1 May 2026

35 links · Friday

AI Water Use Distractions and Lessons for California - California WaterBlog

By Jay Lund . . . Artificial intelligence (AI) will affect many economic and natural resource sectors as these new technologies develop and mature. We are in the early years of this process. Like most new things, AI has become an object of small and great hope…

Uber Spends Full 2026 AI Budget in 4 Months

Uber burned its entire 2026 AI budget on Claude Code and Cursor in just 4 months. Engineers' API costs ranged from $500 to $2,000.

SBC Clusters are a terrible value, but they're fun anyway

Pictured above is the new DeskPi Super4C installed in an 8U mini rack. The Super4C is a 4-node Raspberry Pi CM5 cluster board that solves two pain points I had with the older Super6C. I was testing this board around the same time I helped kick off the SBCC 202…

Proxies all the way down.

A couple of days ago, exe.dev raised a lot of money1. I decided to poke around with it a little, and signed up. Their trial is 7 days long, so despite having no actual plans, I just started doing stuff. In doing so, I noticed a few interesting things that I th…

The Bombadil Terminal Experiment

Last week at Bug Bash 2026, I had a bunch of interesting discussions about testing non-web interfaces with Bombadil, our new property-based testing framework for user interfaces. One direction that I already wanted to explore is terminal user interfaces (TUIs)…

San Francisco streets with confusingly similar names

A list and history of San Francisco's many humorously similar street names, which are liable to confuse both locals and out-of-towners.

Sammy's Blog

I finished reading On the Edge last week, and it was bad. Not that I don't respect Nate Silver. I respect him a lot. So when his seminal text on gambling and risk taking was a rambling mess, I was suprised and disappointed. Nevertheless, a completionist at hea…

Dynamic Software

For fifty years, software has been static. Then 2024 happened. The control flow came alive and a new category of software was born.

Does Prop 13 explain California’s relatively lower birth rates?

California’s total fertility rate dropped from 17th to 43rd in the country since 2008. It is easy to see: home prices predict birth rates with striking accuracy — and Prop 13 is what made California’s housing costs a political choice, not just a market outcome…

Agentic Coding is Burning Me Out

The familiar pacing of software development has been completely compressed by agentic coding because you no longer have those routine stretches of just wiring things together to catch your breath. Writing code by hand, or trad coding as Twitter likes to call i…