18 April 2026

Why Japan has such good railways - Works in Progress Magazine

Japan's railways are the finest in the world. Other countries can copy its formula.

Sorry, Mary

[Note to reader: This is a sequel to my widely-circulated 2021 essay “The Great Solar Bleed-Out Scam”; for the sake of readers who have forgotten or never read that earlier essay, I include it here…

State of Kdenlive - 2026

In 2025, the Kdenlive team continued grinding to push the project forward through steady development, collaboration, and community support. Over the past year we’ve found a nice balance between adding new features, bug fixing, polishing the user interface, and…

The Listener

Private Knowledge

Building a Claude Code Skill Plugin from Scratch | Personal blog at franchb.com

A practical guide to building, structuring, versioning, and securing Claude Code skill plugins — lessons from creating fp-go-skill.

Alex L. Zhang | The Mismanaged Geniuses Hypothesis

We propose the mismanaged geniuses hypothesis, which posits that existing frontier language models are severely underutilized due to sub-optimal use of individual language model calls.

Tokenomics - Anthropic Token Cost Calculator

Compare how the same transcript is counted for requests to Anthropic Opus 4.6 versus Anthropic Opus 4.7

Just let me compute in peace

Computing can be so noisy these days

Audio transcription is worse in 2026 than it was in 2016

I remember in 2016 I could dictate whole novels with Dragon NaturallySpeaking, which at that time worked on my Mac. They no longer supp...

Fire Framework

🔥 The FIRE Framework: One Mental Model to Answer 80% of Backend Interview Questions

Claude knows who you are

Claude Opus 4.7 is solidly superhuman at stylometric identification of authors.

DOOM runs in ChatGPT and Claude / Blog

How I built a playable DOOM MCP app that runs inline in compatible AI clients and falls back to a browser launch URL.

The Blast Radius Problem: Running Your Coding Agent in YOLO Mode

Running your coding agent in bypass mode on your laptop is the mistake. A VM with Tailscale and default-deny egress is how you shrink the blast radius.

SQLite prefixes its temp files with `etilqs_` - blag

Here’s some wild lore inside SQLite’s source code explaining why temp files start with etilqs_

Why LLMs Aren't Giving You the Result You Expect | Why I Prefer Claude Code Today

Every week somebody tells me 'I canceled my Claude plan, it just doesn't perform as well as GPT for me.' I've got 500+ hours in Claude Code and Codex, 400k lines generated, and both deliver. The difference isn't the model. It's how people are talking to i…

Running Your Own AS: Direct Hetzner Peering, a Fourth Edge, and Bringing the Home LAN into the Fabric

Part 4 of the AS201379 journey: adding a fourth FreeBSD edge router at iFog with FogIXP peering, establishing direct BGP sessions with Hetzner, bringing the home network into the AS via an iBGP-spe...

Caching Strategies from Scratch · Vaibhav Acharya, engineer.

LRU, LFU, TTL, write-through, write-back, and cache stampedes explained with interactive demos

HTTP desync in Discord's media proxy: Spying on a whole platform

In 2022, I came across a quirky behavior on media.discordapp.net when I miskeyed a space character into an attachment link: a 502 bad gateway. After some fiddling I realized that this was caused by a HTTP injection bug within the media proxy’s request to the u…

Teaching a Model to Code | Rig

Part 1 of our How We Built Rig series - building a data pipeline to teach a model to act like a real developer.

Closed Source is a Business Decision, not Security. | Thoughts by Javier

Cal.com claims that moving to closed source is a security decision. It is not.

Fonts I Love

My go-to font stack for everything I do, from my website to my projects.

Against big tech credentialism - alex wennerberg

Ryan Peterman is a YouTube interviewer who speaks with senior employees at big tech companies. On the one hand, it is incredible how accessible high-income professionals at highly competitive organizations are, and how open they are willing to speak about thei…

Many anti-AI arguments are conservative arguments

Most anti-AI rhetoric is left-wing coded. Popular criticisms of AI describe it as a tool of techno-fascism, or appeal to predominantly left-wing concerns like carbon emissions, democracy, or police brutality. Anti-AI sentiment is surprisingly bipartisan, but t…

We Are All Playing Politics at Work

Politics is any discussion where the truth doesn't steer the course of action. Most of us like to think we are above it. We believe that in our daily jobs, we are rational actors exchanging facts. We

The Half of CI We Forgot to Automate

Why go/no-go decisions still run on faith in contracts, and the gap between pipelines that prove consistency and pipelines that produce evidence.

Today I shipped 20 apps and a screensaver  ⌘I  Get Info

Shipping software is hard. My secret to doing it successfully is a combination of careful scoping, with strict avoidance of feature creep. But even then, it’...

Optionality Curse · KJ

A corner of the internet where I think in public.

I built my dream bug tracking software in a week. / Mark Jardine

Mark Jardine is a designer and artist living in Allen, Texas.

Pop!OS Linux: Creating a bootable Backup USB with Encryption

For my Pop!OS Linux workstation, I wanted to have a complete backup on an USB drive. Of course, it needs to be encrypted, in case the USB drive gets lots. And to allow me to quickly resume working in the case of an emergency, I wanted the USB backup to be boot…

Europa Missions

The Linux Slayers: Office, Photoshop, and AutoCAD

After having a great time with Linux as my daily driver for 3 years, I was wondering what keeps people stuck on Windows even though, by now, there are so many very outspoken critics of Windows 11.

GIS Analytics Cost Comparison

Cost comparison: BigQuery, Snowflake, Wherobots, Cloud SQL PostGIS, and Hetzner PostGIS on the same Overture Maps workload.

Using a USB switch as a full KVM

I finally got a monitor that supports DDC/CI, so now I can easily switch my monitor and full peripheral set with 1 button!

Composing a Search Engine

How we built Canon, a search pipeline orchestrator for full control over our search engine as it scales in complexity.