July 31, 2026

Detect Dark Matter's Mark from Your Backyard

“Something out there is putting its stamp on how the Milky Way turns. And that basic observation is what allows me to say that, with the help of some roof flashing and a paint-thinner can, I’ve been able to detect dark matter from my backyard.”

The Maxwell Conjecture is False

“We exhibit a configuration of five point charges in Euclidean space whose electrostatic potential admits at least 24 critical points all of which are non-degenerate. Maxwell’s conjecture that the field of n point charges has at most (n-1)² critical points which are all non-degenerate is therefore false.”

Better to beg forgiveness

“There is a whole universe of uses that might technically violate copyright, might technically not fit into di minimis, first sale or fair use – but these are also uses that no one would ever find out.”

The End of an Era

“My lifelong dream of writing novels somehow overlapped with the 20 good years where stories could be published cheaply but not written cheaply.”

Microsoft's Project Silica

“on average for every MB read there are 47 MBs written, and for every read operation there are 174 writes”

July 30, 2026

The AI Aesthetic

“Every zeitgeist comes with new design idioms unique to its challenges.”

July 29, 2026

Half-Life ported to Mac OS 9

“Half-Life has finally landed for PowerPC based Macintosh computers 28 years after it’s original release!”

The Orchestrator's Tax

“Every token in the orchestrator’s context is competing for its attention, and the real value of a subagent is what it keeps out of that context, not how fast it runs.”

Codex Security

“@openai/codex-security is a CLI and TypeScript SDK for finding, validating, and fixing security vulnerabilities in your code.”

July 28, 2026

Discernment

“By definition, a student isn’t an expert on the subject they’re studying. That’s the whole point of studying, to acquire knowledge and thus discernment.”

Try the New Firefox Design in Nightly

“You’ll notice softer tab shapes, a warmer color palette, updated icons, and after hearing from many of you, the return of Compact Mode and new theme options to make Firefox your own.”

July 27, 2026

Most Googlebots are fake

“On the internet, no one knows you’re a dog… and the flip side is that I can claim to be a dog (or a Googlebot) whenever I feel like it.”

July 26, 2026

Memory Safety Absolutists

“With roughly 5 million lines of Rust in the Android platform and one potential memory safety vulnerability found (and fixed pre-release), our estimated vulnerability density for Rust is 0.2 vuln per 1 million lines (MLOC).”

Decker

“Decker includes no advertising, telemetry, gamification, slop-generator integration, or other intrusions on user privacy and autonomy.”

LG to Ban Residential Proxies from Smart TV Apps

“A residential proxy network is not an intended use for LG smart TVs, and LG Electronics is working with developers to remove the residential proxy option from their apps on the webOS platform.”

The Robots Cometh

“Once the technology surpasses this inflection point, robots can gradually be rolled out for large-scale commercial use.”

Accidental Historian

“It just doesn’t bring me any joy. But what does bring me joy is giving somebody a print of a photograph I took.”

July 25, 2026

Claude Opus 5

“Claude Opus 5 is a thoughtful and proactive model that comes close to the frontier intelligence of Claude Fable 5 at half the price.”

July 24, 2026

Everyone Should Know SIMD

“Every developer should be able to recognize the opportunity and, most importantly, should not be scared of SIMD.”

July 23, 2026

Protecting our FLOSS commons from LLMs

“These needless accesses create expensive database queries that diminish the service quality for all of us, requires substantial amounts of work from our system administrators.”

July 20, 2026

July 19, 2026

Minecraft 26.3 Snapshot 4

“Minecraft now uses SDL3 instead of GLFW for window management, input and platform integration. On Linux systems, the game will now use and prefer Wayland natively if available.”

Reviewing AI Code Is Not A Viable Argument

“For every 400 LOC written by a LLM Coding Assistants (at best, less for code that are hard to review), we need one professional senior developer to spend 1h of his time reviewing the code.”

July 17, 2026

The State of Open Source AI

“Open weights are no longer a compromise. They are where the work happens: a majority of production tokens now route through them.”

July 14, 2026

Rewriting Bun in Rust

“A large percentage of bugs from that list are use-after-free, double-free, and ‘forgot to free’ in an error path. In safe Rust, these are compiler errors.”

July 13, 2026

July 11, 2026

An Update on the Scraper Situation

“Scraper attacks come from a huge number of sources across the net…each hit is meant to look like just another human with a web browser.”

July 10, 2026

July 9, 2026

Announcing TypeScript 7.0

“TypeScript 7 brings native code speed, shared memory multithreading, and a number of new optimizations that typically yield speedups between 8x and 12x on full builds.”

July 8, 2026

Odin 1.0

“The Data-Oriented Language for Sane Software Development.”

July 7, 2026

You shouldn't trust Trusted Publishing

“Trusted Publishing is just an authentication method. The only thing Trusted Publishing does is establish a trust relationship between an external machine identity and a package identity on an index for the purpose of authenticating an upload; it does not tell a user that a package is safe to use, high quality, or anything else.”

July 6, 2026

Tunnel 13

“Holmes acted on hunches,” he said. “And hunches play no part in my crime laboratory.”

Zombie 'Who Owns Unix?' Lawsuit Comes Alive Again

“The case and its successors ended in 2021, with a settlement that saw litigants agree to end the matter without IBM admitting fault. But by then, SCO had sold its software to a biz called Xinuos that decided to fight on.”

Mexico 2-3 England: World Cup Round of 16

“In a breathless encounter that will surely go down as an instant classic, England survived for more than 40 minutes with ten men following Jarell Quansah’s red card early in the second half.”

A Speed Limit for Computers

“Above this threshold, energy grows at the expense of equity. Further energy affluence then means decreased distribution of control over that energy.”

AI Has Torched the Market for Junior Programmers

“The career on-ramp for professional software engineers used to work like this: you got hired to write mediocre code, a senior engineer reviewed it, you slowly absorbed judgment through repetition and correction, and a decade later you were the senior engineer. That chain is now broken.”

July 3, 2026

No LLM code in dependencies

“I’ve spent about 100 hours of work over the past month to make sure git-annex can build without dependencies that contain LLM generated code.”

July 2, 2026

Artificial Adventures

“Reviews, refactoring, and one-off scripts are consistently useful. Well worth the money for that alone.”

Rise of the Cheap Robots

“These are finally, finally starting to look like something that could be made very capable.”

This blog is written in en-GB

“It is more than the language I speak; it is the culture I live in, the way that I think, and the accent I use.”

July 1, 2026

On Description

“Most of a description goes unsaid rather than said; most everything is tossed into the pile of the unvarying, the uninteresting, the unremarkable.”

Why I Stopped Arguing With People

“I stopped arguing not because I stopped caring about being right, but because I finally wanted something more than being right: I wanted to keep getting better.”