I built this: This is a GPS-based clock running on a Raspberry Pi Pico in a custom 1U 10" rack faceplate. The clock displays time based on a GPS input, and will not display time until a GPS timing lock has been acquired. When you turn on the Pico, the display reads ---- Upon 3D fix, you get a time on the clock, and the colon starts blinking If the 3D fix is lost, the colon goes solid When t...

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...

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...

Bubble chamber scanner, via Reddit . Welcome to the reading list, a weekly roundup of news and links related to buildings, infrastructure and industrial technology. This week we look at Waymos as kid shuttles, naval reactors for data centers, welder’s anthrax, flood buyouts, and more. Roughly 2/3rds of the reading list is paywalled, so for full access become a paid subscriber. LA fridge law One annoying aspect of moving is that it’s often hard to coordinate your move to take place exactly w...

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...