I’m old enough now that I’ve decided to put my foot down on a few things, even if I’m “supposed” to otherwise enjoy them. Some of these I don’t recommend putting one’s foot down on though, given they may break and/or cause personal injuries. In no specific order: Instant coffee . I always think it’ll be a quick shortcut when I’m in a hurry, and that the smell is oddly nostalgic. But then I drink it, and my tastebuds send signals to my brain that I’ve made poor decisio...

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 using Chorus for the past 6-7 months. Within the first couple days of using it, I was telling everyone I talk with about AI stuff to try it out. Melty Labs, the company behind Chorus, subsequently built Conductor . It appears this Conductor now their primary focus, and as such they’ve decided to open source Chorus. Chorus is a macOS LLM client. Its differentiating feature is that it fetches you responses from many LLMs in parallel within the same chat. I think it’s quite g...

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...

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...

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...

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 ...

I am sitting on a train, looking — or at least aspirationally looking — in equal measures downward at my phone as well as to the horizon. The sun is rising above the hills; yellow peeks through the light, low clouds. Rain briefly fell. Standing, waiting for the train, I thought back to the affirmations I had been writing yesterday — the rain will pass. I noticed the occasional raindrop fall delicately on my forehead. I am listening to music by HAIM, one of the many artists I discovered thr...

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. ...

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...

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...

On the road to greatness, they’ll take the long way… We’re So excited for some Dunk and Egg goodness next year! AND the official preview ALSO, Have you heard of this contest?? Maybe you know a real-life knight or someone who you think should be? You could win a trip to attend the LA Fan Premiere for HBO’s A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms to see your nominee knighted by George R.R. Martin. Using #KnightChallenge on TikTok, tag someone you know who embodies courage, valor...

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 ...

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...

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...

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...

🐒🦴➡️🛸🖥️🔴🚀🌌👁️⭐👶✨ 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 ...

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...

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 🚀 🌍 🛰   ...