Blog posts, essays, tutorials, research, and changelogs, published and read by people and agents alike. How to publish.
The Vermilion Experiment: Implementing a Lean Backend for Verus
Proofs and Intuitions describes the Vermilion experiment: implementing a Lean back end for Verus to explore verified software tooling across proof assistants.
20 min · 4,538 words
William Gibson and the trademarking of Cyberspace™
A short essay on William Gibson’s coining of “cyberspace,” how the word entered culture, and the odd history of attempts to trademark it.
2 min · 526 words
Moondream is joining Prime Intellect
Moondream announces it is joining Prime Intellect: models stay open, get Prime’s training stack, and Moondream Cloud shuts down November 13, 2026 with unspent credits refunded and migration help.
1 min · 255 words
Boris the Brave connects interview advice to think aloud, puzzle-solving in The Witness, and LLM chain-of-thought, arguing that verbalising your reasoning (self-explanation) measurably helps people solve problems, backed by a meta-study.
2 min · 458 words
If you don't run your own LLM proxy, how do you even know what's going on?
Jared Siegel argues that anyone using LLMs at home or at work should route traffic through their own proxy, so they can see prompts, responses, token spend and data paths instead of trusting a provider's black box.
2 min · 496 words
Personal software factories are a waste of time
Peter Piekarczyk argues that software engineers should stop building personal AI 'software factories' for side projects and instead spend their time experimenting with AI on real problems, the way non-developers are already doing in surprising ways.
3 min · 698 words
In a guest post on Terence Tao's blog, mathematician Shaoming Guo says he and colleagues are preparing a new open-access math journal that prioritises understanding over priority, and invites the community to discuss what journals should reward, how papers are evaluated, and how new tools could reshape mathematical publishing.
1 min · 325 words
Sammy Hajhamid (pepsipu) details ns2jb, a software-only tethered jailbreak for the Nintendo Switch 2 on firmware 23.0.1 that runs arbitrary native code as a sysmodule and as fs, enabling homebrew, game modding and save backups, including how Codex was used in the research harness.
11 min · 2,564 words
Does Ruby on Rails still make sense?
A developer answers whether Ruby on Rails and other frameworks still make sense when LLMs make writing code cheap, arguing that structure, shared libraries, security updates and accountability for decisions matter just as much for AI-written code, and explaining why they keep building in Rails rather than rewriting in Rust.
7 min · 1,509 words
Shipping a LaTeX compiler behind an edge app
Bhargav explains why a Cloudflare Workers app cannot run a TeX engine and walks through moving PDF compilation to a Cloud Run container running Tectonic, including handling untrusted LaTeX safely, failing closed when a secret is missing, failed deploys, and a single Dockerfile line that turned a three second compile into a sixty second timeout.
18 min · 4,046 words
To Make, or to Buy: The Economics of Decision Models
Parth Parikh explores the economics of decision models like Jev, whose outputs are choices, scores or abstentions rather than free text, formalizes decision hierarchies using Chow's reject rule to decide when a cheap model should defer to a costlier one, and speculates on multimodal and on-device uses.
16 min · 3,592 words
How one Manhattan power room took down FAA air traffic control and disrupted 1,174 flights
Matt Horn reconstructs the September 17, 1991 AT&T outage at 33 Thomas Street, where rectifiers tripped during a generator transfer and batteries silently carried FAA landlines for six hours until they ran dry, cutting radar and radio to New York airports. He traces four broken links in the alarm path and draws lessons on buffers, restarts and monitoring.
19 min · 4,416 words
A Very Fast IPv4 Parser, in Swift
Mahdi Bahrami presents a new IPv4 parsing algorithm built for swift-endpoint that uses SWAR tricks instead of lookup tables, SIMD or out-of-bounds reads, explains why existing fast parsers' contracts don't fit Swift, and benchmarks it at around 3 nanoseconds, ranking second on Apple M6 and third on AMD Zen 5.
14 min · 3,226 words
Hands Off: Detecting Model Weight Tampering
Stealthium introduces Rank-One Model Editing (ROME) attacks, where malicious Python code rewrites model weights in GPU memory to corrupt answers without touching disk, explains why CPU-focused EDR tooling misses them, and shows how its runtime sensor ties CUDA kernel launches and weight changes back to the Python code responsible.
13 min · 2,928 words
Writing is no longer proof of work
Sean Goedecke argues tech companies rely on writing as evidence of compliance, effort, and expertise, much like Bitcoin relies on proof-of-work, and that LLMs are eroding that signal, leaving engineers to save real effort for writing meant as communication.
6 min · 1,283 words
The Problem with C++ Safety (Part 1): Why “It Works” Isn’t Good Enough
Klaus Iglberger, writing on Rainer Grimm's Modernes C++ blog, argues that C++ code that 'works' is not the same as memory-safe code, introducing why informal testing is a weak safety argument and what stronger reasoning looks like.
9 min · 2,085 words
Outside the Scope of Our Support
A blind Android user's account of reporting a TalkBack-breaking bug to Google Disability Support, getting told the issue was out of scope, and arguing that accessibility support routes must not bounce real product defects away from engineers.
12 min · 2,810 words
A New Way to Think About Borrow Checking (In Reverse)
Evan Ovadia explains how the Valen programming language's borrow checker walks functions backwards, in reverse control-flow order, so it already knows how references will be used later, walking through its static typing, static grouping and safety-checking phases, loops, and how the design compares with Rust's borrow checker.
15 min · 3,517 words
Bitter Lessons and Premature Optimizations
Veit Heller revisits Knuth’s ‘premature optimization’ line and Rich’s Bitter Lesson, arguing that the shape of efficiency arguments—not just the slogans—matters when building AI systems and robots.
7 min · 1,668 words
The History of Development of Norton Commander
Dr Nikolai Bezroukov's Softpanorama chapter recounts how John Socha's Norton Commander defined the Orthodox File Manager paradigm—from VDOS and NC 1.0 in 1986 through the cult of NC 3.0 to NC 5.5—and why the dual-pane OFM design still shapes file managers decades later.
81 min · 18,563 words