I have a page on my site, /post , which lists all of my blog posts. For at least the last year, the HTML document title used on the page has been Posts in the Post Category . This is because the page uses the same template as my other category pages. Posts in the Coffee Category make sense; Posts in the Post Category – which encompasses all of my posts – makes less sense. I hadn’t changed the title in large part because I wasn’t sure how to do it easily, but today I figured out a w...
I thought of this horrendous thing while walking home yesterday. I blame it on heatstroke.
Umbrella in the sun;
It grants me shade.
Umbrella in the sun;
Cold lemonade.
Umbrella in the sun;
It’s hot and dry.
Umbrella in the sun;
Without I’d fry.
Umbrella in the sun;
Too hot for pants.
Umbrella in the sun;
Skirts, shorts, and… France?
Umbrella in the sun;
Too hot to jive.
Umbrella in the sun;
Mambo No. 5.
Umbrella in the sun;
Look like a nerd.
Umbrella in the sun;
...
This week on the People and Blogs series we have an interview with Kathleen Fisher, whose blog can be found at aspeckledtrout.com .
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The People and Blogs series is supported by Naz Hamid and the other 127 members of my "One a Month" club.
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Let's start from the basics: can you introduce yourself...
"What are the must-have apps to install on my new Mac?"…
"Which tool makes you the most productive?"…
"Do you still use Alfred?"…
All these questions and more—and the answer to all of them is Raycast!
I was previously a huge fan of Alfred since back in 2012 .
I liked Alfred, I enthused about Alfred; I also ditched Alfred for Raycast in early 2023.
Raycast is the ultimate productivity tool.
The kind of thing that leaves you bereft on a new laptop until you’ve in...
1.5 TB of VRAM on Mac Studio - RDMA over Thunderbolt 5
Apple gave me access to this Mac Studio cluster to test RDMA over Thunderbolt, a new feature in macOS 26.2 . The easiest way to test it is with Exo 1.0 , an open source private AI clustering tool. RDMA lets the Macs all act like they have one giant pool of RAM, which speeds up things like massive AI models.
Jeff Geerling
December 18, 2025
1.5 TB of VRAM on Mac Studio - RDMA over Thunderbolt 5
...
The Orbital Index
Issue No. 348 | Dec 17, 2025
🚀 🌍 🛰
...
Gitanjali Venkatraman does wonderful illustrations of complex subjects (which is why I was so happy to work with her on our Expert Generalists article). She has now published the latest in her series of illustrated guides: tackling the complex topic of Mainframe Modernization
In it she illustrates the history and value of mainframes, why modernization is so tricky, and how to tackle the problem by breaking it down into tractable pieces. I love the clarity of her explanations, and smile...
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...
I've been using Firefox for over 20 years at this point, but after a stream of cock-ups, I'm thinking about moving on.
I’ve been using Firefox since 2005, so not long after it was first released. I distinctly remember the first time I heard about it - I was on a training course with the Army and the instructor was using Firefox. Netscape was effectively dead, and everyone was using Internet Explorer, but I’ve always been a magpie for the new shiny, so when I saw his browser, I asked him...
Mathematics is, at its core, an art. Like painters, musicians or writers, mathematicians create and explore new worlds. They test, and then push past, the limits of their imagination. They engage with thousands of years of history, with concepts and tastes and fashions that are constantly in flux. This artistic pursuit of beauty, truth and meaning is what every Quanta math story is about…
Source Mathematics is, at its core, an art. Like painters, musicians or writers, mathematicians create ...
A mailbox for Christmas
2025-12-18 09:45
Christmas is often the time when geeks get bombarded with technical questions from their loved ones. Last year, I gave my opinion on Gmail accounts and was asked what alternative to use for email. I was a bit stumped for an answer: ProtonMail or Tuta? But they regularly encourage users to switch to their paid service and use their other services (VPN, drive, password vault, etc.). What's more, standard email clients are not compatible.
That's what g...
LLM Evals: Everything You Need to Know
hamel.dev
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 ...
mdBook is a tool for easily
creating books out of Markdown files. It's very popular in the Rust ecosystem,
where it's used (among other things) to publish the official Rust book .
mdBook has a simple yet effective plugin mechanism that can be used to modify
the book output in arbitrary ways, using any programming language or tool. This
post describes the mechanism and how it aligns with the
fundamental concepts of plugin infrastructures .
mdBook preprocessors
mdBook's architecture is ...
The best way to introduce this post might be to reflect on my post from January, where I begrudingly declared some new years resolutions , and see how good I was at keeping them:
Read more on the site… The best way to introduce this post might be to reflect on my post from January, where I begrudingly declared some new years resolutions , and see how good I was at keeping them:
Read more on the site… The best way to introduce this post might be to reflect on my post from January...
Last week we talked about the different ways we can decompose a simple predicate which is a conjunction of two simpler predicates.
Given the query:
SELECT * FROM ab WHERE a = 7 AND b = 100
We can:
Not decompose the filter at all, and scan our base data applying the predicate a = 7 AND b = 100 ,
push down the a = 7 filter and translate the scan over the primary index into a scan on a secondary index, then apply the b = 100 filter on the results of that, o...
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...
Judge a man by his questions rather than by his answers. – Voltaire
I am an introvert by nature, but I come alive for a good conversation. I was
reflecting on this after a recent international flight, where I was sitting next
to a friendly man who turned out to be a late-career civil engineer. I have a
close friend who is a civil engineer, and so as this conversation unfolded I was
able to inject pieces of information I’d learned from her – the differences
between various civil CAD too...
Bell Labs, as we’ve noted before , was for years America’s premier industrial research lab. Not only did Bell Labs invent much of the technology that powers the modern world — the transistor, the solar PV cell, the first communication satellite — but it made numerous scientific breakthroughs, accumulating more Nobel Prizes than any other industrial research lab. I’m generally skeptical of efforts to create a “modern Bell Labs,” as I think much of what made Bell Labs work was his...
Brief one today. I got asked “does YJIT/ZJIT have support for [Linux] perf?”
The answer is yes, and it also works with samply (including on macOS!),
because both understand the perf map interface .
This is the entirety of the implementation in ZJIT 1 :
fn register_with_perf ( iseq_name : String , start_ptr : usize , code_size : usize ) {
use std :: io :: Write ;
let perf_map = format! ( "/tmp/perf-{}.map" , std :: process :: id ());
let ...
It continues to be a busy December, if not quite as busy as last year . Today's big news is Gemini 3 Flash , the latest in Google's "Flash" line of faster and less expensive models.
Google are emphasizing the comparison between the new Flash and their previous generation's top model Gemini 2.5 Pro:
Building on 3 Pro’s strong multimodal, coding and agentic features, 3 Flash offers powerful performance at less than a quarter the cost of 3 Pro, along with higher rate limits. The new 3 Fla...
I’ve mentioned this a few times now, but when I started using Claude it was
because Peter got me hooked on it. From the very
beginning I became a religious user of what is colloquially called YOLO mode,
which basically gives the agent all the permissions so I can just watch it do
its stuff.
One consequence of YOLO mode though is that it didn’t work well together with
the plan mode that Claude Code had. In the beginning it didn’t inherit all the
tool permissions, so in plan mode it ac...
The Fine Arts Building Last week, I partook of the second Fridays open house in the The Fine Arts Building , ten floors of offices all related to the arts and creatives in some way. Art studios of all kinds, from fine art to photography, music instrument sales, repairs and instruction, an opera company and various music ensembles, puppetry, jewelry makers, authors, interior decorators, a store that sells music scores on paper and an independent books store, and much more. On the evenings of ...
Multiplying the Shuffle Speed in Go with Batched Shuffling
lemire.me
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...
