The rationalists and Harry Potter #

I was exposed to the recruitment pipeline that is Harry Potter fanfic back in college. I’m glad I was too full of myself to find it appealing, saved me a lot of time. Archive

Pandas is too slow #

I have very strong opinions about the correct way to do data manipulation, and it’s neither pandas nor polars, although for sure polars is faster. Archive

Is vibecoding a democratisation of dev skills #

Cory Doctorow and others argue it is, but I’m more on the side of this website: the use of genAI for coding in general erodes community, and community is where learning and development happens. Archive

A lisp to make software more bootstrappable #

I had previously not heard of the notion of making software bootstrappable. Archive

Faster timestamp manipulation #

Datetimes and timestamps are always such a pain. Every codebase and every language deal with them slightly differently, I wonder if a more global solution is possible? In any case, super neat tricks to optimise cycles on a very compute-intensive operation. Archive

No EU tech unicorn is a feature, not a bug #

The EU produces a lot of good tech: the Internet, Linux, Mastodon, the Gemini protocol, VLC, … The EU offers it all to the commons instead of building walls. Archive

The political side of FOSS is weird everywhere #

Fascism is trying to advance everywhere, even in places like FOSS. There’s also something to be said about Copyleft VS. Opensource somewhere in there. Archive

Why do we do anything really? #

This paper has lived in my mind rent-free since a friend shared it with me. I find echoes, less well-thought out, in many pieces about what to do in the age of LLMs. Highly recommended. Archive

On being the right size #

Some projects shouldn’t scale, and that’s a good thing actually. Archive

A cool book list #

More books to read is always a good problem to have! Archive

The TRON OS - a past Japanese OS for the future #

A very interesting OS - with a database of files as the fundamental layer instead of a filesystem - and the history of the trade regulation which killed (some of) it. Archive

Old school raycasting engine #

A very cool project. I’m a big believer that limitations breed creativity. Archive

Pre-production should be free-form #

I’ve never worked on a project where you just hand off a finished product, instead always in “continuous updates” environments. At a smaller scale (e.g. feature), I guess this is what I do however. Archive

It never occured to me the VCR was better than what I currently have #

Streaming is just a new word for “always redownloading” which seems silly really. Archive

We made rocks count so much that they started showing colors #

I like to say that there is a wizard inside the box on my desk, and if I tell the wizard just the right things, I get to do magic. Archive

Systems do what the men with the guns tell them to do #

There is a lot of talk about making resilient systems to outside attackers, but at the end of the day violence trumps all… Archive

Knowledge work is its own special circle in Hell #

I think we’ve all had a job like that one. Archive

DMCA and US tech hegemony #

Before reading Cory Doctorow, I had no idea about the impact of the DMCA and how DRM is a legal device, not a technical one. I wonder if “move fast and break things” would work as a business model there. Archive

Elevators! #

A place I worked at actually used the “two elevator problem” for technical interviews. Fun animations! Archive

C declarations are expressions #

Once I really assimilated this fact, the maze cycle stopped being an issue. Archive

C type definitions are a maze #

I instinctively do something like this, but the diagrams really show how bad this is… Archive

“THE SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED “AS IS”” #

Without guarantees of any kind. Archive

“But you have to do it, it’s inevitable” #

Exactly my feelings for every time someone has told me a trend is inevitable. Archive

MACRO #

A fun apocryphal story. Looking online it seems like it actually comes from “macro-instruction” which makes more sense, but is less fun. Archive

Hiding your site from crawlers #

Very cool adversarial techniques for protecting yourself from those who don’t respect the web-crawling social contract. Archive

AI is not conscious #

Ted Chiang is a wonderful writer, and the analogies to space exploration and AlphaFold never having been considered sentient were novel and striking to me. Archive

Memory out of bounds issues #

See also… I’m learning C (and having fun with it) these days, but these issues bother me. Can we achieve C ubiquity with bounds checking? Archive

On how tech is political #

This specific post is about Linux’s (and Linus’s) recent decisions on using AI tools for the kernel. The excuse of “we use the best tool, we’re not political” is just a cop out. Archive

Why make an app when you can make a webpage? #

Cory Doctorow has a great point about the DMCA act and why companies make apps. Here is how it should be instead. Archive

Q-Q plots explained #

Q-Q plots are great tools, and I learned new tests of distribution similarity. Archive

SIMD examples in Zig #

A nice simple example of some SIMD instructions in Zig. Archive

Having a wide variety of languages is good, actually #

Languages with different focuses make you think about different aspects of your software. Archive

Is software engineering “real” engineering? #

Against Betteridge’s law of headlines, the answer is actually YES! A great three-part series. Achive

Accessibility is also security #

I wonder how to advertise such features? Archive

If statements and branch predictions for optimisation #

Sometimes the compilers are smarter, but also sometimes we’re smarter. Archive

CARDiac, computing by hand #

Learned about this from Cory Doctorow’s blog. Very cool! Archive

A great guide to using valgrind #

Learning how to debug C code has been just as hard as learning to write it in the first place. As they say, I did the first 90% of the work, now onto the second 90% of the work. Archive

The Jqwik saga, from the author #

I find it very interesting to hear what prolific OSS authors think in terms of LLM/GenAI policy. Archive

More old GUIs #

More oldie goodness!! Archive

Virtual OS museum #

A blast from the past! Archive

Github is badly made software #

An interesting and opinionated take on what makes good software. It’s always a surprise to me that billion dollar corporations can’t seem to make good software. Archive

It turns out Claude Mythos might not be that big of a deal #

I know fairly little about cybersecurity, but this deep dive into what Mythos is doing was super interesting. Archive

Lines of code measures complexity and liability #

The more we do with the less code, the better off we’ll be. Archive

LLMs make individual coders faster, but the rest of the funnel is still slow #

A very interesting look at how individual pieces of work combine into a finished product. As usual, the mythical man month remains as such. Archive

CLIPS #

I had never heard of CLIPS, but have played in some games with creating order systems for controllable characters. I didn’t realize how deep it went! Archive

Hot reloading in C #

Every day I learn something new about C! Archive

Conventional commits, and a better alternative #

I remember learning about conventional commits with semantic releases and thinking something was wrong with them. This is a nice formalisation. Archive

Cory Doctorow on centaurs, reverse-centaurs, and class struggle #

I didn’t know of this article when I wrote my own, but I’m glad to see someone with such a large platform share these ideas. Archive