It Depends
That's the answer I would always get from the lead developer on my team, many years ago. I wanted clear, concise answers from someone with experience, yet he never said "Yes" or "No." It was always "I
Global Warming has Accelerated Significantly
Recent record-hot years have caused a discussion whether global warming has accelerated, but previous analysis found that acceleration has not yet reached a 95% confidence level given the natural temperature variability. Here we account for the influence of…
Hardening Firefox with Anthropic’s Red Team | The Mozilla Blog
For more than two decades, Firefox has been one of the most scrutinized and security-hardened codebases on the web. Open source means our code is visible,
After seeing Oliver Ettlin's 39C3 presentation Excuse me, what precise time is It?, I wanted to replicate the PTP (Precision Time Protocol) clock he used live to demonstrate PTP clock sync: I pinged him on LinkedIn inquiring about the build (I wasn't the only …
I don't know if my job will still exist in ten years
In 2021, being a good software engineer felt great. The world was full of software, with more companies arriving every year who needed to employ engineers to write their code and run their systems. I knew I was good at it, and I knew I could keep doing it for …
Liberty has costs, but it's worth it.
Where things stand with the Department of War
A statement from Dario Amodei
pg_plan_advice: Plan Stability and User Planner Control for PostgreSQL?
I'm proposing a very ambitious patch set for PostgreSQL 19. Only time will tell whether it ends up in the release, but I can't resist using ...
eLife Fallout
When a prestigious journal scrapped accept-reject decisions on submitted papers, some scientists rebelled, and the editor-in-chief was fired.
We treat early agreement on a problem as stability. But is it?
Self-evolving software is the future | errgent
Software should be self-healing, self-improving and self-evolving. It's the end of the human code review.
I outsourced my own role in a simulation I was building — and it worked better without me. That made me wonder what's left for humans when intelligence is no longer our edge.
An exploration of Claude Code in the macOS app dev world. Mostly me, watching Claude write macOS apps from scratch, learn a programming language it never heard of, reverse engineer a window manager and make me question the future and life in general.
Published 2025-3-5
BM25
There is a particular kind of respect reserved in engineering for the algorithm that outlives its era. BM25 is one of them. BM25 was born out of information retrieval research in the 1970s and 1980s, polished over decades, and eventually adopted as the default…
How my application programmer instincts failed when debugging assembler
I've had a smidge of extra time with my recent unemployment, so to stay sharp and learn a few new things I followed Seiya Nuta's guide to building an Operating System in 1,000 Lines.
AI learned from decades of human engineering. Now the industry is eliminating the developers who created that knowledge. What happens when the source runs dry?
Modern web search isn’t magic; it’s a massive engineering feat. Crawlers scour billions of pages, hybrid indexes organise that data, query…
The End of the Crawlable Web : For most of the modern internet, there was an implicit contract between websites and search engines. Websites made their content accessible. Search engines indexed it. And in return, search engines sent users back to the original…
Future shock – Ceejbot's notes
Software development in the age of gen AI
I Wail, For My Tailscale Fails-- How My Packets Got Dropped Beyond the Pale
How My Packets Got Dropped Beyond the Pale