17 August 2026

53 links · Monday

Don't use an LLM for your README.md

One of my more popular open source projects is Shell Bling Ubuntu, which, contrary to its name, actually supports many different operating systems these days: modern macOS, Alpine, Fedora 40 and up, Rocky Linux 8 and up, WSL (Windows Subsystem for Linux), and…

RSS/Atom Feeds are Critical

Robert Kingett tooted that indieweb folk are saying RSS readers are flawed, I'm here to say that feeds are ESSENTIAL to the web, all of it, and if any web gardener/creator/writer folk are indeed saying this, they need to re-evaluate.

Qwen3.8 27B - Intelligence, Performance & Price Analysis

Analysis of Alibaba's Qwen3.8 27B and comparison to other AI models across key metrics including quality, price, performance (tokens per second & time to first token), context window & more.

Notes on purposeful skill maintenance/improvement/neglect

Over the course of my life I’ve invested a lot of time and effort into the acquisition of different skills, abilities, competencies, specialized knowledge – for simplicity I will refer to all of it as “skills” in the following. Some of those skills, I would sa…

Session Visualization with Obsidian

When working with coding agents such as Claude, Codex etc. we provide the prompts and context until we get to the final result. However a lot happens behind the scenes. The model constantly makes calls to tools, MCP servers, commands etc until it arrives at th…

How I over-engineered my book | Ben Balter

My book has a linter, ~5,500 automated checks, and a Pandoc pipeline that rebuilds five formats — EPUB, Kindle, paperback (×2), and web — on every git push. For a book one person wrote. Here's how I built and published it the way I ship software.

Lane Departure Microscope

How a 7-inch digital microscope turned out to be running car dashcam firmware, complete with spoken lane-departure warnings and no speaker to play them.

Do That Which Makes Your Life Easy

Why it might work well to make decisions (while building or maintaining software) in the interest of your quality of life?

Attempting a game

“Build and ship a computer game” is on many a programmer’s bucket list, mine included. However, I am quite cognizant of the reality that most people who claim …

you have arrived

at your destination 😄 you should probably unsubscribe to this blog if you receive these as emails. love you fam. just hang out in person from now on. emails are dead now. k with that out of the way... https://docs.google.com/document/d/1-wiKwNi…

AI;DR (AI; Didn’t Read)

I'm about as pro-AI as you can be, but this is becoming a pet peeve of mine (and I'm not alone). That's why I love the AI;DR acronym as my new solution for ignoring the walls of slop.

TabBench-LLM

TabBench-LLM evaluates large language models as few-shot, in-context tabular classifiers, head-to-head with two baselines.

Let the App Idea Die in the Chat

One of my favorite things to do while I'm programming or working on my projects is to have slow, easy-listening jazz playing in the background. And ever since AI came along, I've been barely writing any code. I've probably built more small utility apps in the …

Code is the Byproduct

Recently, the Jacobian Conjecture was disproven by a counterexample discovered by an LLM. Shortly thereafter, a ChatGPT session from mathematician Terence Tao made the rounds online. In his chat, Tao uses ChatGPT to help him wrap his head around the implicatio…

A Preview of DuckDB v2.0

DuckDB v2.0 is coming this fall. In this post, we preview its headline features: DuckDB as a server, triggers, the VARIANT type, asynchronous I/O, a new SQL parser, a new storage format, and much more.

Who Are the Token Brokers? | Vectoral

A look at the brokers buying unused AI credits from startups and reselling them — the marketplaces, the bulk-discount routers, and the message boards where off-market inference changes hands

Part 1/6 | Systemic Risks in the Managed PostgreSQL Industry: Extension Risks Are Real! Exploiting PostGis Memory Corruption Bug at NeonDB, SupaBase and Many More - Mehmet Ince @mdisec - Vulnerability Researcher | Building security products | Security Advisor | Amateur Muay Thai fighter

Back in April, I was talking with our system and software engineering teams at PRODAFT about the possibilities of using a managed database service. Due to the nature of our business, we simply cannot start using managed services right away. I told my team, “Al…

Your harness design is probably bad.

Harness engineering is the new buzzterm, but given its effectiveness, it's hard to deny the need of it. Most of the literature on the internet about harnesses revolve around coding, and sometimes proving math theorems, but often does anyone try to figure out h…

Field Notes: Is Software Still the Point?

The blog was quiet for a few weeks. I wasn't; at least not entirely. And of everything I read, built, and argued about over the summer, one idea kept pulling at me until I couldn't put it down. I want to think out loud about it here, before the new

Vim Fugitive in action - dzx.fr

Learn how to harness the power of Vim Fugitive to efficiently stage, diff, commit, and resolve conflicts in Git repositories.

Why LLMs Are Unreliable Language Detectors

LLMs can translate, explain grammar, and write fluently in dozens of languages — so it seems obvious they should be great at simply identifying what language...

You can just choose how many bugs you want now

There’s a bizarre aspect of AI coding that I’ve been trying to put my finger on, and I think it’s this: you can basically just decide how many bugs you want your software to have …

Double-double: 31 digits of precision without leaving the FPU

If you ever need more precision than what 15 decimal digits of the double format can offer, and arbitrary-precision arithmetic is too slow, too heavy, or simply not available, there is a neat trick: glue two doubles together and treat them as one number. This …

Being ambitious and being a dad | Nicholas Charriere

When I was going through YC, I didn’t mention my seven month old daughter to anyone. Now a few years later I have two kids, a dog and a very packed schedule. My kids are the best thing in my life. For years, my work was my life. Now my life competes with my wo…

Optimal Ask

Let’s say that you are selling N widgets and you need to determine a price for your widgets. There are N customers, each of whom will buy at most one widget if your price is lower than the maximum price they are willing to pay. The maximum price that people wi…