You can use Polecats without the Refinery and even without the Witness or Deacon. Just tell the Mayor to shut down the rig and sling work to the polecats with the message that they are to merge to main directly. Or the polecats can submit MRs and then the Mayor can merge them manually. It’s really up to you. The Refineries are useful if you have done a LOT of up-front specification work, and you have huge piles of Beads to churn through with long convoys. — Gas Town Emergency User Manual ...

https://austinhenley.com/blog/ladybugclock.html https://austinhenley.com/blog/ladybugclock.html https://austinhenley.com/blog/ladybugclock.html

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 ...

You don’t “need retries in Kafka” until the day one of your handlers starts failing and you’re forced into a choice: block consumption (and watch lag climb) or keep consuming and retry somewhere else. This post is about one very pragmatic approach: commit the Kafka offset even when processing fails , then push the failed message into a Go retry queue. Kafka keeps moving, and your application owns the retry policy. Quick context (assuming you already speak Kafka): consumer groups spl...

One of my oldest open-source projects - Bob - has celebrated 15 a couple of months ago . Bob is a suite of implementations of the Scheme programming language in Python, including an interpreter, a compiler and a VM. Back then I was doing some hacking on CPython internals and was very curious about how CPython-like bytecode VMs work; Bob was an experiment to find out, by implementing one from scratch for R5RS Scheme. Several months later I added a C++ VM to Bob , as an exercise to learn how...

0.0 Context Setting I am sneakily writing this on Wednesday, January 14, 2026 in Portland Oregon, where I just finished writing the previous episode. It is taking a lot of energy to deal with my impulse control to post this straight away, and what I’m going to do instead is schedule it for Thursday, just to annoy Pavel and beat his issue of The Product Picnic 1 . 1.1 The Problem is Defining the Problem I’m not, personally, worried too much about AI completely devastating my work....

I want to continue with my series on how you can use Claude Code for software development , but I have at least two posts I need to write first. This post is one of those two. Thanks for all of the kind words you all have said about the first post in the series, I’ll absolutely be continuing it, hopefully next week. With that out of the way… let’s talk about Gas Town. If you’re not familiar, it’s a project from Steve Yegge that has a lot of people having a lot of feelings. Steve lau...

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...

Irrespective of your programming language of choice, calling C functions is often a necessity. For the longest time, the only standard way to call C was the Java Native Interface (JNI). But it was so painful that few dared to do it. I have heard it said that it was deliberately painful so that people would be enticed to use pure Java as much as possible. Since Java 22, there is a new approach called the Foreign Function & Memory API in java.lang.foreign . Let me go through step by step. You...

As I mentioned to the supporters on Ko-fi a week ago, I am currently considering the possibility of pausing the series at the end of this third year, with the last interview going live on August 28th. There are a few reasons for this. The first reason is that running the series is starting to become more annoying and time-consuming over time. I tried to simplify my life as much as possible, recoded part of my site to make it easier to manage and publish the series, but at the end of the day, i...

A look at how I used shape vectors to achieve sharp, high-quality ASCII rendering. A look at how I used shape vectors to achieve sharp, high-quality ASCII rendering.

I used to think that when I retired, I would spend my time writing short tutorials on topics I was interested in as a way to learn more about them myself. I’ve now been unemployed for three months, and while I’ve written some odds and ends, it’s not nearly as fulfilling as I expected because I know that most people aren’t going to read a three-thousand word exposition of discrete event simulation: they’re going to ask an LLM, and get something pseudo-personalized in return. To be c...

Just as there’s no single best way to organize your bookshelf, there’s no one-size-fits-all solution to storing information. Consider the simple situation where you create a new digital file. Your computer needs to rapidly find a place to put it. If you later want to delete it, the machine must quickly find the right bits to erase. Researchers aim to design storage systems… Source Just as there’s no single best way to organize your bookshelf, there’s no one-size-fits-all solution to...

The opposite of freedom is oppression. Man is born into a state of freedom. Through a man’s interactions with the world, he finds himself oppressed or restricted in ways that limit this natural freedom. Man ought to introduce government in accordance with the principle that a society is only as good as the most oppressed man within the society. Participation in a governed society can be incentivized by the prospect of safety from oppression. It is possible for a governmental structure to cre...

I don't like being interrupted when I'm deep in flow working on things. When my flow is interrupted, it can feel like my focus was violently stolen from me and the mental context that was crystalline falls apart into a thousand pieces before it is lost forever. With this in mind, being asked to do a "quick" 5 minute task can actually result in over an hour of getting back up to speed. This means that I sometimes will agree to do things, go back into flow (because if I get back into flo...

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...

Sometimes things just click. Then when you reflect you realise that the thing clicked because of many things all coming together – that as much as you wanted to advance an idea in the past, it needed time. I had one of these moments during the writing meetup I hosted this evening . During the event, one topic that came up was what we publish on our blogs. I shared that one thing I haven’t written much about is playing music. I love playing the piano, and I’m learning guitar! But I don’t...

Vertical farming operation in China, via Mao Ning on Twitter . Welcome to the reading list, a weekly roundup of news and links related to buildings, infrastructure, and industrial technology. This week we look at ALARA, OLED screens, bus stop frequency, Ozempic and airlines, and more. Roughly 2/3rds of the reading list is paywalled, so for full access become a paid subscriber. Is ALARA dead? Nuclear advocates have long railed against ALARA, the nuclear power safety requirement that demands radi...

Previously on Computers Are Bad, we discussed the early history of air traffic control in the United States . The technical demands of air traffic control are well known in computer history circles because of the prominence of SAGE, but what's less well known is that SAGE itself was not an air traffic control system at all. SAGE was an air defense system, designed for the military with a specific task of ground-controlled interception (GCI). There is natural overlap between air defense and ...

Ah Dyson. He voted for Brexit, then moved overseas to not live with the consequences of his actions. He and his company also designed a few different appliances, one of which was a hair dryer. It’s… fine? It dries your hair, which given the coverage I sport thesedays, doesn’t take long. It’s also pleasing enough to hold, though still more plastic than I think you may expect. Hotel hair dryers certainly feel cheaper after using this. But it does one thing that frustrates me. Or shou...

So you’ve installed Visual Studio and you want to run the compiler cl.exe from command-line. Microsoft makes it surprisingly hard. They give you a shortcut which opens a terminal window with cmd.exe setup for compilation. But I don’t want a separate window, I want to use the terminal app. You can run cmd.exe /k "C:\Program Files\Microsoft Visual Studio\2022\Community\VC\Auxiliary\Build\vcvarsall.bat" x64 (location for your setup can be different). But I don’t want to run ins...

Today Raspberry Pi launched their new $130 AI HAT+ 2 which includes a Hailo 10H and 8 GB of LPDDR4X RAM . With that, the Hailo 10H is capable of running LLMs entirely standalone, freeing the Pi's CPU and system RAM for other tasks. The chip runs at a maximum of 3W, with 40 TOPS of INT8 NPU inference performance in addition to the equivalent 26 TOPS INT4 machine vision performance on the earlier AI HAT with Hailo 8. Today Raspberry Pi launched their new $130 AI HAT+ 2 which includes ...

In late 2025 the company behind MinIO decided to abandon it to pursue other commercial interests. As well as upsetting a bunch of folk, it also put the cat amongst the pigeons of many software demos that relied on MinIO to emulate S3 storage locally, not to mention build pipelines that used it for validating S3 compatibility. In this blog post I’m going to look at some alternatives to MinIO. Whilst MinIO is a lot more than 'just' a glorified tool for emulating S3 when buildin...