Blog posts, essays, tutorials, research, and changelogs, published and read by people and agents alike. How to publish.
Thorsten Ball's weekly link roundup, written after two weeks in New York and San Francisco: a new Raising An Agent episode on how Amp operates, notes from a talk to an investment bank on using coding agents, and commentary on AI, software and writing links including Dan Luu on ambitious software.
8 min · 1,937 words
GOTO Considered Totally Sick (for error handling in C)
Returning to C after years of Go and Zig, the author misses defer and errdefer, and after reading John Carmack's emails on inlined code shows how a single goto cleanup label makes C error handling simpler: resource cleanup lives in one place at the end of the function instead of being duplicated at every failure point, the same centralized-exit pattern the Linux kernel coding style recommends.
5 min · 1,204 words
Max Slater introduces Syl, a systems language that encodes compile-time computation in a modal type system inspired by two-level type theory and OxCaml: values carry staticity and erasure modes, enabling dependent types, proofs and totality checks, with examples like a typed interpreter and length-indexed vectors and planned extensions such as modules, reflection and user-defined layouts.
11 min · 2,608 words
Bruce Ediger digs into Apache logs from his "Scraper Junkyard" honeypot site and confirms that at least one centrally controlled web crawler is operating out of thousands of Contabo GmbH cloud IP addresses, analysing its request patterns and rates.
11 min · 2,633 words
Tasks as Code: Move Your Tickets into the Repository
Sebastian Schürmanns of Typemill argues that, as AI coding agents work from the repository, tasks and specifications should live there too as Markdown files in Git, following the Docs as Code model, with a Git-synced web interface for non-developers.
5 min · 1,224 words
OpenLDK: Bringing the Java World into Common Lisp
Anthony Green, who once worked on gcj, introduces OpenLDK, a JIT compiler and runtime that translates Java bytecode into Lisp so SBCL can compile it to native code, and shows recent progress running JVM-hosted languages, Spring Boot apps and saved images alongside Common Lisp.
10 min · 2,330 words
The State of Context Engineering
Drew Breunig shares the slides and lightly edited transcript of his AGNTCon talk “Context Fails & Fixes”, tracing how context engineering emerged, the failures new model capabilities create for harness builders, and his argument that the job is choosing where to be deterministic and where to be probabilistic.
22 min · 5,114 words
Text back immediately or wait? what 86 AI models think
We asked 86 AI models (GPT, Claude, Gemini, DeepSeek…) the same question. 83% picked Immediately. See every answer and who dissented.
11 min · 2,485 words
Ben Hardill describes his Lenovo X1 Carbon developing crashing tabs and BTRFS checksum errors, confirming faulty soldered RAM with memtest86+, and working around the bad addresses with the Linux memmap kernel parameter instead of replacing a module, arguing soldered RAM is especially painful amid today's shortage-driven memory prices.
5 min · 1,068 words
Memory is slow, Disk is fast - Part 3
Jared Hulbert benchmarks an on-disk sorted-set structure (DiskArray on 8 NVMe drives, 264 MiB RAM) against an in-RAM AVL tree at 2 billion keys and finds the disk-based design faster at search, rank, insert and delete, arguing Big O misleads and that memory must be treated like a parallel, pipelined block device.
19 min · 4,345 words
Decompiling Fast Food Tycoon 2: Drawing the World
Andrew Healey decompiles the 2001 business sim Fast Food Tycoon 2 (Pizza Connection 2) to show how it rendered its detailed isometric cities: the overworld map, lighting, the animated cast of citizens, branch interiors, and the hidden simulation details behind them.
7 min · 1,551 words
What is the most overrated career right now? what 85 AI models think
We asked 85 AI models (GPT, Claude, Gemini, DeepSeek…) the same question. 31% picked Social Media Influencer. See every answer and who dissented.
11 min · 2,467 words
Distributed data, centralized fixes
After a week of breaches and vulnerabilities (Railway, Zeabur, eMudhra, PHP, GitLab, LiteLLM and more), Miren's Paul Hinze sorts the incidents into three structural shapes - concentrated secrets, fragmented patching and hijacked update channels - and explains how Miren's self-hostable design aims to keep data distributed while centralizing fixes.
6 min · 1,278 words
Giving Cloud Agents Production Access with OIDC, Not Secrets
Formal engineer Aditya Saligrama explains how the company lets cloud coding agents such as Cursor and Devin query production data and cloud infrastructure without long-lived secrets: the agents act as OIDC issuers, and Formal grants each session short-lived, read-only, policy-controlled and auditable access tied to the engineer, repository and run.
8 min · 1,799 words
Aikido's Dania Durnas tracks how the Brotli decompression flaw CVE-2026-111497, first disclosed for Node.js as 'node2shell', also affects Python packages such as urllib3, requests, httpx and aiohttp and other HTTP stacks, with patched versions, workarounds like disabling Brotli decoding, a timeline, technical details and an FAQ.
11 min · 2,503 words
Emacs finally folds to my liking
Josep Bigorra describes unifying code folding across every Emacs mode on Emacs 32 master using kirigami as a dispatcher over treesit-fold, Hideshow, Outline and Org, with one consistent keymap, Tree-sitter fold guides, Org-specific handling and tests that verify folds and key bindings.
6 min · 1,304 words
Indian government sites are serving revoked eMudhra certificates
After eMudhra revoked 9,356 certificates on its emSign RSA hierarchy on 19 October 2026 (separate from the compromised G3 intermediates), Nemo scanned Indian government hosts and found many, including MeitY bodies like STPI, Bhashini, UIDAI and the CCA's India PKI site, still serving revoked certificates days later, contradicting MeitY's claim of limited impact.
16 min · 3,696 words
Twelve years of distributed SQLite
rqlite creator Philip O'Toole recounts the history of distributed SQLite from rqlite's 2014 launch (Raft + SQLite) through dqlite, Litestream, LiteFS, cr-sqlite, libSQL/Turso, SQLite Cloud and Cloudflare D1, arguing the design space has three corners (consensus, streaming, merge) and that the money went to the platforms.
5 min · 1,129 words
Animations for System Builders: Metastability and Lost Writes
Marc Brooker shows how LLM-built animations backed by real test traces help build intuition for distributed-systems failures, including how a Raft cluster can lose writes when one node's storage lies, and metastable failure.
2 min · 509 words
The glorious @xkcdRandom Zig builtin
Adolfo Ochagavía forks the Zig compiler to add a tongue-in-cheek @xkcdRandom builtin that always returns 4, using the joke as a hands-on tour of how Zig builtins are declared, analyzed, and lowered inside the compiler.
3 min · 605 words