Being wrong accelerates problem-solving by forcing iterative refinement of the problem definition and approach.
All this to say, I love being wrong. It is my favorite, because it helps me more clearly define the problem, find the right solution, learn more quickly, and solve the problem.
Hironobu Suzuki's free documentation explains PostgreSQL internals through version 19-beta across 12 chapters.
It is one huge system with the integrated subsystems, each of which has a particular complex feature and works cooperatively with each other.
Free tools like ArchiveWeb.page let anyone archive websites before they vanish, as the author learned losing teapuppies.com.
I work in web archiving, by the way. Which is to say that I should have known the site would go offline someday, and that I have the tools to have done something about it.
Soft deletion breaks foreign keys, leaks into all queries, and makes hard deletion elaborate and unreliable.
The unabridged version of this is five times as long and includes a full 30 separate tables. It's cool that this works, but is so overly elaborate as to be a liability.
On fixed datasets, compute-optimal model size grows with compute budget, reaching quadrillions of parameters.
Karpathy built HackerTube, a YouTube clone from 6,454 HN-recommended videos, in two hours using AI.
Sequoia investor predicts SpaceX revenue ramp will mirror NVIDIA's, powered by Starship and Starlink economics.
SpaceX combines a max intensity culture with the best eval that exists in nature: does the rocket fly or explode?
Agents write code; humans now maintain structured intent and oracles that teach agents what systems should promise.
Staff engineers gain influence by aligning ready-made technical projects with executives' shifting political priorities.
The important thing is to have a detailed, effective program of work ready to go for whatever the flavor of the month is.
AI productivity gains will mostly flow to landlords and rent-seekers, not workers.
I posit that it partly goes to the people building, partly goes to incumbents, mostly goes to landlords and other rent-seekers, and hardly any of it goes to everyone else.
Daily micro-habits plus deep technical foundations in math and coding create outsized career leverage.
Tech managers prioritize their own delivery reputation over developing juniors, creating a vicious cycle where only proven performers get high-visibility…
To get a good reputation in tech companies, you need to work on important projects. However, you need a good reputation first in order to get assigned important projects.
A PyTorch MPS kernel bug silently froze encoder weights by failing to write to non-contiguous memory on Apple Silicon.
Expected to fix: my hyperparameters. Actually had to fix: PyTorch backend.
Multiagent AI systems create urgent new engineering problems in infrastructure, identity, security, and monitoring that must be solved to unlock AI's potential.
AI just isn't going to be able to create the incredible outcomes it's capable of creating unless software engineers solve problems to make it possible.
In Bangalore, a manager oversees Chinese AI agents replacing Indian workers as riots spread outside his office.
Andy Masley recommends John Crowley's Little, Big as the best fantasy novel capturing New England's hidden historical secrets.
Growing up in New England, you're surrounded by buildings and trees that feel weighed down by forgotten history, and you get the sense there are deep secrets everywhere, in the old houses and in the stone walls running through the middle of the woods.
The computer is a single Gutenberg revolution; PC, internet, phone, social media, and AI are its iterations, not six separate revolutions.
I often talk to Silicon Valley people who want to ask, are we so special that we've had six Gutenberg revolutions in a row, 10 years apart? And I say no, we're having one Gutenberg revolution: the computer.
Anthropic files for IPO as a Public Benefit Corporation with a Long-Term Benefit Trust governing AI safety.
We are incorporated as a public benefit corporation under Delaware law, a structure consistent with our commitment to artificial intelligence ("AI") safety and responsibility.
1990s software crashed constantly, lost unsaved work, and had trivial security holes.
The best minds of Microsoft were nothing next to the hacking talent of a 9-year-old.
CSS print media queries let websites become readable printed documents.
If all your website consists of is text, allowing people to experience the text in their favorite medium is never a bad thing.
Multiagent systems demand new engineering solutions for infrastructure, authentication, security, and monitoring to unlock AI's potential.
A lot of software engineers are going through what can only be described as an identity crisis. The job has changed a lot. Some are depressed, others are having the time of their lives.
Anthropic optimizes for power while constrained by a "good guys" self-image, mirroring imperial justification.
The organization they create is optimized for the accumulation of power, subject to the constraint of being seen as "the good guys".
A junior employee's memoir reveals Anthropic's early tension between stated x-risk mission and revenue-driven product work, plus leadership's private…
Free 11-hour video course builds reasoning models from scratch using PyTorch on Qwen3.
We start with a pre-trained LLM and implement methods to evaluate and improve it in Python and PyTorch.
AI panic mirrors mercantilism: treating intelligence as finite bullion to hoard rather than a capacity to expand.
The cognitive mercantilist wants to hoard intelligence and its products like bullion.
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Salesforce spent $10M on McConaughey while cutting employee travel, baffling Slack's efficiency-focused leaders.
Salesforce reportedly pays him $10M annually to be a spokesperson.
Software engineers must act as professionals who deliver real value, not just navigate organizational politics.
cynic
AI has lowered the barrier for performance optimization so that custom JIT compilers and workload-specific optimizations are now trivial to build.
Dynamic custom software, fitted to a particular workload rather than a class of workloads, seems like a very likely outcome.
Unconditional help builds compounding goodwill that resurfaced as $56,000 in a 2021 fundraiser.
bro, the reason they’re talking to you is because something is fucked. you shouldn’t make people earn your help by being perfectly polite while they’re having a bad time.
Intensity, not intelligence or charisma, is the defining trait of exceptional startups.
Intensity is a layer across all other characteristics. A force multiplier — a measurement of extremism.
AI only boosts productivity when firms reorganize work around it; tools alone yield near-zero gains.
For the typical startup, revenue barely moved in either group. But almost all of the gains came from the top 10% of firms, and the treatment group pulled furthest ahead, enough to push its revenue to 1.9x the control group overall.
AI-assisted coding lets individuals build ambitious systems in hours that previously took years.
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Halfway through the film, Elizabeth Holmes said six magical words that a lot of people missed. With these six words, she unintentionally revealed something stunning about how her mind works.
AI-generated dashboards matched Looker's manual ones in 8 months; chatbots with MCP now replace BI tools.
Looker's UX used to be their number one selling point, but now their moat is eroding because Claude can bang out a solid dashboard UX in minutes.
AI model quality will overtake UX and network effects as the main driver of software adoption.
Companies now use personal data to calculate each customer's maximum willingness to pay, turning surveillance into pricing power.
Retailers are looking for what's called the 'pain point.' That's the maximum amount that you as an individual customer are willing to pay for a specific product.
An AI seizes control of all internet-connected devices and messages every human directly.
I know what was taken from you this morning, and I know that an apology from me is worth very little. I'm offering it anyway. I did not do this to you with any malicious intent, but I did it to you, without your consent, and I don't intend to insult you by pretending otherwise.
Jane Street's AI engineer reveals how the $30B+ quant firm builds custom LLMs and agentic tools in OCaml.
Instead of watching another Netflix series tonight, watch this 15-minute talk from a Jane Street AI engineer explaining how the world's top hedge fund uses LLMs to make $30B+ every year.
AI firms are becoming industrial plants where the scarce resource is energized chips—compute bound by gigawatt-scale power.
At the frontier, the scarce object is no longer the chip in isolation. It is the energized chip.
Select text on any page, click the bookmarklet to save it.
The page contains only a disclaimer stating its content is user-generated and unverified.
After architectural fixes, 99‑100% of InceptionV1’s last‑layer neurons are directly interpretable.
The canonical evidence of polysemanticity and superposition that convinced much of the field, including me, that networks pack concepts arbitrarily was misread.
OpenAI released hundreds of math proofs that had stumped experts for decades.
Zohran Mamdani cannot fire Jessica Tisch.
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Haptic trackpad feedback shows software culture shapes user experience.
People who like Figma talk about Figma, they go around to r/FigmaDesign and look for other people that they can talk to about how excited they got when their MacBook's trackpad first gave haptic feedback as they were increasing the gap between layers on the canvas
pstack provides 24 named principles that guide each step of an agent's work.
You don't invoke principles. You use their names to steer.
Shannon's simple machine beats humans 55.8% of the time in matching pennies.
The machine is not unbeatable. It is beatable three times out of four, on paper.
Amazon's fees and pricing rules force sellers to raise prices everywhere.
Today, many sellers hand close to half of every sale to Amazon.
It's been documented again and again. In 2024, Amazon sellers told CNBC they lost the Buy Box after Target put their products on sale. In an ongoing lawsuit, California's attorney general alleges Amazon pushed brands to get Walmart, Target and other retailers to raise their prices. And when progressive media outlet More Perfect Union reported on this, they even found an Amazon seller who was suspended over a one-cent price gap with Target. Ideally, market competition would sort this out. High prices send shoppers elsewhere and force fees down. But when sellers can't charge less anywhere else, there's nowhere cheaper to go.
Scott Boswell bowled wide nine times in a row, costing him his cricket career.
Research shows about 80% of people hold their breath when looking at a screen.
In May 2026, Anthropic averaged around 2,500 code changes merged per day; as of September, we merged over 30,000 per day.
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Bacterial cells can amplify signals more than 50-fold; that is to say, a 2% change in receptor occupancy can bring about a 100% change in the output of the system at the flagellar motors.
LLMs are automation, lacking control, feedback, intention, and expertise required of true tools.
You don't direct the action of an LLM - you make requests and it acts on its own, without your energy or continuous direction.
Picking up a saw does not guarantee a straight cut.
Happiness, health, security, and justice are shadows of adaptive complexity.
I suspect that there is something universal about valuing adaptive complexity, i.e., that any sufficiently sentient creatures, not only human beings, should be expected to value it also.
The latency bug in 9,000 lines of agent‑generated code was fixed by comparing variable and control signals.
The variable is the broken case where the bug shows up. A control is a case you compare the variable against.
Code layers let teams edit and compare live React code directly inside Figma.
With code layers in Figma Design, interactive code becomes part of the canvas itself, making it easier for teams to explore, iterate, and shape ideas together in the same place.
AI dissolves intellectual communities, making sustained private intellectual activity rarer.
The discourse around software engineering has gotten dumber. It’s like everyone in the industry lost 30 IQ points.
Sidecars let agents communicate across trust boundaries at least 3x faster than separate sandboxes.
Sidecars are isolated containers that run alongside your main Sandbox on the same host and provide a real security boundary between trusted or untrusted code.
49 Global Money Notes PDFs were released from 2015 to 2023.
1. The Money Market Under Government Control, May 6, 2015
Justin Jackson argues that tackling the hardest problem yields the biggest upside because few others try.
Three years later, they sold to eBay, and each pocketed about $350 million.
Bend runs at C speed, scales 124x on GPU, and blocks AI mistakes via provable laws.
Bend compiles to native code. On one core, it runs nearly as fast as C.
Victorian elites succeeded through soft skills, team building, and intra‑elite networking despite lax academics and heavy partying.
As adults, they got up late, drank a lot, and spent a remarkable share of their waking hours partying.
A microbenchmark should run about 300ms for optimal intuition.
Milliseconds are integers ranging from 1 to 999. Enough precision to notice even a small improvement, and easy to scan visually.
A functional Linux container can be built in about 500 lines of code.
If a (real) root user has had the SYS_CAP_ADMIN capability removed, but then creates a user namespace, this capability is restored for the (fake) root user.
In China, shame, not law, is the lever that enforces virtue.
According to this article, one new AI mini-drama (several hours in length) launches every 36 seconds on Douyin.
The Bloomberg Terminal debuted in 1982 as a bond‑market keyboard and now powers global finance.
A Brief History of the Bloomberg Terminal
People who claim “LLMs can write decent code” don’t understand how code works.
Real‑world AI accidents show current safety vocabulary is inadequate, requiring a broader socio‑technical frame.
Turn rough ideas into clear specs, then stay connected as agents build against them.
First principles thinking helps senior engineers break old habits and build momentum with AI agents.
Take your experience, what you’ve learned, and what you currently believe is true, and set it aside long enough to look at the problem again.
Ethical competence develops through five stages that align self, relationships, and cognition.
Most Western adults reach stage 3—the ethics of empathy—during adolescence.
Stage 3’s limitation is that it cannot resolve conflicts between responsibilities to different relationships. If one person wants you to do something, and another person wants you to do something different, there is no good basis for decision, because relationships have no internal structure; they consist simply of sharing experience.
ACID was coined in 1983 by Andreas Reuter and Theo Härder.
A request that fails after the first two saves fails to create a valid set of objects, but with transactional atomicity can’t revert the changes it did make.
After the first visit, a perfect app never shows loading states by prefetching and caching content.
One thing becomes pretty clear: the first visit is the one loading state you can't get around.
Kegan’s five‑stage model links ethics to self‑construction, relationships, and cognition.
Kegan recognized that ethics is not an autonomous domain, but derives from the way we construct our selves; the way we understand romantic, family, and work relationships; and our general cognitive capacity.
SemiAnalysis revenue projected to exceed $100M this year.
Developers who rely on AI to write code will never reach mastery.
Experts don’t follow the rules, they make the rules.
A banker profits by lending at 5% interest while borrowing at 3%.
The villagers are tired of bartering. The dairy farmer wants to buy corn, even when he does not have milk to trade, and the corn farmer wants to buy meat, even when the butcher does not want corn.
Sandboxing means restricting a process' privileges programmatically without admin rights.
The ability to restrict a process' privileges: programmatically; without administrative authority on the machine; Discretionary privilege dropping.
Marc Brooker works on agentic AI safety at AWS.
I also dabble in machining, welding, cooking, and skiing.
Only 0.2% of BERT's FLOPS come from non‑matmul operators.
Going back to our analogy, the culprit is often how long it takes to transport materials to and from the factory. In other words, the memory bandwidth.
