13 February 2026

38 links · Friday

Testing Reachy Mini - Hugging Face's Pi powered robot

When I saw Jensen Huang introduce the Reachy Mini at CES, I thought it was a gimmick. His keynote showed this little robot responding to human input, turning its head to look at a TODO list on the wall, sending emails, and turning drawings into architectural r…

Factional Drift: We cluster into factions online

Whenever one of my articles reaches some popularity, I tend not to participate in the discussion. A few weeks back, I told a story about me, my neighbor and an UHF remote. The story took on a life of

The Age of Ensloppification

There’s been a mixture of hype and controversy about this new AI agent thing called Openclaw1. It bills itself as a Personal AI Assistant and, basically, you set it up with a bunch of integrations and let it loose on your life. To me it appears to be like Home…

Finding the Active Voice

How should we go about helping our users with their active voice?

Explain Your Rules

The explainability of the rules your code introduces is a litmus test for design quality. When the explanation is long or complicated, it signals a hack, an unbounded scope, or a rejected elegant design.

Business is the Art of Maintenance

The cost of running a business is the maintenance of the original idea behind the actual start of the company. The value of the company is that continuous maintenance. The cost of starting the business is small, and the cost of having the idea is zero. If the …

The Single Best One-Shot Prompt I've Ever Seen

Why the quality of your input matters more than the quality of your instructions. How single words move trajectories, why CLAUDE.md can't save a bad codebase, and the uncomfortable truth about prompting.

What to do before thinking hard

As a mathematician I spend a lot of my time thinking about stuff. To make the most out of this time, I need to be able to focus. Here is a list of questions that I have found useful to go through w…

Diffusion Models for ARC-AGI: A Retrospective

In early July 2024, I spent about two weeks applying diffusion models to the ARC-AGI abstract reasoning benchmark. It was my first ML project after taking the fastai courses on diffusion. I solved one task, nearly solved a second, and moved on before running a…

Working Yourself Out of a Job

The technology industry's entire purpose is to progress the technology. Anyone who stagnates in one area will eventually work themselves out of a job.

Claude Code Doesn't Make You Better at Multitasking

Engineers are running 8 instances of Claude Code at once. That doesn't mean they are completing work 8x faster. If you must hold the context for 8 agents in your head at once, your expertise as an engineer is wasted. See https://emsh.cat/one-human-one-agent-…

Coding Agents Meet Distributed Reality

AI is about to write most of the code in the world. Most of the code in the world participates in a distributed system. And distributed code is where our worst…

How to Lie with Charts | Hands-On Data Visualization

Tell your story and show it with data, using free and easy-to-learn tools on the web. This introductory book teaches you how to design interactive charts and customized maps for your website, beginning with easy drag-and-drop tools, such as Google Sheets, Data…

The Last Piece of Software

A parable about a builder, the closing of gaps, and the strange grief of getting everything you wanted.

Scaling Culture Without Dilution

How culture actually scales in distributed teams. Why systems shape behavior, goals define incentives, and bonding aligns judgment under pressure.

Reflections on using Claude Code

This is the follow-up to my post from two weeks ago on observations using Claude Code  (Opus 4.5 to start, 4.6 after it released) to rebuild...

One With The Environment

We are all products of our environments, but to what extent exactly? A friend told me he's found it more effective to change his surroundings rather than trying to will himself to change from the inside out. In the Free Energy Principle, Professor Karl Frist…

The Redundancy Paradox

Hardware usually breaks because of physics. Software breaks because of math and misunderstanding

What won't change - Praful

I, like many others in the great city of San Francisco, suffer from AI anxiety. I wake up pondering the meaning of work as more jobs are automated, what skills remain important in a world where knowledge work is trivialized, how best to run a swarm of coding a…