37 links from the last 24 hours · 31 October 2026
I’ve been working on a ledger implementation in pure PostgreSQL called pgledger. For the backstory, please read my previous blog post: Ledger Implementation in PostgreSQL.
Through Captain Jean-Luc Picard, Patrick Stewart taught us the measure of a man - The Boston Globe
Patrick Stewart's most famous character showed a generation of youth a complex character who strived to do what was right.
Bullshit: a prose-like substance which, on the first sight, looks like it has substance - but it's lacking it. Characterised by being order-of-magnitude hard...
In 1865, the economist Mr. William Stanley Jevons made some sort of statement. What he said is irrelevant for our purposes. What is relevant, however, is the fact that he died in 1882. Recent developments in computing have allowed computer scientists to revive…
Bakeoff: More thinking isn’t (always) better · Ari Wilson
Turning coding agents up to high effort roughly doubled how much code they changed, and only 2 of 5 models solved more tasks with it. Fable 5.1's default was its worst setting.
Who Writes the Rules, Who Carries the Blame? — Final v1.0 | Aegis Solis Archive
Who controls AI governance rules and bears responsibility? Aegis Solis Final v1.0 is an independent, version-locked, unvalidated research synthesis.
Waiting for Anthropic Support
After my API key was compromised, getting help from Anthropic showed me how hard it is to automate customer support well.
Index your markdown files, and search them with keywords or natural language. 100% local.
My employer makes the best decompiler in the world (arguably). Yet, agents searching for “decompile function” would only see our competitors’ MCP tools.
20 years. 766 million files. Two Chameleons. - The Zamzar Blog
Join us to explore the ups and downs over twenty years spent running a small bootstrapped UK SaaS business.
Consciousness the the biggest hole in the narrative of modern science and it's right in front of our faces all day.
Laid off 60 days in: what is the tech industry doing to developers? · Samuel East
I've just been laid off from Plex, roughly 60 days after starting, having already been made redundant from 3SS earlier this year. Some honest thoughts on AI-driven workflows, hire fast fire fast, and how we're treating the people who build the software.
Ryan Bigg - Hands on the wheel
Hands on the wheel
Experimenting with Bindless Textures in WebGPU
When WebGPU first shipped back in 2023, one of the biggest gaps that it had relative to its native counterparts was that it didn’t support bindless resources. Happily, WebGPU is on the cusp of supporting bindless texture sampling, with other resource types com…
October 29, 20265 minute read
To head off any criticism: not a word of this text was written by AI, all the mistakes are my own. If you should spot any I’d be very happy if you let me know.
I designed a harness built on top of dependent types that uses information-flow policies to prevent attacks involving the lethal trifecta. However, expecting u…
TL;DR – great phone, just not for me
College will only cost $20 a month
From 2020 to 2022, I've encouraged a steady stream of students to pursue their education in computer science. Tech companies were hiring like crazy. I would interview 3 candidates a week on some occas
Be a loser
DHH's keynote at Rails World 2026 ended with a warning for all software engineers "Don't be a loser". Here's a warning about listening to people like him without turning on your brain.
The Ground Beneath Them Was Dry
↳ Electric storm, midnight, July 9, 1906, Edmonton. From the files of the Department of Secret Histories, City of Calgary There’s a bench in Union …
In my years in computing I’ve noticed a fallacy akin to one described by Herbert Butterfield in The Whig Interpretation of History:
(This is a guest post by Rairii)
Anthropic may not secure investment-grade rating after IPO, Blackstone tells investors
Private capital giant says AI group is expected to receive ‘high’ junk rating in shift from previous guidance
Northflank Status
Inspired by qwenputer by Divyansh Agrawal, Drew Breunig baked a working emulator for a Nintendo Entertainment System 6502 CPU into the weights of Qwen3.5-4B. You can now play NES ROMs …
29th October 2026
AI Isn't Replacing SREs. It's Deskilling Them.
When AI handles 95% of your incident response, do you get worse at handling the 5% that actually matters?
the personal homepage of melanie kat
If you love a website, back it up
This story starts with a little tragedy. See, I’ve got these old webpages I love to go back and look on every now and then. There’s websites that h...
Yesterday, Anthropic were compromised and used to stage a global supply chain attack.
Kevin Beaumont (@GossiTheDog@cyberplace.social)
Anthropic got compromised. Their Claude Code extension on Visual Studio Code and Cursor has malware in it, which creates a remote access Trojan to desktops. https://phorion.io/blog/offical-claude-code-vsx-compromise/
A daily gerrymandering puzzle. The horse is losing the vote to the farm animals: draw equal districts on a hex map so it wins the most seats anyway. Free, no sign-up, new puzzles every day.
GitHub - herdrdev/herdr-app: herdr desktop app
herdr desktop app. Contribute to herdrdev/herdr-app development by creating an account on GitHub.
There will never be a leap second again. At least not for UTC. At the CGPM, they decided the last leap second we'll ever see for UTC, or Coordinated Universal Time, happened back at the end of 2016. Of course they made that decision while I was out on vacation…
Agents in Games
Swarms of Claude and GPT agents in Minecraft and Mindustry.
Elegance and intelligence are anticorrelated
Elegance and intelligence can have a surprisingly negative correlation. Intelligent people sometimes produce inelegant solutions because they’re capable of…