14 May 2026

47 links · Thursday

Four tech waves. Six companies. Here’s what I’m building next.

I’ve been lucky. Lucky to be building during four major technology shifts: the internet, SaaS/web services, mobile/social, and now AI, and to have learned something useful from each one. Not by being the smartest person in the room, but by being around others …

Working Hard | Joy of Reading

Before podcasts were a thing, Bill Simmons would trade e-mails with somebody successful for his piece on ESPN called "The Curious Guy". I ran into this excha...

The End of Claude Code Automation

Starting June 15, Anthropic is moving automated Claude Code usage out of the normal subscription bucket. usage will now count against a separate monthly API-style credit that is much smaller than what…

Noam Hurwitz

Modern chips are produced in part through lithography: light is projected through a mask onto photosensitive material coating silicon to pattern transistors, contacts, vias, interconnects, and other structures. As Moore’s Law pushes on and chips continue to pa…

Naturally Occurring Quasicrystals

I love quasicrystals—like crystals, but with patterns that never repeat, like Penrose tiles. But they’ve very rare in nature. They’re created only by the most exotic and violent e…

Small Model Forensics

What ~2,000 timed API calls reveal about how closed-weight model providers scale inference, or fail to, in 2026.

God Damn AI is making me dumb

It's so god damn tempting to use AI to write. Whether it is articles, code, or documents. I feel like using AI is diminishing my ability to write myself. ...

Introducing Claude for Small Business

We're launching Claude for Small Business, a package of connectors and ready-to-run workflows that put Claude inside the tools small businesses use every day.

How Quickly do Browsers Implement Features?

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I Don't Even Know What To Build Anymore - Vance Lucas

UIs with buttons and charts are not cool anymore. All that matters is AI agents now. APIs, CLIs and MCPs. It's all about the data, bro. Where is your MCP? Or so the discourse goes...

The harness that lied — Are You There?

On the verdict-before-evidence pattern in security research — and how I caught my own PoC confirming itself regardless of the facts.

You need to calm down

AI isn’t changing the fundamentals of building software. It’s changing the speed. Don’t confuse the two.

How LLMs Really Work

If you have used ChatGPT, Gemini, or Claude, you have already formed an intuition about what these systems do. You type something in, and text comes back that feels coherent, knowledgeable, and sometimes eerily human. But the machinery underneath is simultaneo…

I Read OpenSSL for Fun and Found a Nonce Leak

I was poking around the OpenSSL source code recently. Not really hunting for anything specific (one of the most heavily audited codebases), just curious about how the new post-quantum crypto stuff was wired up in version 4.0.0. I went in expecting to find noth…

Was my $48K GPU server worth it?

In 2024 I quit my FAANG job to become an independent researcher. To do this I needed GPUs, so I built “grumbl”, a 6x 6000 Ada GPU server. This blog describes the build, some of the issu…

On Planet Quantos, Programmers Flee

An interactive story about porting a classical rank-select function to a reversible (quantum-oracle-style) form. Step through five C implementations, each adding one constraint from the world of unitary computation.

Prayer-Driven Development

The term “Prayer-Driven Development” was coined by Davor Pavleković for deployments where hope is your only strategy. That was before AI agents made it an industry standard. Everyone Did Their Part. Nobody Saw the Whole. You’ve been here. The prompt that needs…

Taking control of the SQLite WAL – Philip O'Toole

rqlite is a lightweight, open-source, fault-tolerant relational database built on SQLite and Raft. Version 10 is out now. rqlite has a particular relationship with the SQLite Write-Ahead Log (WAL). SQLite, left to itself, manages its own WAL: it checkpoints wh…