Do Things that Don't Scale July 2013One of the most common types of advice we give at Y Combinator is to do things that don't scale. A lot of would-be founders believe that startups either take off or don't. You build something, make it available, and if you've made a better mous...
The Hidden Drivers of HRM's Performance on ARC-AGI We scored on hidden tasks, ran ablations, and found that performance from the Hierarchical Reasoning Model comes from an unexpected source
Lean Claude Code for Production | Nizar's Blog Many agentic coding demos showcase landing pages, one-off scripts, or greenfield projects. While technically impressive, they often produce single files with little thought for maintainability. Even OpenAI's ChatGPT 5 launch demo followed this pattern. At...
I’m sorry, but the solution to Online Safety Act Age-Verification age-gating & censorship blocks is *not* to call on platforms to “ban the UK”; here I shall respectfully explain why… Some folk, including Thomas Pearson with 115k followers on TikTok, are calling for big global platforms to shun the UK in order to “…make the UK Government lose money, and fast”. In thi…
There Is No Bubble My thoughts on data center buildout and demand for compute, and how that relates to the 'tech bubble'
What I wish I'd done differently with AbstractOps All successful startups are alike; each failed startup is a failure in its own way
Talking to ChatGPT costs 5ml of water, not 500ml Summarizing a whole lot of internet argument about the water usage impact of language models
Interviewing your laptop - Biased and Inefficient There’s increasing interest in (or, at least, coverage of) the idea that surveying large language models could substitute for surveying people. This has obvious advantages: to repurpose a Heinlein quote “it’s cheap, clean, convenient, and free of any poss...
Lessons Learned from Rewriting UltraGraph This post summarizes the lessons learned from rewriting UltraGraph v.0.8
The Art of the Talk I've given dozens of talks over the years, yet I still feel like I have much to learn about public speaking. Preparing for my upcoming talk at WordCamp US has me stopping to reflect on what I already know.
Making Claude Behave After hearing great things about the Claude code agent, I made the switch from Cursor, but becoming efficient was a bit of a struggle. So here are some notes to help other beginners get started with Claude code.
TextKit 2 - the promised land After 4 years with Apple's TextKit 2: The promised 'better' text engine has unstable scrolling, unreliable height estimates, and viewport issues so bad that even Apple's TextEdit suffers from them. Good architecture, but the implementation makes it frustr...
The Electric Fence Stopped Working Years Ago "Don't worry, he won't leave the porch. The electric fence hasn't worked in years, but he still won't go past it."
This is how the Swiss would have done HS2 — Freewheeling HS2 has become a case study in how not to build infrastructure. But what if we’d taken a different path entirely? In this post, I imagine how the Swiss would have done it: starting with the timetable, not the project. It’s a counterfactual, but it’s not...
I'm really happy with my Pinetime I’ve been using my Pinetime with InfiniTime since 2021. It’s not perfect, but it’s definitely great. I’m quite happy with it, and wouldn’t trade it for any other existing watch or smartwatch.
Dependency Hell Is a Real Place Software dependencies is not primarily a technical problem. It’s a problem of people with misaligned interests. Understand this—or go to dependency hell.
On waste — bayindirh Lately, I have been pondering the waste we generate as we live and the ways to reduce it. As I scale down, I fill trash bags with things I can’t use, which bothers me. The items that can be donated and have a second life are strictly excluded from this de...
Expanded file type support for issue attachments [GA] · community · Discussion #169478 Hello Community! 👋 uploading.mp4 You can now upload a wider range of file types to issues, pull requests, discussions, and comments, making it easier to share code, data, logs, and more. New suppor...
Why I Switched to JSON Prompting and Why You Should Too Learn how JSON prompting can transform your interactions with large language models for more accurate and efficient results.
Why Game Devs Don't Merge Files Why game developers can't merge files like regular software teams: the reality of working with terabytes of binary assets, exclusive file locks, Perforce workflows, and the human coordination rituals that emerge when two artists edit the same texture.
Edka Digital | Reduce Kubernetes Complexity | Deploy anything Enterprise Kubernetes Management Platform - Simplify cloud operations and accelerate application delivery on Kubernetes
The beauty of a text only webpage There's something I love about opening a text-only webpage. They're a refuge from the GDPR cookie banners, the trashy ads, the email opt-ins, and the god...
Planning – The Core Reason Why Gameplay Feels Good – Frictional Games In this post I dig into planning, and how it is a fundamental part of what makes a game engaging. Planning affects many aspects of what is so special about games and why we enjoy playing them. This post will go over the reasons behind this, and explains w...
Alex Charlton — Dithering on the GPU Wherein I describe a novel algorithm for ordered dithering based on an arbitrary palette, which may be executed on systems such as – but not limited to – graphics processing units.