26 May 2026

48 links · Tuesday

Life in My Twenties

Something I’ve been reflecting on a lot lately is my life in New York City and how much it has changed over the years. I was sitting in Washington Square Park a couple of weeks ago with a friend and it brought back memories of when I used to go the…

Every token, everywhere, all at once — idlemachines

Every model that turns a variable-length collection of vectors into one vector is making a choice about what to throw away. Pooling methods are a spectrum, and frontier embedding models live at specific points on it.

Visibility Into the Black Box

I ship production code through an AI pipeline. Not to a toy project — to a ten-year-old Rails monolith that serves real users, reviewed by teammates who genuinely care about craft. They love OOP. They spot code smells three abstractions deep. They'll tell you …

Made (by humans) in California

Very recently, I was hunting for a new TV show and clicked on Apple TV, drawn in by the buzz surrounding Margo Has Money Troubles. I launched the first episode and got hooked by the new intro logo. It caught my eye because it felt weirdly alive. There was a sp…

The Theoretical Upper Limit of the US Stock Market

An analysis of the macroeconomic bounds, equity risk premiums, and structural constraints defining the maximum theoretical valuation of American equities.

Being A 1.5-10x Developer

Good code begets good results, so let's make a case for using coding agents to write better code, rather than just more code.

The Misuse of Memory — Krezl

Memory is a recording of threat. This is its origin and its purpose. The organism that remembered where the predator hunted survived. The one that did not was eaten.

Stop doing easy things

In 2011 Rich Hickey in his seminal talk "Simple made easy" defined the distinction between Easy and Simple. Easy is something that is approachable, can be do...

Tokenization Is the Bottleneck You’re Not Measuring

You’ve optimized your GPU serving stack. You’ve tuned vLLM’s batch size, configured PagedAttention, maybe even set up prefix-aware routing for KV cache locality. Your P99 looks good. Your throughput is climbing. And somewhere in your proxy layer, every single …

It’s hot, close the windows

Seriously, close the windows*. Unless your house is hotter than outside, all you are going to achieve is a hotter house.

Ad Infinitum · Matthias Ott

Web design engineer, UX designer, teacher, and speaker – helping teams build websites and digital products with a focus on CSS, accessibility, and performance.

The Saboteur's Guide to Software Projects

One of the funniest reads for large orgs is the declassified "Simple Sabotage Field Manual" (1944): the CIA (then OSS) guidelines for the Resistance on underhandedly destroying productivity. A few years back, I took a sharpie and highlighted for a friendly cli…

The Ask

Coffee in hand, I sit down in the Cave. Any Tuesday during the work week, a sip, and I parse the calendar. 1:1 — he's fine. Status meeting — listen. Staff me

Don't fear the Dark Factory

A few months ago our boss challenged us to adopt the Dark Factory pattern for agentic software development. Inspired by the work of Justi...

PEEK: Give Your Agent an Orientation Cache

We introduce PEEK, a system that caches reusable orientation knowledge about a recurring external context as a small, prompt-resident context map.

Fully in-browser container builds

Containers are fun. The ecosystem is incredibly open, with the internals right there for anyone to explore. Once you wrap your head around the specifications, you unlock the power to build custom tools and may even discover unexpected use cases1. Speaking of “…

Monads are Easy

Monads don't have to be mysterious. Using a book warehouse analogy, this post explains what a monad is, what flatMap does, and how to spot one in the wild.

Amber Alert with Spam URL?

I received an amber alert, but the link seems to redirect to a spam page. Important services need to be fault tolerant. The shorted link needs to be tested.

Blog - Airistotle

Before recently, tech debt was the main form of time plague that tormented development projects. The ever-tempting sacrifice of a functional, but imperfect, “temporary” implementation to the dark lord in exchange for some free time now; a simple equation that …

What Are Atoms Made Of?

This post starts with the the slides of an elementary talk I gave at Sloans Bar and Grill, in Glasgow, as part of a wonderful series called A Pint of Science. At the end I include some fascinating …