20 July 2026

40 links · Monday

Engineering management after the cost of code collapsed

I have been a director of engineering for a bit over three years now, and I still hear and read what I call the "old rules" repeated over and over: a director should not spend time coding, good work takes time, protect the team from the business, get consensus…

An ode to the old ways

When I was a kid in middle school (Class VI in the Indian education system), I can vividly remember learning about the “Five Generations of Computer”. The first few generations were about vacuum tubes and transistors, then came the integrated circuit. The curr…

CANBUS – Networking so simple, even YOU can understand it!

Dave explains the CAN BUS all the way down to how the signaling works over the wires, so you can understand the entire process! Check out an episode of ShopTalk on Dave's Attic where we answer the best user questions! https://youtu.be/ZUvDO2g5Y1s Follow me …

Anatomy of a Room

How we create rooms for The Incident at Galley House, from floorplans to final renders.

Write with maximum effort

The effort taken to write something should be about the effort to read it.

My first winter in Boston · xydac

Ten years ago I landed in Boston from India in the middle of winter, knowing almost no one. A first blizzard, empty grocery shelves, learning a city that moves around the Patriots and the Celtics and the Red Sox, a landlady who scammed me out of my deposit — a…

How to piss off your Nix friends

Warning If you are pissed off reading this blog post, I guess, mission accomplished ? Try not to take life too seriously. Unfortunately, there’s a lot worse things in life than my opinions on Nix.

I’m done with Mullvad - moonwriting

Dear reader, For a long time, Mullvad VPN stood as the embodiment of a perfect privacy-focused company. From innovative features and data minimization to...

Taking OCaml and Eio for a spin

My first blog post on this website was about Haskell. I've always been interested in functional programming but the complexity of Haskell never seemed worth.

What Bad Bases Are Good For

Base two numerals can be awkward to compute with, and Roman numerals are even more awkward. But awkward is not the same as bad. Today I’ll tell you about a truly awful numeral system—possibly the v…

Expensive Is Just a Brand Now

You've probably heard this one before. It might have come from a parent, a teacher, or a friend who bought an expensive item and wanted to justify it. It goes something like this:

Kimi K3, Qwen 3.8, and Anthropic's (potential) Unravelling

Kimi K3 and Qwen 3.8 prove open models can reach the frontier. Why the economics of frontier labs favor infrastructure owners — and why Anthropic's model-only position risks unravelling.

The value chain cascade

Why the most important phase of a technology begins the moment it stops improving.

Library of Babel

Walk through a browser-based homage to Borges's impossible library.

Who You Gonna Call

Generative AI makes software quality mistakes that experts for decades have known to avoid.

Jelly UI — Soft Web Components

Jelly UI is a dependency-free Web Components library for tactile product interfaces: soft-body physics, real form controls, dark mode, RTL and WCAG AA accessibility.

Through the Thick of It: Punching Summer Grass Mats for Bass

By July, the grass tops out, mats over, and most anglers give up on it. Underneath that canopy is the best bass habitat on the lake — shade, cooler water, oxygen, and food. Here's the science of why they're under there, and how a heavy tungsten Texas rig or fl…

American AI is locked down and proprietary. It's losing.

China's open-weights AI strategy is winning: its companies are taking the lead. America's closed-first, locked-down strategy is doomed to failure - and it could take the US economy down with it.

Stop Using OpenCode

If you don’t know what OpenCode is, imagine a boot stamping on a human face forever. The boot is made of TypeScript and the face is everything we have learned about security and systems software since the invention of the electronic computer in the 1940s. The …

Robotics @ XIAOMI

Breaking the data barrier. Scaling robot policy models with embodiment-free pre-training.

Airport Simulator

The sky (and your endurance) is the limit!