2 January 2026

39 links · Friday

We Should Call Them Macroservices

I love the idea of microservices. When there's a problem on your website, you don't need to fix and redeploy your entire codebase. If the issue only affects your authentication service, you can deploy

Let users zoom in on mobile devices

This is a bit of a rant. Maybe my eyes are not as good as they used to be. When I read an article that has pictures on them, I like to zoom in to see the details. You might think this makes no sense,

The Natural Path to Gamblification

I had a 383-day streak on Duolingo. Three hundred and eighty-three days of that green owl peeking through my notifications, reminding me that my streak was in danger. I wrote about how I never actuall

All AI Videos Are Harmful

When OpenAI released the first version of Sora, I was excited. For years, I'd had this short story sitting on my hard drive, something I'd written long ago and always dreamed of bringing to life as a

Poor Man's Productivity Trick

Have you ever joined a large organization? One with a quarter million employees? Their process is fascinating. You receive hundreds of emails to set up different software. You get a machine mailed to

Do I Leave the Laptop at the Office?

A few years back, I worked at an AI startup as the first hired engineer. All of us could fit in a four-space cubicle, sharing an office with multiple startups. As you can imagine, when you're trying t

Paying for the rides I took 8 years ago

What does it mean when we say that investors are subsidizing the price of a service? We often hear that ChatGPT is not profitable, despite some users paying $20 a month, or others up to $200 a month.

Is Blogging Dead?

When I started 2025, I set myself a simple challenge: write consistently and see if I could reclaim some of the audience this blog once had. In 2024, I had published just 4 posts and had only a handfu

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JSON formatter that produces highly readable but fairly compact output. - j-brooke/FracturedJson

Human papillomavirus prevalence in first, second and third cervical cell samples from women HPV-vaccinated as girls, Denmark, 2017 to 2024: data from the Trial23 cohort study

BACKGROUND Danish women vaccinated with the 4-valent human papillomavirus (HPV) vaccine (HPV types: 6/11/16/18) at age 14 in 2008 reached screening age in 2017, allowing assessment of long-term effects on prevalence, persistence and incidence of HPV infections…

Can Bundler Be as Fast as uv?

At RailsWorld earlier this year, I got nerd sniped by someone. They asked “why can’t Bundler be as fast as uv?” Immediately my inner voice said “YA, WHY CAN’T IT BE AS FAST AS UV????” My inner voice likes to shout at me, especially when someone asks a question…

2025 letter | Dan Wang

Corgis, compute, Cold War; Ecclesiastes; ties; Stendhal; humor; Pascal's Wager; deep infrastructure; Germanic obedience; Texas State Fair

Static Protocols in Python: Behaviour Over Inheritance

The first time I read about protocols was in the book "Fluent Python" by Luciano Ramalho. This book goes deep. Deeper than I knew Python at that time. If you hadn't heard of Protocols before, I'll give you a short introduction. Protocols have something to do …

Notes on Taiwan

Semiconductors, sunsets and hot springs

The Package Merge Algorithm

This was adapted from a short twitter thread on the Package Merge algorithm I had written, and how it can be applied to create length-limited huffman codes Problem Statement Say you’re a broke coin collector.

The Year That Kicked My Ass • furbo.org

January started as normal as can be expected when malicious grifters start making basic decency a radical idea. It turns out the anxiety associated with these political events would be the least of my problems throughout the year. It felt great to finish up a …

The Case for Blogging in the Ruins

In 1751, Denis Diderot began publishing his Encyclopédie, a project that would eventually span 28 volumes and take more than two decades to complete. The French government banned it twice. The Catholic Church condemned it, Diderot's collaborators abandoned him…

Healthy Tension | Sanjay Nair

Software engineering leader based in Atlanta, Georgia, sharing insights on leadership, technology, and software development.

What Are Context Graphs, Really?

The conversation around context graphs has exploded, but the term itself has become a Rorschach test. This is not about adding memory to your agent—it's abou...