98 links from the last 24 hours · 30 September 2026
A configurable stacking window manager for Wayland, built on River and inspired by FVWM and MWM.
My last post on the Rust compiler’s performance was two months ago and a lot has happened since then.
This post describes the construction of an Aho-Corasick automaton for the simultaneous matching of substrings within a sequence. I’m fond of this algorithm because it constructs an automaton from an existing tree data structure in a rather pleasant way.
The AI Race Just Got Awkward | insufferable.dev
Funny how quiet everyone got.
Pi now supports MCP. Why we changed our minds, what changed in MCP and in Pi, and what Codemode is.
Photo Scrubber — local face blur & metadata removal
How a Pole sees the world in September 2026: a scrolling essay that follows one closed strait into fuel, food, bonds, defence and demography.
GitHub - ninjahawk/livenerf: Benchmark for tracking model capability after release.
Benchmark for tracking model capability after release. - ninjahawk/livenerf
GPT 6.1 Sol: Near-Astra intelligence for a fifth of the price
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…
Why Independent Developer Blogs Are Going Offline
Independent developer educators are losing readers and income to AI. What you can do about it, and how I block training crawlers on this blog.
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.
ADD CONSTRAINT UNIQUE runs in milliseconds and locks nothing that matters, then aborts on a duplicate email. Fixtures hide it and so does uniform random data. Here is the data shape that exposes it.
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…
Typing code and dragging pixels were always solutions. What problem were you trying to solve?
Build the Harness Before You Hand the Agent Real Work — Matthew Boston
AI agents guess, and they guess fast. Linters, type checkers, the compiler, formatters, and a real test bed are what turn those guesses into verified changes. The tighter that loop, the more of the build an agent can safely own.
In Defense of the Visual Cortex
Why prefer graphs to glyphs. A manifesto.
The Cambrian Explosion of Software: Innovations from AI Volume
Explore the Cambrian explosion in life and software, where rapid change leads to new creations and diverse projects shaping the future.
I reran my Denial of Spend test on GPT-6 Astra, Sol and Luna and Claude Fable 5.1, Opus 5.5, Sonnet 5 and Haiku 4.5. None were fooled by lookalike letters, and all of them still paid to read them: up to 5.7x the tokens and up to 3.9x the bill.
I Miss Coding
I write less code by hand, ship more software, and spend much more time deciding what I am willing to own.
A short explanation of the polar dual of a convex polytope using the level sets of its support function.
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…
RAG Over Markdown: An End-to-End Local Pipeline in Pure PHP
RAG without the vendor mystique: chunk, embed, index, retrieve, generate — a complete question-answering pipeline over markdown docs, every stage running locally in PHP.
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 …
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.
Structural duplicate detection cannot tell a pasted copy from a shared idiom. cargo-crap 0.6.0 asks a TypeSafe model which pairs to merge and which to leave alone.
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…
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 …
I built a fire map to find out.
What TypeSafe Got Right With the Jev Launch - Log - nibzard
The Jev launch shows how product decisions help people understand value, try it quickly, and give them a reason to share.
Simon Sapin, 2026-02-15
Cite this blog post
The dumb metaphor I use when I advocate for more than just LLMs
The Dokkōdō Protocol: Musashi’s 21 Rules for Personal Autonomy
Miyamoto Musashi’s classic ink paintings reflect the same radical minimalism and focus present in the Dokkōdō. (Image source: Wikimedia Comm...
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 …
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 …
What's the highest legal FILETIME? Is it safe to use? - The Old New Thing
Being wary of how people use it and how it interacts with other types.
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 …
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 …
std::call_once vs. std::async - The Old New Thing
Simple vs complex machinery.
GoCode
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…
The long way around to screen sharing.
LLM access to models by Anthropic, including the Claude series
DevLife
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 …
We just shipped support for the ugliest part of HTTP: Vary
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 …
An open source multi-tool for exploring and publishing data
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 …
c#Code
DDD
Access large language models from the command-line
S3 Is the Future, S3 Is the Past
I'm hosting an evening event with Jesse Vincent in San Francisco on Wednesday 14th October for people who are building weird and interesting things with and on top of coding …
GoCode
Comparing exception behavior of magic statics, std::call_once, and std::async - The Old New Thing
Do you try again or give up?
Last week TypeSafe AI unveiled Jev, their first example of a new category of model that they are calling “System One models” (I’m with Maggie Appleton, I think “decision models” …
c#Code
Debugging walkthrough: Access violation on nonsense instruction, episode 3 - The Old New Thing
Trying to figure out what the interloper was trying to.
A brief history of Windows scroll bar shortcuts - The Old New Thing
Right-clicking and shift-clicking.
Datasette plugin that authenticates users against GitHub
Python web app to help rewrite your commit messages
LLM web UI for setting keys
A configurable stacking window manager for Wayland, built on River and inspired by FVWM and MWM.
C++ reminder: Function-local static variables are initialized only once, even if it looks like they get initialized multiple times - The Old New Thing
Only on first execution.
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.
dotnetc#Code
Bluesky reply bot checker
LLM plugin for accessing Jev and other TypeSafe AI models
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 …
Explain and validate SQL queries as you type them into Datasette
Magic statics vs. std::call_once - The Old New Thing
They sort of do the same thing, but differently.
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 …
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 …
Personal
After a two year preview, Cloudflare's support for running Python code in their server-side Workers platform is now stable: "Python is now a first-class, fully supported language on the Cloudflare …
gcpCode
GoCode
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, …
The one where I’ve seen enough (for real this time).
dotnetc#Code
c#CodePolly
Every “AI” tool is missing critical features that you would need if you wanted to do real work with them. What would those look like, if they existed?
MCP was always a bad idea?
GoCode
c#Code
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…
If you're just here for the code, you can grab it in this Gist
dotnetc#Code
No, really, you need to pass all unhandled messages to DefWindowProc, part 2 - The Old New Thing
Another example to add to the list.
Yesterday was Grok 4.7 (pelicans) and MiMo v2.6 Flash/Pro (more pelicans). Today Anthropic released Claude Opus 5.5, and around an hour later OpenAI released GPT-6 Sol and GPT-6 Luna. It’s …
When working with Win32 FILETIME, don't forget that you have std::chrono now - The Old New Thing
Let the library do the math for you.