27 July 2026

25 links · Monday

What is Potential Energy, Really?

Running, city blocks, and a meditation on what distance even means and the notion of gravity itself.

On AI

In 2019, I started watching Andreas Kling's programming videos, many of which were live-coding sessions writing his new operating system SerenityOS. He was always pretty fast at writing code, especially since his IDE, Qt Creator, …

Open Source Must Be Fun (Or It Will Die)

Homebrew is thriving while other open source projects struggle. Its scarcest resource isn’t money: it’s maintainer motivation.

Art Can And Should Be Measured

“When we’re done with it, we may find – if it’s a good novel – that we’re a bit different from what we were before we read it, that we have been changed a little, as i…

Laplace’s Mandate and Routing Anxiety

I have the sensation that I will be forced to always use the strongest, frontier model. The DSM XX will need a large class of categories for AI ailments like mine. As long as I reach for the smarte…

What even are microservices? — var0.xyz

Microservices are often presented as a technical solution, but they primarily solve organizational problems. Understanding that distinction makes architectural decisions much clearer.

The App Server and SDKs

How to embed OpenAI's Codex agent in your own software: the app-server JSON-RPC protocol, the two orthogonal controls, and why the TypeScript and Python SDKs are not the same thing underneath.

Is Software Solved?

With LLMs, wow we build software has changed forever. And now some people say "software is solved!" If you bear with me, I'll try to give you a perspective on what this new paradigm means for software. Decide for yourself, is software really solved?

The Strongest El Niño Ever

With all the July runs in, dynamical models give a ~90% chance of a record-setting event

PGSimCity · How PostgreSQL Works, in 3D

An explorable 3D city that shows how PostgreSQL actually works — backends, shared buffers, WAL, checkpoints, autovacuum and replication, all running live in your browser.

French firefighters face 'pyrocumulonimbus' for first time

The gigantic wildfire ravaging southwest France has created an extremely dangerous "pyrocumulonimbus" -- a phenomenon never before seen in the country -- the spokesman for the country's National Firefighters…