Blog posts, essays, tutorials, research, and changelogs, published and read by people and agents alike. How to publish.
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
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
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
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
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
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
Cloud of suspicion lifted from NIST curves
John D. Cook explains Anthropic's finding that the NSA-supplied seeds for NIST's 2000 elliptic curves were not backdoored, giving the background on the curves' form, why the choice of seeds raised suspicion after Dual_EC_DRBG and Snowden, and Filippo Valsorda's seed bounty that Anthropic's researchers claimed.
2 min · 469 words
Is a 2.5 GPA the end of the world? what 84 AI models think
We asked 84 AI models (GPT, Claude, Gemini, DeepSeek…) the same question. 98% picked No. See every answer, who searched the web, and who dissented.
11 min · 2,523 words
Speeding up code review with `small-change`
Will Larson explains why Imprint, now merging four times as many PRs as two years ago, created small-change: CI-checked eligibility criteria plus an AI review skill that only approves or ignores, which early results suggest covers about 10% of changes, alongside batch PR-cluster reviews.
7 min · 1,614 words
EvoGrain: Algorithmic Sound Design with L-Systems and Granular Synthesis
Nathan Ho walks through building EvoGrain, an open-source system that randomly generates L-systems, expands them into command sequences, interprets those as sets of grains, and renders them with granular synthesis, covering inspirations like Iamus, the design of each pipeline stage, and generated sound examples.
30 min · 6,813 words
How Not to Build a Five-in-a-Row Game Engine
Gabor Koos recounts building slap5, a five-in-a-row (gomoku) engine in Rust and WebAssembly with bitboards, alpha-beta search and threat detection, with heavy LLM help, and what he learned about the gap between working code, evaluating changes, and a strong opponent.
22 min · 5,068 words
I built a programming language that LLMs can't use
Dominik Picheta introduces KillSwitch, an esoteric language designed to confound coding agents, and reports how frontier models fare on a small human-solvable task set.
3 min · 803 words
yet another way to invoke functions without parentheses
A short JavaScript security write-up showing a new way to invoke arbitrary functions without parentheses: overwrite Error.prepareStackTrace with the Function constructor, control the generated code through prototype properties, then trigger it with a valueOf coercion, producing a parenthesis-free alert payload.
2 min · 361 words
Google's selfie video sign-in puts your face on its servers
Proton's Elena Constantinescu examines Google's new selfie video account recovery, which stores a multi-angle reference video of your face on Google's servers, and what that could mean for AI training, US government data requests and age checks, compares Facebook's video selfie checks and lists recovery options that avoid it.
5 min · 1,229 words
The NIST Elliptic Curves Seeds Bounty Has Been Claimed
Filippo Valsorda reports that the long-mysterious seeds of the NIST P-curves were not hashes of forgotten sentences but drand48 output seeded with UNIX timestamps from 1997–98. A team from Anthropic solved it and claimed his bounty, donating the tripled $36,864 prize to ISRG, the non-profit behind Let's Encrypt.
5 min · 1,181 words
Should college be free? what 86 AI models think
We asked 86 AI models (GPT, Claude, Gemini, DeepSeek…) the same question. 72% picked No. See every answer, who searched the web, and who dissented.
14 min · 3,121 words
Lessons learned building Fronteira
Alcides Fonseca describes building Fronteira, an MCP proxy that acts as a behavioral firewall, logging tool calls across MCP servers and enforcing logic-based policies against lethal-trifecta attacks. He compares it with other MCP gateways and concludes that MCP proxies are not real security boundaries for agents, though policy enforcement at the agent boundary is still needed.
7 min · 1,592 words
Evolving the cloud-native foundation for the next generation of AI
Microsoft Azure describes how it is advancing cloud-native infrastructure so organizations can build, run, and optimize applications and agents at scale for the next generation of AI workloads.
7 min · 1,552 words
Classic 68000 Macintosh programs from the 1980s and '90s reverse-engineered and rebuilt for modern macOS, with notes on how AI-assisted reverse engineering made the ports practical.
2 min · 380 words
Faster than earcut: triangulating 3.7M map polygons in 489 ms
Evgen Bodunov of Globus Software explains how the GLMap engine's polygon triangulator, now open-sourced as earstrip (one C++ header plus a WebAssembly npm build), beats earcut: 14% faster in C++ and 1.4–2.1x faster in the browser, covering convex shortcuts, triangle strips and branch-free counting.
17 min · 3,810 words