10 June 2026

51 links · Wednesday

Get Rid of It

'Delete any part or process you can. You may have to add them back later. In fact, if you do not end up adding back at least 10% of them, then you didn't delete enough.'

A Mechanical Agentic Taxonomy

Anthropomorphic metaphors have their place in how we talk about agentic systems. Treating an agent like a persona or a subagent like a teammate can speed up early design conversations. Even the word skill frames a collection of conditionally loaded text files …

The Boot Chain of a RISC-V Board: From Silicon to Ubuntu 26.04

When you press the power button on the SpacemiT K3 Pico-ITX, Ubuntu 26.04 appears on the serial console about 30 seconds later. Between those two events, five distinct software layers run in sequence, each one handing off to the next. Understanding what each l…

Digesting a codebase before a model reads it

Across every organisation I’ve worked in, documentation is either missing or, once written, out of date. So, we’ve stopped treating it as something people maintain and made agents regenerate it on every code change.

Please, use a link!

This is a rant. It didn't start today, but I think I've reached the end of the line. The straw that broke the camel's back, so to say. I used an internal tool for the first time. I logged in and navig

What if Mario had a gun

Mario 64 and Mario Odyssey are one of my favorite videogames. Mario Sunshine could be up there as well but my right joycon is broken and there’s a point in the game where I have to look at the sun but can’t enter first person camera mode. There’s something a…

Why LLMs (still) lack taste

Frontier LLMs are really smart, and they’re becoming particularly good at software development. It feels like every week there’s a new model release that achieves SOTA scores on a handful of benchmarks. I use LLMs to build software every day, and they’re incre…

Adet

At the bottom of sites you'll usually find about pages. Everybody knows what a faq is, if you care to read it. Another thing some might care to read is the established traditions of the site or community. Instead of learning through experience, observation,…

Active recall

Improving memory though writing

Our funding announcement - PgDog

PgDog is a connection pooler, load balancer, and sharding proxy for PostgreSQL. Scale Postgres horizontally without rewriting your application.

Sami Lehtinen - Fastsync: How I Doubled rsync's Speed

Writing fastsync: Why is copying files still so slow, and how I doubled rsync’s speed I wrote a tool called fastsync when I finally got too frustrated with rsync’s poor local copying performance. This post goes through the making of the tool, the root cause I …

Relocatable Derivations

The earlier post on guix-transfer highlighted how we can use the tool to transfer derivations from /gnu/store to /nix/store.

Don't Fuck With My .bashrc

Everyone, to the terminal! Drop that webUI, you’re so 2024, use the terminal brah! I’m a geek! I hack stuff, I use the terminal!

Every GPS satellite is a numbers station

Research by Steven Murdoch of UCL suggests that GPS Subframe 4, Page 17 may have served as an OTAD-related encrypted broadcast channel for nearly two decades.

On Atoms and Knowledge

A note to my daughter about physics, and mostly about how to learn: find the small truths that let you rebuild everything else.

I miss the climb

Steve Jobs once described the computer as a bicycle for the mind. I have always loved that metaphor because it captures what computers used to feel like t...

Now what?

Here’s an impressive Show HN project: a comprehensive, reverse-engineered, LLM-written technical documentation of how a calculator’s operating system works. What a resource!

Skynet: Towards Synthetic Neurobiology

The original idea was a joke. I was looking at LLM loops and thinking about how they map onto Elixir’s actor model — GenServers that receive messages, process them, maybe spawn new processes. The jump from “LLM reasoning step” to “GenServer handling a message”…

Sovereign

The keyword in politics these days is ‘sovereign’. What few will admit is that it is effectively the adoption of the American strategy: Make America Great Again. In other words, reindustrialization of key sectors of the economy. The UK used to be a computing c…

The Push to Solo Work

TL;DR: Some people seem to miss that collaborative tools lose their value when used by one person.