Let the Sand Think
The best intelligence money can buy will soon reach almost everyone. What does that do to ours?
The Actor Was the Expensive Part
AI video models like ByteDance's Seedance 2.5 can now generate finished film, sound and image together, in a single pass from reference material, holding characters and voices consistent across shots. That collapses the real cost of moviemaking, which was neve…
Let the machines in – Flights of fancy
“From each art practiced in its time I derive a knowledge which compensates me in part for pleasures lost. I have supposed, and in my better moments think so still, that it would be possible in this manner to participate in the existence of everyone; such symp…
I'm (mostly) picking models on speed now, not intelligence
For the first time I'm choosing my daily driver models on tokens per second rather than raw intelligence. Why ~100tok/s might be the new 100ms, where the speed gains stop mattering, and the price war that's coming.
Why are all the amount values negative?
A few days ago I got this email from a customer. Something about all the amounts coming out as negative. I converted their PDF. PDF Sample Converted Sample The customer was right, all amounts were coming through as negative. Pretty weird. Interestingly the col…
When "no healthy upstream" isn't about the upstream you think
Field notes from a seasoned distributed systems software engineer and software architect leading public-facing systems that scale for millions of users.
Mathematics Without Mathematicians
We must know. We shall not know.
Is the Industrial Revolution a good precedent for explosive economic growth today?
One line of evidence that AI might lead to explosive economic growth is the precedent set by the Industrial Revolution. For hundreds of years — 1252 to 1652, to be precise — the compound annual growth rate of per capita real GDP in the UK was around 0.07%. It …
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Your boss profits from your excuses (here's the proof) | gilbert ramirez
Every excuse you've repeated for years has an author — and it's usually whoever profits when you stay put.
Steeping through data and brewing a database
I wanted to understand what goes in a tea, and after finding a thousand of them the only way out was to overengineer an explorer
Prevent cognitive debt by manually retyping LLM-generated code — Ankur Sethi's Lab Notebook
Despite what I said in April, I'm still using coding assistants on my personal projects.
Sharing an X Server Across Hosts with FamilyWild · dobrowolski.dev
2026-08-02
The Triangle Game, from Zero
A beginner-friendly visual guide to a colouring game with people and coloured connections, and the 2026 proof that its long-term score grows without limit.
Types with AI
2026-07-26
Call stack diffs
Inspired by HumanLayer’s “Program Design” section in Why Software Factories Fail, I’ve recently added a permanent system instruction for coding agents to communicate all planned changes or implementations inline as call stack diffs:
Don’t credit the LLM – Isaac Su
Lately, an odd habit seems to have caught on among my peers when they’ve done something with an LLM.
Rita Kozlov - The Cloudflare Blog
August 2, 2026
Go 1.27 interactive tour
An interactive tour of what’s new in Go 1.27: every notable language, runtime, and standard library change, with short runnable examples you can edit and run in the browser.
Giving and taking credit in big tech companies
Engineers often complain that visibility should be their manager’s job. In other words, they think engineers should be able to focus on the code, while their manager figures out who’s doing well and rewards them.
NetBSD Blog
August 01, 2026 posted by Martin Husemann
AI financial advice is surprisingly good — especially if you ask the right questions | MIT Sloan
Large language models encourage smart financial behavior, but they fall short on the more subtle aspects of saving and investing, according to MIT Sloan’s Taha Choukhmane and co-authors.
Seed News - ByteDance Seed Team
One-take Creation, Flexible Referencing: Introducing Seedance 2.5