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Chasing a -O2 pessimization in antcc
The author of the antcc C compiler investigates why a Lua benchmark ran slower at -O1 and -O2 than unoptimized, digging into the interpreter dispatch loop, register allocation, SSA phi handling and stack slots to find and fix the optimization that made the code worse.
12 min · 2,750 words
Can Ease of Creation Lead to Decrease in Quality & Value?
Gustavo Pezzi of Pikuma reflects on whether AI tools that make software and games trivially easy to produce will flood the market with cheap, generic work, drawing parallels with past shifts in other crafts and asking what will make people care about what you make.
11 min · 2,431 words
Christopher Drum of Stone Tools takes a hands-on look at Lotus Improv on NeXTSTEP, the cult-classic spreadsheet that separated data, formulas and views into named categories, testing how its model holds up today, what it got right, and where its rigidity frustrates traditional spreadsheet use.
33 min · 7,630 words
Hittite royal archive found in Turkey
The History Blog reports a large Hittite-period cuneiform archive excavated in Turkey, describing the tablets’ find context, what kinds of administrative and royal records they appear to contain, and why the discovery matters for Anatolian Bronze Age history.
2 min · 549 words
Where is all the new, good software?
Nate Meyvis lists candidate answers to the skeptic’s question—if AI coding is so powerful, why isn’t more great new software obvious—covering quieter quality gains, limited adoption, political bottlenecks, ephemeral and private tools, leisure capture, and AI sometimes reducing software use.
2 min · 511 words
Developer Agency in the Age of AI
David Scott Bernstein argues that AI gives developers leverage but not agency: the real work is understanding problems, choosing tradeoffs, testing assumptions and preserving changeability, and teams must keep asking whether they can still understand, verify and change what they build.
5 min · 1,084 words
purplesyringa investigates vfmaddrnd231pd, an FMA instruction with per-instruction rounding control documented in Intel's 2024 Software Development Manual that the GNU assembler doesn't recognize, whose documented intrinsics are missing from Clang and ICC, and that has vanished from the 2026 SDM.
2 min · 415 words
512 bytes at a time: reconstructing IBM i save-file checksums
Silent Signal reverse-engineers the per-record and global checksums in IBM i save files (SAVFs), reimplements both in Python, finds the constants in IBM Licensed Internal Code media, and shows a structurally edited SAVF can be repaired so IBM i accepts and restores it.
28 min · 6,346 words
Classic 1990's PC Shooter Quake Runs on Pimoroni Explorer
Pimoroni's Les Pounder covers Zenodante's RP2350 Quake, a port of Quake's single-player campaign that runs on the £33.90 Pimoroni Explorer microcontroller board, a game that once needed a £1,000 1990s PC.
2 min · 434 words
Deep dive into Azure Maia 300 architecture
Microsoft details the architecture of Maia 300, the third generation of its Azure Maia AI accelerator, built as a co-designed system of silicon, software, racks, networking and datacenters optimized for cloud-scale agentic LLM inference.
8 min · 1,750 words
Meta AI Research introduces the Muse Wonder series (Muse Wonder and Muse Wonder Full), frontier models aimed at personal and professional agentic tasks that combine Active Memory and Active Focus, available through the Meta Model API and Muse Code.
4 min · 1,030 words
Kevin Kelly's 2016 AI Predictions, 10 Years Later
Taylor Troesh revisits AI-related excerpts from Kevin Kelly's 2016 book The Inevitable a decade on, noting that Kelly anticipated a few AI heavyweights dominating while also arguing for a future of open, ubiquitous, commodity intelligence.
5 min · 1,089 words
How I Found a $90,000 Remote Code Execution Vulnerability in Google
Simon Koeck explains how a Flask session cookie on developers.google.com carried the secret used to sign it, letting him forge sessions and chain that into remote code execution across seven Google DevSite domains, a bug Google rewarded with $90,000.
4 min · 915 words
An incomplete list of incompatibilities between C as written in the ISO standard and C as it exists for people using gcc/clang with glibc/musl, covering the asm keyword, FLT_ROUNDS, standard floating-point pragmas, and other places where real toolchains are not conformant by default.
4 min · 986 words
Parsing JSON at tens of gigabytes per second… in Python
Daniel Lemire benchmarks JSON parsing on free-threaded Python 3.14 using eight hours of GH Archive events (7.6 GB), comparing the standard json module, orjson, msgspec and his fastsimdjson library across up to 64 threads, and shows Python can reach tens of gigabytes per second.
3 min · 789 words
"200 OK" doesn't mean your AI agent did the job
Prathap K argues that a success response from an AI agent's tool call only means a request was accepted, not that the work happened, and describes the read-back check he uses to verify each write against the real system (email, CRM, messages).
2 min · 562 words
Tetris in d dimensions: how we rightsize Kubernetes nodes
Emmanuel Bakare explains how CostGraph rightsizes Kubernetes nodes as a vector bin packing problem: sizing pods from real usage percentiles, checking placements against scheduler hard constraints, and using Dot Product and L2 heuristics from Panigrahy et al. instead of first fit decreasing.
12 min · 2,675 words
Writing a Demoscene Intro for the ZX Spectrum
Mark Dastmalchi-Round walks through tools, techniques and challenges of writing a retro ZX Spectrum demoscene crack intro, covering the pipeline from assets to a runnable production.
31 min · 7,074 words
Living in the Weimar era of Ruby
Julik Tarkhanov responds to DHH's RailsWorld vibe-coding keynote, arguing that celebrity disinterest in Rails does not obligate the community to abandon it, and framing a freer, post-celebrity chapter for Ruby.
13 min · 2,998 words
A guest post on Terence Tao's blog by Kate Stange and Edmund Harriss reporting on an Institut Henri Poincaré workshop that asked what it would mean for a mathematical illustration to be rigorous, and reflecting on meaning, understanding and human practice in mathematics as AI and formal proof reshape the field.
9 min · 2,184 words