3 August 2026

48 links ยท Monday

The wettest month isn't the worst month

Richmond loses more construction workdays in January than in July, on a third less rain. Why spread-out winter rain costs more than clustered summer storms, three wrong guesses about a model that read too high, and what happened when it was measured against a …

Retries don't fix eventual consistency — var0.xyz

Retries are great for transient failures, but they can't solve eventual consistency. Treating one problem as the other often adds unnecessary complexity to distributed systems.

Who's Writing Open Source Code?

As AI steadily reshapes the software industry around it as open source once did before it, it’s useful to try and understand where those two forces intersect. Open source has, as it has with virtually every other industry software category, had an enormous imp…

The Last Bug on Earth

Everyone is panicking that AI will bury us under incomprehensible bugs. Relax. The code is about to get so perfect there will be no bugs left at all, only the business cases nobody documented, or documented badly. The machine builds exactly what you ask for, w…

Do you understand what I’m saying? - Pravesh Koirala

Edward Teller once said, “Von Neumann would carry on a conversation with my 3-year-old son, and the two of them would talk as equals…” He added that he sometimes wondered whether von Neumann used the same principle when speaking to everyone else. That is a rem…

Canva is one percent of the way there

I spent three years inside the most ambitious company I've ever seen, and the way it works is a preview of how every company will soon have to work.

Working on Economics with Fable 5 - Wilsons Blog

For the past few months I’ve been working on a theory. It started out as just a fun little data exercise looking at some different types of taxes and benefits and how it effects what people buy and how much they work. During that time I took advantage of opus …

Twelve Years Without a VPN

I have not used a corporate VPN in more than ten years. At Google, access to internal applications depends on the user and the device, not on the…

Making a game in C for the Global Game Jam: Inside Job

In this post I'll talk about how my team and I designed a local multiplayer investigation game, how I implemented a record-replay mechanic, the strange platform bugs we hit along the way, and how we still managed to make a game we're proud of, using my engine …

Measuring an eBPF Cache Without Leaving the Kernel

When testing our eBPF agent, I don’t always get the same experience as our users, especially in performance critical sections. I realize that the benchmark test suite isn’t always enough, because user’s environments can be completely different from our benchma…

I Don't Write Code Anymore. I Have It Written.

I don't write code anymore. I approve it. An honest look at the slow shift from author to approver, what AI took from the craft, and what was already fading on its own.

Going Backward

Reinventing the generic iterator wheel.

SQLite Critical CVEs or LLM Slop? | JFrog

The JFrog security research team recently identified a supply chain attack targeting the `xinference` package on PyPI. Versions 2.6.0, 2.6.1, and 2.6.2 were compromised and yanked by maintainers after users reported suspicious behavior. If you installed or imp…

Don't be a meat proxy

Too often I ask a question in Slack or leave feedback under a merge/pull request or argue with friends in a WhatsApp group and get back:

More German than many Germans

I just wanted to do an internship in Europe so it would be easier to find a job after graduation. That internship completely changed my life.

Invisible Problems

During the pandemic, we completed one of our largest projects at work. To celebrate, since we couldn't meet in person, we all ordered food on DoorDash and played an online escape room game together. W

Qwen Studio

QWEN STUDIO DISCORD Today, we are officially releasing Qwen 3.8-Max, the most capable model in the Qwen family to date. This also marks the first time we will open-source the weights of a Qwen-Max-class model — the open weights will be released next week. Buil…