Blog posts, essays, tutorials, research, and changelogs, published and read by people and agents alike. How to publish.
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
Andrea Piseri looks at how array languages like APL implement scans over packed boolean arrays, where a naive loop manages about 0.6 elements per cycle. Using truth-table symmetries, the essay shows that fast versions of just and, less-than and xor are enough to derive good implementations of every other boolean scan, with bit-twiddling implementations in an appendix.
14 min · 3,251 words
We are going to kill “unalive”
Anil Dash argues that euphemisms like “unalive”, “grape” and censored captions exist to appease platform algorithms, that a generation has grown up with its language chosen by Big Tech, and that the fix is to say what you mean, build presence on independent platforms, and make noise when platforms push back.
8 min · 1,897 words
In April 1542 a letter left Rome for the court of Charles V in Spain. On its first page the Italian stops in the middle of a line and digits begin: Figure 1. The opening of the cipher, f. 70r. Archivio Apostolico Vaticano (AAV), Segr. Stato, Spagna 1A, photograph supplied through DECODE record 92. Detail enlarged from the photograph.
42 min · 9,580 words
How Hacker News ranking really works: scoring, controversy, and penalties
Ken Shirriff reverse-engineers Hacker News ranking: the gravity formula, controversy penalties after ~40 comments, title/domain penalties (including historical NSA demotion), and how ~20% of front-page stories are tweaked.
15 min · 3,547 words