Today's links

38 links from the last 24 hours · 11 October 2026

Don't diagnose your opponents

When you disagree with someone, there are two paths forward. The first is to try to engage with what they’re saying: what their reasons are, whether their…

Build your own decision model

"System one" decision models are models that infer and respond with calibrated probabilities or every allowed answer. Consider your everyday language model, to get typed output from it (JSON), you may use Structured Output to constrain the output to guarantee…

Discretionary Review

A city-building game about trying to get housing built in San Francisco. By Oliver Sin.

Dwarf Fortress uses version control now

I remember hearing a while ago that Dwarf Fortress didn't use version control. That fact has been lodged in my head, because given its inherent complexity I have trouble imagining …

One vector is too few. One per token is too many.

Introducing BreadBowl-Embed, a new late-interaction architecture for embeddings: 16 routing–value slots per passage, so the same index can retrieve and rerank, with no cross-encoder and no second pass over the text.

Bag of Decisions Reranker

Let an LLM generate the questions to ask Jev for a given query. See how well that works as a reranker.

unintentional type theory in nLab

In contrast to intensional type theory, which is a type theory containing an identity type x=yx=y whose elements are identifications of xx and yy, unintentional type theory has a mistaken identity type x≈?yx \overset{?}{\approx} y whose elements are inadverten…

We Should Still Send Home Assignments in Engineering Interviews

I’ve been hiring software engineers for the last 8 years. I’ve reviewed hundreds of home assignments as part of hiring process. In the recently introduced AI era, it is more and more believed that hiring assignments are useless because candidate can just feed …

Don't make me use your harness

I cancelled my Claude subscription today because I can't use my purchased tokens in my harness of choice. I also couldn't use them with an LLM proxy server, either. Sure, I can do some hacky things to make it work, but it's not supported and I risk

Custom Agents are Antipatterns

In the last few years I've seen people struggling to offer some value through the use of AI Agents. Across examples I noticed a common shape in them, a...

Integrating Decision Models into Agent Harnesses

Two ways to put Jev inside an agent harness: checking step completion and making bounded business decisions. Experiments with Proceda cut main-LLM calls by almost a third.

You're Not Crazy, They Never Sent FIN

A load balancer forgets an idle connection, a connection pool remembers it, and the first request after a quiet stretch gets a TCP reset the client logs as a 502 from a service that never saw it. AWS documents the behavior at 350 seconds, without a FIN. We rep…

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MCP server rules: Claude, ChatGPT, Codex, VS Code and more

The checkable rules each AI host applies to an MCP server, from tool-name length to mandatory annotations and timeouts, where they conflict, and which tools validate against them. As of 1 October 2026.

The Keynote I Thought I Was Going to Give

[6 min read] A couple of weeks ago, I gave my keynote, “The Most Valuable Engineer Isn’t Shipping Features,” at Rails World 2026 in Austin, Texas. If you ...