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Frank Denis shows that LLVM compiles a plain 128-bit addition into conditional branches on 32-bit RISC-V, explains why that breaks constant-time assumptions in cryptographic code, compares GCC and the Zicond extension, and discusses how hard portable side-channel-safe code really is.
5 min · 1,208 words
You Might Want to Try Being Less Creative
After a jam session at Secret Studios with a musician friend, Bryant reflects on why he never finished a song as a teenager, arguing that trying to be original at every step keeps you from finishing anything and that borrowing proven structures frees you to create.
3 min · 732 words
TypeSafe AI, the lab behind the Jev System One model, announces an $870 million Series A at a $7.5B valuation led by Andreessen Horowitz with Sequoia Capital and DCVC, with Martin Casado joining the board, and explains what the money means for developers and customers.
1 min · 213 words
A statement on the Tor Project's relationship with Mullvad
The Tor Project explains why it is continuing its technical collaboration with Mullvad after concerns over a political donation by a Mullvad co-founder, while pausing proactive co-branding and revising how Mullvad Browser is described on Tor's channels to avoid implied endorsement.
2 min · 538 words
There are many themes, but this one is yours
Earendil explains Pi's new default system theme, which asks the terminal for its colors and builds Pi's theme from them, and why the hard part is contrast: perceived readability varies between people, so they also built a contrast survey to train a better contrast algorithm.
10 min · 2,390 words
HIP and ROCm as first-class citizens
Ludovic Courtès reports that Guix developers migrated the whole AMD HIP/ROCm stack from the Guix-HPC channels into Guix proper starting with 7.1.1: more than 40 packages covering the toolchain, linear algebra libraries, rocHPL, a ROCm Open MPI and profiling tools, plus HIP variants of scientific software.
6 min · 1,485 words
Why Are Coding Agents So Dumb?
Michael Lynch argues that while LLMs keep getting better, the coding agents that drive them have barely improved since early 2025: he separates the model from the agent, catalogs the workflow gaps and bugs he still hits in Claude Code, Codex, OpenCode, Cline and Pi, and sketches what a better agent would do.
10 min · 2,316 words
Oxide Computer Company announces a $445M Series D, opening with the milestone that ordinary operations made it pay income tax this spring, and explains why a profitable hardware company still raises: to keep accepting new demand, expand manufacturing capacity and build an enduring company.
3 min · 694 words
Ryan Dahl announces that the entire Deno team is joining Cloudflare, explaining how the move continues Deno's goal of simpler server software beyond the runtime, what it means for Deno Deploy and the open-source runtime, and why the new celld work focuses on Durable Objects.
2 min · 512 words
Glyph Lefkowitz contrasts the concerted push against generative AI across writing, art and music with how many programmers keep using it anyway, and argues that programming is art like any other creative medium, so AI encroachment on software development is just as worth resisting.
8 min · 1,807 words
When No ID Means No Internet: Age Verification and the Right to Access Information
EFF examines who gets locked out when age verification laws require identity documents to go online, surveying new mandates in Australia, India, the UK and US states and arguing that ID-based checks exclude people without documents and threaten the right to access information.
5 min · 1,071 words
$50K First Letters Prize awarded for PHerc 343
The Vesuvius Challenge awards a $50K First Letters Prize to Erwin Nieuwlaar for virtually unwrapping and detecting ink in PHerc. 343, revealing the first text read from this still-rolled Herculaneum scroll since AD 79. Papyrologists read a Greek sequence likely meaning 'everything that happens' and discuss possible references to music.
4 min · 975 words
Gavin Anderegg explains why, after 20+ years of serving only JPEG, PNG and SVG, he has finally adopted WebP: browser support became baseline, better tooling after leaving Photoshop for Pixelmator Pro makes it easy, and the file-size savings are real, while he looks ahead to AVIF and JPEG XL.
2 min · 452 words
100+ reactions to 100+ solutions
Proofs and Prompts collects more than a hundred short, signed reactions from mathematicians to OpenAI's 6 October 2026 release of AI-generated solutions to open problems, ranging from astonishment and problem-specific comments to worries about verification, research culture and students.
69 min · 15,879 words
What is the most overrated college? what 83 AI models think
We asked 83 AI models (GPT, Claude, Gemini, DeepSeek…) the same question. 72% picked Harvard. See every answer, who searched the web, and who dissented.
12 min · 2,764 words
What should we tell our students?
In a guest post on Terence Tao's blog, mathematician Álvaro Lozano-Robledo addresses students worried by AI progress in mathematics: keep calm and carry on studying, because there is still much research, explanation and communication of mathematics to be done, with and without LLMs.
19 min · 4,466 words
a16z's Seema Amble, Ivan Makarov and David Borecky argue AI is reshaping the CFO role from accountant to banker to builder: data stops being the bottleneck, finance engineers build their own tools, teams get smaller, planning becomes continuous, controls become product features, and finance's mandate grows.
9 min · 2,003 words
The Rise and Fall of the Plasma Screen
Brian Potter traces plasma displays from the University of Illinois PLATO terminals of the 1960s through their run as the premier flat-panel TV technology to their displacement by LCDs, and what the story says about how technologies win and lose.
8 min · 1,823 words
demoscene-recomp: classic PC demoscene productions running natively in the browser
demoscene-recomp runs Future Crew's Unreal and Second Reality, Triton's Crystal Dream II and NoooN's Stars in the browser by recording every executed x86 block in an emulator, translating it one-for-one into cycle-timed C, compiling to WebAssembly with timer, VGA and Sound Blaster models, and checking it event for event.
1 min · 221 words
Why did Warriors Suppress Love?
Alice Evans asks whether patriarchy was inevitable, drawing on ethnographies from New Guinea, Amazonia and elsewhere to argue that cooperation beyond kin was often fraternal: warrior societies used initiation rituals, men's houses, secret societies and misogyny to keep men loyal to each other rather than to their wives.
13 min · 3,029 words