Featured post what's this? ✨ Giving and taking credit in big tech companies Engineers often complain that visibility should be their manager’s job. In other words, they think engineers should be able to focus on the code, while their manager figures out who’s doing well and rewards them.
Rebuilding Postgres for 300x faster analytics: batching, operator fusion, and SIMD - malisper.me Last week we released version 0.2 of pgrust. This release was all about performance. It’s 10x faster than the previous version of pgrust. On OLTP benchmarks, pgrust is 30% faster than Postgres, and on Clickbench, Clickhouse’s benchmark for analytical data...
Our Moon is two-faced. Science missions unravel its layers. Moon Monday #286: China’s Chang’e 6 samples have helped scientists decipher enigmatic layers of the lunar farside, leaving a curious trail for future missions to build upon.
Kimi K3 Built the Game. I Still Had to Play It. Kimi K3 built a playable first-person game from one prompt, but its bugs only appeared when a human played it. AI can make the first version. Somebody still owns the failures.
The wettest month isn't the worst month Richmond loses more construction workdays in January than in July, on a third less rain. Why spread-out winter rain costs more than clustered summer storms, three wrong guesses about a model that read too high, and what happened when it was measured again...
Ideas are abundant. Friction is evidence. — Jay Your first company can start with a problem you already feel, and the tools you need while solving it.
Export Spotify Data and Music (Playlists, etc.) I am quite tired of Algorithm in any app, so am I with Spotify.
Retries don't fix eventual consistency — var0.xyz Retries are great for transient failures, but they can't solve eventual consistency. Treating one problem as the other often adds unnecessary complexity to distributed systems.
Who's Writing Open Source Code? As AI steadily reshapes the software industry around it as open source once did before it, it’s useful to try and understand where those two forces intersect. Open source has, as it has with virtually every other industry software category, had an enormou...
Promises, Kept: From Swarm Theory to an Agent System of Record We once argued that swarm theory and promise theory were the right lens for resilient systems. Then we built Multisynapse to prove it. Here's what shipped, and where we're going.
I Built a Digital Human You Can Talk To An engineering account of a voice-to-avatar pipeline built with Deepgram, Groq, Chroma, AWS Polly, GeneFace++, FastAPI, and WebRTC.
The Last Bug on Earth Everyone is panicking that AI will bury us under incomprehensible bugs. Relax. The code is about to get so perfect there will be no bugs left at all, only the business cases nobody documented, or documented badly. The machine builds exactly what you ask f...
Do you understand what I’m saying? - Pravesh Koirala Edward Teller once said, “Von Neumann would carry on a conversation with my 3-year-old son, and the two of them would talk as equals…” He added that he sometimes wondered whether von Neumann used the same principle when speaking to everyone else. That is ...
I shrank my chess engine 70x by trying to compress it The compression scheme lost to a small model trained from scratch. That loss led to the real result: at a fixed time budget, a 5M model beats one 28 times its size, until it doesn't.
The no-bullshit guide to Agentic Engineering Practical guide to shipping production-ready software in hours instead of months.
Canva is one percent of the way there I spent three years inside the most ambitious company I've ever seen, and the way it works is a preview of how every company will soon have to work.
Working on Economics with Fable 5 - Wilsons Blog For the past few months I’ve been working on a theory. It started out as just a fun little data exercise looking at some different types of taxes and benefits and how it effects what people buy and how much they work. During that time I took advantage of ...
My newsletter is your email client, too | Andros Fenollosa My newsletter has no subscription form, no double opt-in with a magic link, and it doesn't live in a third-party service with its tracking pixel. And
Agentic Coding: Bet on the Primitives - Robin Wieruch Agentic coding collapses the cost of implementation labor. Why the rational bet is moving from high-level libraries back to primitives you own.
Twelve Years Without a VPN I have not used a corporate VPN in more than ten years. At Google, access to internal applications depends on the user and the device, not on the…
Making a game in C for the Global Game Jam: Inside Job In this post I'll talk about how my team and I designed a local multiplayer investigation game, how I implemented a record-replay mechanic, the strange platform bugs we hit along the way, and how we still managed to make a game we're proud of, using my en...
Measuring an eBPF Cache Without Leaving the Kernel When testing our eBPF agent, I don’t always get the same experience as our users, especially in performance critical sections. I realize that the benchmark test suite isn’t always enough, because user’s environments can be completely different from our be...
I Don't Write Code Anymore. I Have It Written. I don't write code anymore. I approve it. An honest look at the slow shift from author to approver, what AI took from the craft, and what was already fading on its own.
How The Heck Do You Catch A Fly Ball? (An Interactive Exploration) An interactive exploration of how outfielders (and dogs) catch fly balls: the gaze heuristic, optical acceleration, and why a ball hit directly at you is the hardest one in the sport to read.
Taylor Farms Has Rewritten Its Cyclospora Statement Four Times in Sixteen Days. It Still Has Not Said What Changed at That Plant After 2013, or Why Two Thousand Negative Tests Should Mean Anything. A company’s public statement in the middle of an outbreak is not marketing. It is evidence — what the company said it knew, and when, published to the
SQLite Critical CVEs or LLM Slop? | JFrog The JFrog security research team recently identified a supply chain attack targeting the `xinference` package on PyPI. Versions 2.6.0, 2.6.1, and 2.6.2 were compromised and yanked by maintainers after users reported suspicious behavior. If you installed o...
Don't be a meat proxy Too often I ask a question in Slack or leave feedback under a merge/pull request or argue with friends in a WhatsApp group and get back:
More German than many Germans I just wanted to do an internship in Europe so it would be easier to find a job after graduation. That internship completely changed my life.
Invisible Problems During the pandemic, we completed one of our largest projects at work. To celebrate, since we couldn't meet in person, we all ordered food on DoorDash and played an online escape room game together. W
Qwen Studio QWEN STUDIO DISCORD Today, we are officially releasing Qwen 3.8-Max, the most capable model in the Qwen family to date. This also marks the first time we will open-source the weights of a Qwen-Max-class model — the open weights will be released next week....
