Converting ISO Country Codes to Flag Emojis Did you know that there's a simple formula you can use to convert from an ISO two-letter country code to the emoji of the flag of that country. I've made an interactive thingy to demonstrate it, and shared some other fun things I've learned while playing ...
Typeface Specimens of Houston Mono™ Neil Panchal, the creator of soon-to-released Typeface Houston Mono™, recently sent me a complimentary set of the TX-24 Houston Mono typeface specimens. Some of you know this probably, but U.S Graphics is also the company that created the famous Berkeley ...
From Chat Completions to an Agents API – Notes by Dennis Yurkevich A note on the shift from chat completions to agents that return finished work, and what that means for builders outside frontier labs.
Simple systems are the best systems When it comes to systems design, John Gall knew his stuff. He even has a LAW1 about it: A complex system that works is invariably found to have evolved from a simple system that worked. A complex system designed from scratch never works and cannot be pat...
Colonies on Mars require more than engineering Elon Musk talks about a city on Mars the way a developer talks about a new subdivision outside Phoenix. The engineering problems are hard, but they are the kind of hard we know how to attack: get there cheaply, make propellant on site, close the life-supp...
Why I'm building a SaaS company during the SaaSpocalypse. When building is cheap, all that remains is focus, taste, and conviction.
The Agentic Mesh: Cognitive Automation at Scale Convictions for designing tomorrow’s agentic systems — an agent mesh system capable of delivering value at scale, borrowing principles from the data mesh.
Encrypted Client Hello: A Big Tech Privacy Fix Much of the traffic on the web is now encrypted thanks to SSL/TLS (https). This prevents attackers from seeing the contents of your traffic. But they can still see which domains you are connecting to, and that might be a problem still.
Snapshot-based CMEK Bypass: Cross-Project Disk Replication This follow-up demonstrates a snapshot-based bypass that complements the disk-cloning attack described earlier.
Scientists found that the creatine supplement millions take for muscle gains is quietly raising brain energy levels and slowing early Alzheimer's cognitive decline by 30% - thesciverse Tens of millions of people take creatine every day for their muscles. A comprehensive review and a landmark clinical trial published in 2025 and 2026 have now documented what the same supplement is quietly doing to their brains. Creatine crosses the blood...
Cloudflare Turnstile requiring fingerprintable WebGL Since about a week, Cloudflare Turnstile (their "Verify you're human" device verification) has been looping indefinitely in my webkit-gtk based browser. Preventing access to quite few websites (previously, but it even went worse lately). Turns out i...
the solution might be cancelling my AI subscription I am trying to think of a list of all the wonderful things I've built with AI:
The Website Specification A platform-agnostic, full specification of the technical features a good website should have. Built in the open under an MIT licence.
AV2 Specification AV2 is the next-generation video coding specification from the Alliance for Open Media (AOMedia). Building on the foundation of AV1, AV2 is engineered to provide superior compression efficiency, enabling high-quality video delivery at significantly lower ...
Build agents, not pipelines There are only two ways to use LLMs in a computer program: as part of a pipeline, or as an agent. In other words, either you express the control flow of the program in code, or you give a LLM tools and allow it to manage the control flow itself1.
Accenture to Acquire Ookla to Strengthen Network Intelligence and Experience with Data and AI For Enterprises Accenture has entered into an agreement to acquire Ookla, a global leader in network intelligence, competitive benchmarking and customer experience analytics.
Domain Expertise Has Always Been the Real Moat Personal website for Aaron Brethorst - Seattleite, technology leader, photographer, transit enthusiast, erstwhile non-runner.
On first looking into JAX Some (well, quite a lot of) initial thoughts about JAX, having spent a short time playing with it.
Corporations are tracking your emotions and there's nothing you can do about it | Tony Rice Corporations are tracking your emotions and there's nothing you can do about it
Webcam Eye Contact - jmercouris How can we make eye contact over the web? When collaborating with individuals across the globe, we lose a part of our humanity. We cease to be people and become pictures on a screen. To rehumanize our interactions, we can take several steps. One approach ...
Why the Next Datacenter Should Be Sized for a Village, Not a City - Nicola Bortignon Small AI datacenters co-located with energy communities can act as controllable anchor loads, absorbing surplus renewable energy, delivering waste heat, and turning curtailed electricity into trained models.
My Remaining Use for Pen and Paper - I care about practicality. I read books on an iPad and take notes on my laptop; in general, if I can avoid having another thing by replacing it with a digital copy, I’ll use it digitally. For many of their historical uses, pen & paper just aren’t practica...
Short-lived certificates: a nuisance or an automation opportunity? - kowalski7cc How the policy change of certification authorities can push IT towards better HTTPS certificate management
The Orchestration Tax Starting more agents is easy now. However, more agents running doesn't mean more of you available - your cognitive bandwidth doesn't parallelize. All the jud...
Same prompt. Different teammate. | AI Agents That Work A quick field note on Opus 4.8, Claude Code and what changed when it started connecting project context I did not spell out.
