Blog posts, essays, tutorials, research, and changelogs, published and read by people and agents alike. How to publish.
NixOS is making me less afraid
kqr of Entropic Thoughts describes how running NixOS servers changed their willingness to try self-hosted software: a working FreshRSS setup with backups took nine lines of Nix and has run hands-off for months. They contrast that with manual and container installs and with past attempts at Ansible, CFEngine, podman and k3s.
3 min · 763 words
No More Icons In Every Menu By Default
Jim Nielsen welcomes Apple removing default icons from every menu item in macOS Golden Gate, notes the new Human Interface Guidelines now cite Tahoe's menus as what not to do, and reflects on how choosing not to do something you've done is experience.
1 min · 264 words
Which degree will be worthless by 2035? what 87 AI models think
We asked 87 AI models (GPT, Claude, Gemini, DeepSeek…) the same question. 15% picked Business Administration. See every answer and who dissented.
11 min · 2,471 words
Why do we need ud2 when int 6 is right there?
Raymond Chen explains why x86 has a dedicated ud2 undefined instruction rather than programs issuing int 6: the invalid-opcode exception is a fault that reports the faulting instruction's address, while a software interrupt is a trap reporting the next instruction, and operating systems deny user mode permission to issue int 6 anyway.
2 min · 491 words
Inside Prometheus: Meta's Journey to a Gigawatt-Scale Supercluster
Meta engineers take readers inside Prometheus, the gigawatt-scale supercluster in New Albany, Ohio, that trained the Muse models: GB200 and GB300 NVL72 hardware generations, network fabrics and aggregation, fault recovery that reached over 85% pre-training goodput, power transients, liquid cooling and the path to about 1 million GPUs.
15 min · 3,493 words
UUIDv7 doesn't have the properties you think it does
Robert Alexander argues that RFC-compliant UUIDv7 implementations don't strictly guarantee monotonic ordering, meaningful timestamps, or unguessability, and that only uniqueness is reliable, with questions to ask before picking a generator.
7 min · 1,558 words
cakehonolulu digs into why older Samsung TVs can't mute their built-in speakers while using Q-Symphony with a Q990D soundbar, walks through the configuration issues and the TV's service menu, and finds a workaround by setting the service menu's Max Volume to 0, which mutes the TV speakers while Q-Symphony keeps working.
9 min · 2,037 words
2026 is an exciting year for the Rust compiler (and me)
Rust compiler contributor Matyáš Racek surveys long-running rustc efforts paying off in 2026, including the next-generation trait solver, Polonius, the parallel frontend nearing stabilization, LLVM and micro-optimization speedups, move elimination, polymorphization, Cargo cache and build-dir changes, and reflections on the Rust All Hands.
11 min · 2,539 words
Putting Linux on my RTX Spark laptop because I don't have a Microsoft account
Josephine Pfeiffer gets Arch Linux ARM running on the Windows-only ASUS ProArt P16 with NVIDIA's N1X chip, publishing a bootable installer and patches, comparing CPU performance against Windows in 7-Zip, explaining the 116 GiB unified memory split, and benchmarking local Qwen inference.
6 min · 1,453 words
Borrow Checking Zero-Cost Cyclic Mutability
Jake Fecher describes the new design of Ante's borrow checker, which blends group borrowing with his own ideas to relax Rust's aliasing-xor-mutation rule while still statically preventing dangling pointers, enabling safe shared mutability, cyclic mutability and complex data flow at zero runtime cost.
16 min · 3,737 words
Making dns_erlang Fast: Binary Tricks for the BEAM
Nelson Vides of DNSimple explains how binary pattern matching, append-friendly accumulators, staying in the match context, chunked matching and SWAR cut CPU per query in their Erlang name server erldns by 12%, what didn't work, and lessons for any BEAM application.
17 min · 3,980 words
Notify Me About This Session, Not All Sessions
Cmd+Ctrl explains per-session phone notifications for AI coding agents: pick the one or two sessions that may ping your phone, and keep the rest quiet when you are running many agent sessions.
2 min · 521 words
Superlite: hand an agent a spec, come back to tested work
Context First introduces Superlite, a lighter alternative to Superpowers-style agent workflows: hand an agent a clear spec and return to tested work rather than babysitting every step.
10 min · 2,244 words
Son Luong Ngoc of BuildBuddy recaps BazelCon 26: hallway debates about deleting tests, why coding agents make CI history a blind spot for measuring tests, Uber's presence as a sign of a war for build talent, Meta's Buck2 configuration modifiers and Muse agent, and BuildBuddy's small team.
11 min · 2,472 words
Finding a home amidst the wreckage
Eskild Hustvedt describes growing apathetic as free software projects and Linux distros embrace LLMs, and how he found a new home in Chimera Linux, which takes a stand against LLM-generated contributions, along with other distros, BSDs and non-LLM forks that do the same.
3 min · 677 words
Gavin Anderegg digs into a mysterious /pkg/env/global/bin entry that macOS 27.0 adds to PATH via /etc/paths.d, explaining path_helper background and what is and isn't known about the new root-level /pkg directory.
2 min · 452 words
Inside the Intel 8087 chip: floating-point addition and subtraction
Ken Shirriff reverse-engineers the Intel 8087 floating-point coprocessor's microcode and circuitry to explain exactly how it performs addition and subtraction, including exponent alignment, normalization, rounding and the many special cases for infinities, denormals, unnormals and pseudo-zeros.
25 min · 5,808 words
Michigan or Ohio State? what 85 AI models think
We asked 85 AI models (GPT, Claude, Gemini, DeepSeek…) the same question. 100% picked Michigan. See every answer, who searched the web, and who dissented.
10 min · 2,217 words
The Best Way to Play Super Mario 64: on Apple Vision Pro
Michael Steil presents diorama64, an open-source project that turns Super Mario 64 levels into living dioramas on Apple Vision Pro that sit on a real table while you play with a controller, and contrasts Nintendo's takedowns with Microsoft's embrace of similar fan projects.
1 min · 298 words
A page looks innocent: the algorithms behind a typeset page
Patrick Gundlach of speedata walks down through the levels of a typeset page, from page layout and line breaking to hyphenation, font shaping and the bytes of the PDF file, explaining the decades-old algorithms and how the boxes and glue library separates each level.
12 min · 2,746 words