7 August 2026

33 links ยท Friday

I'm excited for Intel after testing the XPS 13

Shortly after Apple launched the budget MacBook Neo, Dell announced their response, a new low-end XPS 13. Matching the Neo's current pricing, it starts at $699, or $599 with an educational discount. That discount is currently set to expire on November 2, and w…

How to keep thinking

Imagine you’re the guest on some kind of frenetic, software-engineering-themed game show. The host is constantly flipping over new cards with questions that you have to answer as fast as possible:

Quake – 30th Anniversary Update

To celebrate the 30th Anniversary of Quake, we have collaborated with MachineGames to create a new episode, Dawn of the Machine, now available as a free update to Quake.

There's a bug in the Economy, and Fable found it. - Wilsons Blog

So, these AI models have been pretty good at finding bugs and exploits in all sorts of code. Not only that, they’ve managed to prove quite a bit of maths, from insignificant to quite significant. Maybe one might doubt the significance of those findings, but fo…

Cookie Law for Robots

Cookie law turned consent into a ceremony instead of a choice. AI policy risks repeating the mistake if disclosure becomes its main measure of human agency.

What happens to our blogs when we die?

Does anyone want to read my dumb blog after I'm dead? Hell if I know, but I want to give my family the opportunity.

What is a product? - One more thing

It is far too easy to create software these days, but what is the difference between a side project and a real product?

The Complexity We Choose | Frazik

AI can help us write more software, but our real opportunity is to make software simpler to understand, verify, and own.

A Subtle Web of Meaning - Robert Simoes

Sitting inside the Sheraton Hotel Lobby in Toronto, waiting to attend my flight , a man entered the lobby in a frantic state.

Degrees of wealth - Jaap Grolleman

In eight years of living in China, taxi drivers or older colleagues loved to ask, “Which is better, the Netherlands or China?”, hoping for a single insightful answer that would explain everything. And now, back as a resident in the Netherlands, people ask the …

How to throw a LAN party in 2026

A practical guide to hosting a home LAN party in 2026. Covers networking, power, seating, game selection, file sharing, and food for groups of 5 to 32 players.

Fact Extraction Head to Head — Rakuen Software

Thirty-two local model runs over the same 1,001 notes, with every ordering claim tested. Six consecutive steps down the leaderboard are noise, the top two cannot be told apart, and the column that decides the choice is not the score.

We lost reading

We lost reading. In the advent of GenAI we are all worried about losing the writing. Software developers write less code than ever.

We got model fusion at home

In this chunk I’m going to document a little OpenCode1 setup that uses multiple (well, two in this case but your plan is your limit) LLMs to review a GitHub pull request. It’s a simple exercise in fusing multiple different models to perform a task and can be c…