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,
Why my redirect rules from 2013 still work and yours don't Here is something that makes me proud of my blog. The redirect rule I wrote for my very first article 12 years ago still works! This blog was an experiment. When I designed it, my intention was to try
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
We have all we need to make mass surveillance a reality I was watching a movie when I got a random notification from Google Maps on my phone. I never get notifications from this app unless I'm doing turn-by-turn navigation. This one was titled "Timeline,"
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
TIL: Parental controls aren't for parents I found a stranger texting my 12-year-old on a 'kid-safe' Gabb phone. Parental controls are broken.
Public Domain Day 2026 in Literature - Blog Read about the new ebooks Standard Ebooks is releasing for Public Domain Day 2026!
10 years of personal finances in plain text files I've been tracking my finances using Beancount in plain text files for 10 years. Here are the numbers, the workflow, and why I believe plaintext accounting will outlive any app.
Home 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 infec...
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 que...
I’m a developer for a major food delivery app. The 'Priority Fee' and 'Driver Benefit Fee' go 100% to the company. The driver sees $0 of it. I’m posting this from a library Wi-Fi on a burner laptop because I am technically under a massive NDA. I don’t care anymore. I put in my two...
2025 letter | Dan Wang Corgis, compute, Cold War; Ecclesiastes; ties; Stendhal; humor; Pascal's Wager; deep infrastructure; Germanic obedience; Texas State Fair
TOMLDecoder Is Now Faster Than C (Thanks to AI) Recently, I gave my TOML library written in Swift an 800% speed boost. The natural question after that is: how much faster can I push it?
Rebalance Your Backpack — Perpetual Rewiring Hold a full backpack with your hands close to your chest, then with arms fully extended away. It feels heavier, right?
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 t...
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.
2zuz - Find Products at the Best Price A product search engine that puts you first. Showing only relevant results.
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 ...
A Website To End All Websites | Henry From Online How to win the war for the soul of the internet, and build the Web We Want.
Predictions Scorecard, 2026 January 01 – Rodney Brooks Nothing is ever as good as it first seems and nothing is ever as bad as it first seems.
Generating Human Faces with Variational Autoencoders In this post, we will explore variational autoencoders (VAE). We will go over the concepts needed to understand them, such as the KL-divergence and the r...
I Thought 2025 Was Cloudy. 26 Years of Data Proved Me Wrong Missing the sun in 2025? I felt the same way. Then I analyzed 227,000 hours of data and discovered my brain had been lying to me all along.
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 abandone...
systemd Portable Services Are Pretty Good | Rishi Kulkarni | Statistics & Machine Learning How systemd portable services provide version-controlled deployment, atomic updates, and socket activation for a side project—without containers or orchestrators.
Intelligence is not just about task completion Andrew Marblemarble.onlandrew@willows.aiJanuary 1, 2026
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...
Python Numbers Every Programmer Should Know A cheat sheet of real-world timing and memory numbers to guide performance-sensitive decisions.
