I was recently asked by a fellow blogger how I would prefer to be credited in a blog post they were working on. This brought to mind an idea I have been thinking about for a while: how could I indicate the way I would prefer a post on my website to be cited? By having this information readily available, anyone who wants to link to my site would have the information they need to feel confident in their citation. After thinking about this question for a while, I now have a “ How to cite pages o...

Almost a year ago, I found that N100 Mini PCs were cheaper than a decked-out Raspberry Pi 5 . So comparing systems with: 16GB of RAM 512GB NVMe SSD Including case, cooler, and power adapter Back in March last year, a GMKtec Mini PC was $159, and a similar-spec Pi 5 was $208. Today? The same GMKtec Mini PC is $246.99, and the same Pi 5 is $246.95: Today, because of the wonderful RAM shortages 1 , the Mini PC is the same price as a fully kitted-out Raspberry Pi 5. Almost a...

Suppose you want to empty a box. Really, truly empty it. You remove all its visible contents, pump out any gases, and — applying some science-fiction technology — evacuate any unseeable material such as dark matter. According to quantum mechanics, what’s left inside? It sounds like a trick question. And in quantum mechanics, you know to expect a trick answer. Not only is the box still filled… Source Suppose you want to empty a box. Really, truly empty it. You remove all its visible co...

How to make a cigarette smoke effect using shaders and three.js. How to make a cigarette smoke effect using shaders and three.js.

I’ve filed a few issues in the GitHub repository for my discrete event simulation of a small software development team in order to map out future work. The goal is to move away from what Cat Hicks calls the “brains in jars” conception of programmers by including things like this: Rushing work should increase the chance that re-work will be needed. If programmers don’t ever get a break, they burn out , which increases both their bug rate and the time needed to do the n...

For the new year, a resolution How small that is, with which we wrestle, what wrestles with us, how immense; were we to let ourselves, the way things do, be conquered thus by the great storm,— we would become far-reaching and nameless. What we triumph over is the Small, and the success itself makes us petty. The Eternal and Unexampled will not be bent by us. …growth is: to be the deeply defeated by ever greater things. from  The Man Watching by Rainer Maria Rilke Fo...

I entered the new year holding an inconsolable, shrieking baby while London set off an armageddon of fireworks around us. So goes parenthood. The baby is fine, just congested and teething. I am as “fine” as anyone can be after months of chronic sickness, broken sleep, and parental troubleshooting. I am very tired and full of stoic perspective, but still savouring the baby babble sounds, tiny fingers on my face, and three-teeth grins. When people ask me how parenting is going, I've taken to...

TL;DR: 2026 is going to be The Year of The Linux Desktop for me. I haven't booted into Windows in over 3 months on my tower and I'm starting to realize that it's not worth wasting the space for. I plan to unify my three SSDs and turn them all into btrfs drives on Fedora. I've been merely tolerating Windows 11 for a while but recently it's gotten to the point where it's just absolutely intolerable. Somehow Linux on the desktop has gotten so much better by not even doing anything differe...

The Case for Blogging in the Ruins by Joan Westenberg Joan makes the case that the modern web, dominated by platforms and algorithms, has stripped away depth, ownership, and genuine thought. Blogging, she argues, is a quiet act of resistance that lets us think clearly, write freely, and leave something real behind. Read Post → I’m not sure where I first heard about Joan and her superb writing, but I’ve been following her for around a year or so now, I t...

The decorations, they be coming down. You know it when the shopping centres fill with these storage boxes. Here’s one of the centres Clara and I frequent: I also finally grokked what bugged me about the tree in this one: it wasn’t placed in the centre. Well, it’s in the shopping centre, just not in the cartesian centre of… wait, I was going somewhere with that. By Ruben Schade in Sydney, 2026-01-06. The decorations, they be coming down. You know it when the shopping centre...

Recently, Kev posted a survey on his site to figure out how people access his content. Big fan of asking people directly and the results are not at all surprising to me. As I said to him, RSS traffic on my server is VERY high. But it's fun to get more datapoints so I created a similar survey and I'd really appreciate it if you could take probably 10 seconds to answer it. It's literally 1 question. I'll keep the form live for a week and then publish the results. Thank you :) ...

2026 will be a year of AI disruption across all of academia. Let's start by talking about AI is changing how we write research papers. Not the research itself (another post), just about the dissemination thereof. Technology has changed research distribution since the invention of paper, and the printing press, typewriters, journals and conferences have all had dramatic effects. But we've already seen such dramatic changes just within my research career from authors doing their own formatting (Te...

Leeza SOHO tower under construction, via Federico Italiano on Twitter . Happy new year, and welcome to the reading list, a weekly roundup of news and links related to buildings, infrastructure, and industrial technology. This week we look at automated code checkers, meranti wood, shifting snowfall patterns, launching spacecraft with bullwhips, and more. Roughly 2/3rds of the reading list is paywalled, so for full access become a paid subscriber. Automated code checkers I’ve previously writte...

Sometimes I get asked questions that would be more fun to answer in public. All letters are treated as anonymous unless permission is otherwise granted. Hello [Redacted]! You asked about a friend's son who is a recent graduate looking for work as a software developer and having a hard time. I like to think of three key aspects of getting a job: 1) knowing where to apply, 2) getting an interview at all, and 3) passing the interview. Knowing where to apply There are three different types ...

We are experiencing one of the most significant technological breakthroughs of the last few decades. Call it what you will: AI, generative AI, large language models… But where does it come from? Academics will tell you that it stems from decades of mathematical efforts on campus. But think about it: if this were the best model to explain what happened, where would the current breakthroughs have occurred? They would have happened on campus first, then propagated to industry. That’s the line...

I am a huge fan of gistpreview.github.io , the site by Leon Huang that lets you append ?GIST_id to see a browser-rendered version of an HTML page that you have saved to a Gist. The last commit was ten years ago and I needed a couple of small changes so I've forked it and deployed an updated version at gisthost.github.io . Some background on gistpreview The genius thing about gistpreview.github.io is that it's a core piece of GitHub infrastructure, hosted and cost-covered entirely by Gi...

The last time I wrote a year in review was in 2019. I ended it with “have a healthy 2020” and we all know how that went. Since it does feel like we’ve been living in hell since 2020 I somehow stopped writing yearly reviews. But I have been itching to capture more of my life and I did have an okay 2025 so here it is. The struggle is, I am a glass half empty person. I’d hate to sound like I am always moaning and complaining but with the current state of the world, I just can’t justify,...

I recently came across a cute game called https://enclose.horse. In this game, there is a horse in the middle of a field and a bunch of rivers surrounding it. You have to "enclose" the horse by cutting off its access to the boundaries of the map using a limited set of walls. The game is to create the largest possible space you can under those constraints. It's harder to explain in words than if you just go try the game. What the game is asking you to do, in graph theory terms, is to find a ve...

“For man, or for a man, there can be no new beginnings.” — David Zindell, Shanidar Re: A Call for New Aesthetics . At some point in the 20th century, we filled out the last few basis vectors of humanity. We explored the whole game map. This is what it means to live at the end of history: every aesthetic movement, political and economic system you can imagine can be understood as a linear combination of things that have come before. Asking for a new aesthetics is like asking for a n...

As lunar exploration ramps up worldwide , our celestial companion is slated to be explored by increasingly advanced rovers of all sorts over the next 10 years. Not all of them will be successful, and so the reason for this post is not just to garner excitement about the possibilities of near future lunar exploration but also to archive in one place the promises being made so we can assess them in the future instead of only reporting, sharing, and amplifying grand plans. The same rationale is wh...

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 ...

It’s time for a yearly review again. Time flies. Nerdy things I enjoyed I read a few books this year. The whole Dungeon Crawler Carl series was absolutely amazing and it quickly jumped up to one of my favorite series of all time. I can’t be held accountable for everything I’ve ever said to a stripper. Princess Donut Board games are great. I still don’t play nearly as much as I’d like to but my kids are quickly growing up and to my eternal joy they’re...

Previously: 2024 , 2023 , 2022 , 2021 , 2020 , 2019 , 2018 , 2017 A surprisingly persistent personality quirk I have is that I care a lot about the changeover of the new year. I quite like consuming yearly predictions, year-in-reviews, and so on, and use the calendar transition as a time for reflection. Work I’ve now been at Databricks for a little over 3.5 years, and it’s been quite a fun ride. In most ways, it’s exceeded my expectations from when I joined. I’ll hopefull...