The Cold Email
Written pieces, talks, and other bits by Zach Holman.
Everyone's Tables Suck
Why is it so hard to add a cell? A tour of terrible tables in Notion, Google Docs, Linear, Obsidian, and Slack -- and how at Macro we're bringing tables back.
Why compute might get 10x more expensive in coming years
If a human-level software engineer that could run on an H100 equivalent, at current market rates for software engineers, that H100 should rent for over $250k a year. That’s 15x today’s spot price.
Safety in an `unsafe { world }`
The homepage of Josh Liebow-Feeser
Agency Is the Job Now
Technical skill got repriced the day models could write most of the code. What's left is the willingness to blast through obstacles, and two stories about donuts and blood explain the whole thing.
Vera Rubin Observatory
Shai-Hulud and the risks of external dependencies | scotto.me
Shai-Hulud code review
Model Configuration | Kimi Code Docs
Kimi Code Documentation
We are surprisingly close to prompt-to-model in computer vision
In computer vision, neural networks have become a commodity. You are a Google search away from downloading near-SOTA neural networks that are free, open source, have a permissive license, and are capable enough for most use cases.
We accidentally built an LLVM compiler for JAX | josh iza.ac
Sometimes when you build software, you shave a yak so deeply that you end up with a surprisingly nice sweater (while the yak, presumably, wonders why it is suddenly rather drafty). For the past while, my team and I have been building a quantum compiler called …
Why do OpenAI's GPT-2 weights beat mine?
The original GPT-2 small weights are much better than my own models at a specific instruction-following task. Time to look into why!
I Tested Six Ways to Save $$$ on 5.6 Sol. The only one that worked was using Terra
Six interventions meant to save tokens gave different answers depending on how you count. None cut the ten-task batch total twice. Caveman and the cheaper Terra model looked mildly cheaper per task, but within run-to-run noise.
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I want to leave the internet
I want to leave the internet. This site, reddit, my banking app, the cloud service, Youtube, my music streaming app, my email, Whatsapp, iNaturalist, pornsit...
Vibe rot
20 July 2026
headroom cut 39% of my tokens and raised my claude bill
headroom cut 39% of input tokens off an agentic coding benchmark and the bill, if anything, went up. prompt caching is why, and most savings meters cannot see it.
When Reading Roman History
I finished reading SPQR by Mary Beard a few months back. In this overdue post, I share things that are important to keep in mind when casual history nerds like myself read about Roman history and ancient history more generally.
Parsers don’t have to be complicated | Branimir Karadžić's Home Page
Branimir Karadžić's Home Page
Why Performance Improvements Compound
Mature systems rarely waste time inside algorithms. They waste time moving data between them—and that is why performance fixes compound.
That time when I failed the Microsoft interview
The year was 2015, halfway through my Computer Science bachelor’s degree. I had spent a few months contributing to open source and my confidence levels were high, so I thought: why not aim for a summer internship at Microsoft? Microsoft, of all places, might s…
Why are databases so hard?
You've probably all experienced it; another outage and the database is the root cause. Why are databases such a frequent cause of problems ...
What's That Burning Smell? - Off Grid and Free: My Path to the Wilderness
I share a lesson learned for anybody who has an off grid solar electric system. A problem - a solution and the math behind it all.
Software for One - Adam Waxman
Robin Sloan wished for a HyperCard that could build a family app in a day. That world showed up.
Stripe Just Wants a Number - exe.dev blog
Inside exe’s billable facts architecture.
LLMs and shaders
In the last post I described how chat interfaces to LLMs are giving a limited view of what the LLMs could do. In this post I wanted to com...
Distributed rate limiter with HRW in Elixir | jola.dev
Building the classic distributed rate limiter, using the HRW library instead of the traditional ExHashRing.
How Real-Time Apps Actually Work
We use real-time apps every day but rarely stop to think about how they work.
GitHub - drumih/turbo-fieldfare: Gemma 4 26B-A4B inference in ~2 GB of RAM on any M-series MacBook
Gemma 4 26B-A4B inference in ~2 GB of RAM on any M-series MacBook - drumih/turbo-fieldfare
An announcement from Superlogical
Building the multiplexer for all work.
Performance Pitfalls - Stamping a Last Seen Date / Bad Caching
Last Accessed Dates, bad caching, a performance trap
Luke Valenta - The Cloudflare Blog
July 29, 2026
KOReader
KOReader is a document viewer for E Ink devices. Supported fileformats include EPUB, PDF, DjVu, XPS, CBT, CBZ, FB2, PDB, TXT, HTML, RTF, CHM, DOC, MOBI and ZIP files. It’s available for Kindle, Kobo, PocketBook, Android and desktop Linux.
Kevin Guthrie - The Cloudflare Blog
July 29, 2026
GitHub - twalichiewicz/HNewhere: A lightweight userscript that adds Hacker News discussions to any article.
A lightweight userscript that adds Hacker News discussions to any article. - twalichiewicz/HNewhere
DOOM on regex - find & replace as a computer
one operation: global find & replace
GitHub - openai/codex-security: SDKs and CLI for Codex Security
SDKs and CLI for Codex Security. Contribute to openai/codex-security development by creating an account on GitHub.
You don't have to be smart if you can think clearly
When you’re on fire, problems are transparent: they’re solved simply by the act of looking at them. Even complicated layers of multiple problems can simply be glanced through like stacked panes of glass. But nobody can work that way all the time.
Deflock Casa Grande: Flock Oversight Petition
Casa Grande residents deserve safety with enforceable limits on Flock cameras. Read the evidence, sign the petition, and ask for warrants, audits, and oversight.