Today's links

93 links from the last 24 hours · 30 September 2026

State of the (Tagged) Union Address by Andrew Kelley

Andrew Kelley on what's cooking in Zig land! From a technology and toolchain perspective, a review of some of the recent major advancements, tech demos of what's very close to being finished, and talk about the roadmap of things to come over the next several y…

Sculpting DTS support into a 2020 LG CX

My LG CX shipped without DTS support. Bringing it back meant reconstructing its audio DSP firmware and restoring the missing DTS handling across eight layers of the TV’s audio stack.

The mathematics of perfect speed dating

A speed-dating puzzle about moving sixteen people between four tables leads to finite fields, affine planes, and a surprisingly rich scheduling problem.

What REPACK (CONCURRENTLY) costs while it runs

PostgreSQL 19 comes with online table rewrites. Measured against pg_repack and pg_squeeze REPACK (CONCURRENTLY) is the fastest and the lightest on WAL under writes. Here's what it does to vacuum, readers, writers and old snapshots while it runs, and what to ch…

I Miss Coding

I write less code by hand, ship more software, and spend much more time deciding what I am willing to own.

It’s not the (Super) Intelligence, Stupid!

I have been following the AI debate from the sidelines for quite some time now. I wanted to stay out of it for several reasons: I am not an expert, in fact (except for the most basic applications) I am not an actual user, and there are way too many other…

Pencils Down, Intent Up

DHH’s ‘pencils down’ moment at Rails World points to a deeper shift: AI is becoming the abstraction closest to human intent. What does that mean for Ruby, Rails, JRuby, Spinel, Elixir, and the future of programming?

Speeding Up the Process of Mourning

The world of mathematics, including theoretical computer science, is in turmoil. Even the Millennium Prize Problems, and, worse still, our beloved FOCS/STOC open problems, are no longer beyond the …

Don’t try on thoughts

There are many reasons to write by hand, instead of using AI. A classic reason is that writing is thinking — in other words that if you’re not writing, you’re not clearly thinking.

Religion, consciousness, and continuity

Most religions can be seen as a social technology that enable cooperation, ultimately enabling a society to be able to better preserve and d...

Every British PM’s nightmare - Project Syndicate op-ed - Yanis Varoufakis

With Keir Starmer expected to fall on his sword shortly, here is my take on the conundrum facing Andy Burnham, indeed any and every British PM. The true nature of Britain’s ‘special relationship’ with the United States has far more to do with American financie…

10 Tokens For Your Meat Brain LLM – Jimmy's blog

I’m blessed to have family, friends, and coworkers from all over the world, and I love discovering words from their languages that have no English equivalent. They reveal what a culture finds important, and they may even shape how we see: Russian has separate …

A quote from John Gruber

Muse is getting a lot of attention — including mine — because it’s both groundbreaking technically (each user gets their own entire persistent Linux VM running in Meta’s cloud) and …

A quote from Muse AI Agent

Bad news on the MX Keys Mini pickup. Usman showed up at your building around 9:15 and waited, messaged a bunch of times, and nobody came down. He left angry …

2026 in LLMs (so far)

On Friday I gave the closing keynote at the WeAreDevelopers World Congress North America in San Jose. I tied together the key trends from the past year into a chronological …

A quote from @therealcornpop

Hey, you know it's like super obvious if you're using AI to write your scripts for TikTok and YouTube, right? [...] It's not just the general AI-isms of "it's not …

OpenAI DevDay 2026 live blog

I’m at OpenAI DevDay today, in Fort Mason, San Francisco. Same as last year I’ll be live blogging the keynote and some other notes during the day. OpenAI gave me …

macOS Golden Gate Is a Buggy Mess · SquareOrbits

In June 2008 Apple announced Mac OS X Snow Leopard, proudly boasting that it would have "no new features". Instead of piling on new things, Snow Leopard aimed to build on the success of its predecessor, Leopard, opting to focus on under-the-hood performance an…

Yes, no AI is now a feature - TDF Community Blog

One of the comments on the announcement of LibreOffice 26.8 was a simple question: “So, no AI is now a feature?” LibreOffice does not reject artificial intelligence out of hand, but an office suite used by tens of millions of people – in schools, hospitals, pu…

Tool: Shadow roots, explained with live examples

Learn about shadow DOM through interactive examples that demonstrate style encapsulation, inheritance, slots, parts, and JavaScript access. Explore how shadow roots create isolated DOM trees with private stylesheets and elements …

Claude Sonnet 5.5

New Sonnet model from Anthropic today. They say it "runs 30%+ faster, and costs up to 30% less for most work" - it's priced the same as Sonnet 5 but …

A quote from @joedaroo

To say that we were surprised at the jump and suddenness of the capabilities of our models when it came to “cyber” or “swarming” or “message boards” or anything else …

Release: llm 0.36

Access large language models from the command-line

Living with your creations

Last week, I tweeted out the three oddities of application development:

Introducing GPT-6.1 Sol

Meet GPT-6.1 Sol: near-Astra intelligence for coding, computer use, and professional work at one-fifth of Astra’s standard API input and output token prices.

Note on 24th September 2026

The more time I spend working with coding agents, the more convinced I am that they make software engineering even harder. We can do amazing things with them, but unlocking …

Tool: Kākāpō Party

Experience an interactive pixel-art celebration featuring kākāpō (New Zealand's flightless parrots) jumping and dancing to music. Click, tap, or press Space to trigger confetti bursts, balloons, streamers, and festive effects …

Tool: Gemini 3.8 TTS Playground

Test and experiment with Google's Gemini 3.8 text-to-speech API through an interactive playground where you can compose single-voice narration or multi-speaker conversations, preview the generated audio, and explore request and …

2017 Review

Personal

A quote from voxium

It has been half a month since I started a new role at a big company. Nobody knows anything here. The specs, code, tests, PRDs, tickets, resolution of those tickets, …

Leaving them behind

The one where I’ve seen enough (for real this time).

What makes Lisp difficult to read?

The Lisp family of programming languages is infamous for their parenthesis-heavy syntax. Many people, myself included, find this syntax more difficult to read than the notation of languages like Python, Java or C. The perceived unreadability of Lisp is signifi…

Vinext 1.0 - A New Alternative to Next.js

This Next.js alternative just officially hit 1.0. Vinext 1.0 gives Next.js apps a new path to Vite and Cloudflare Workers. Let's break down what Vinext is, which Next.js features it supports, how it compares with OpenNext, and where its cache warming approach…