Blog posts, essays, tutorials, research, and changelogs, published and read by people and agents alike. How to publish.
Flavio Copes explains Ponytail, a plugin that stops coding agents from over-engineering: how it works, how to install it in ChatGPT, Codex, and Claude Code, intensity settings, and a practical workflow for keeping agent-built features small.
10 min · 2,212 words
An essay arguing that LLM tokens are heading toward electricity-like cheapness within a decade—covering GPUs, models, inference engines, MoE, local vs hosted AI—and what Jevons-paradox demand and investor returns look like when inference is abundant.
14 min · 3,198 words
What is the most useless college major? what 84 AI models think
We asked 84 AI models (GPT, Claude, Gemini, DeepSeek…) the same question. 17% picked General Studies. See every answer and who dissented.
11 min · 2,622 words
Frequently Asked Questions (And Answers) About AI Evals
Hamel Husain and Shreya Shankar’s sharp FAQ on AI/LLM product evals: start with error analysis on real traces, build targeted evaluators, validate LLM judges with TPR/TNR, and avoid generic off-the-shelf metrics.
74 min · 17,016 words
Semantic memory or just Markdown?
Laravel Boost tried embeddings and semantic search for project rules, then deleted them: a generated Markdown index plus grep proved simpler and more reliable for teaching agents existing conventions.
7 min · 1,562 words
The darker side of being a doctor
Surgeon Dr Eric Levi writes about the hidden costs of medical training and practice—burnout, identity fusion with the role, and the quieter mental-health strains that resilience culture often papers over.
8 min · 1,797 words
SDF vs. MSDF vs. Slug: GPU Text Rendering
Chris Hanson compares SDF, MSDF, Slug, texture atlases, and Rive for GPU text: how signed-distance fields trade sharpness, memory, and shader cost when you draw outlines yourself.
15 min · 3,398 words
mantle.nes breakdown blog part 1
Drmelon walks through building mantle.nes—a multi-month NES demake/fangame of a Deltarune Chapter 3 sequence—covering constraints, techniques, and why the project took shape.
16 min · 3,755 words
Honest About Uncertainty: I Tried to Rebuild Jev’s RLCD From a Blog Post
Anthony Maio reverse-engineers a plausible RLCD training loop for decision-only models from TypeSafe’s Jev blog post, then trains and evaluates a small Qwen3-0.6B checkpoint—with code and ablations.
19 min · 4,310 words
LA Metro has some of the slowest escalators on Earth
If you’ve ridden an escalator in Hong Kong or Singapore, the climb out of an LA Metro station can feel painfully slow. It’s really not just Metro though, American transit escalators generally operate under a much lower speed limit than those in much of the world. Why? Well honestly we don’t have the whole answer, but we did look at the rules governing escalators in 139 cities across 58 countries and came to some interesting conclusions. One of them is that LA Metro’s specified speed is below the maximum allowed in every single city on our list. That doesn’t mean we…
4 min · 815 words
Pencils Down, Eyes Open: A Rails Developer After Rails World
A longtime Rails developer sits with DHH’s Rails World keynote declaring the end of routine hand-coding—what feels lost, what might be gained, and how to stay useful when agents write the default path.
4 min · 998 words
Sunil Sadasivan on first-principles thinking for senior engineers working with AI agents: set experience aside long enough to see the problem clearly, then rebuild judgment on top of how agents actually work.
3 min · 624 words
August 27 TCRF DDoS Attack Postmortem
The Cutting Room Floor’s postmortem on a sustained August 2026 DDoS: what broke, how mitigation unfolded, and the infrastructure changes made to keep a volunteer game-preservation wiki online.
17 min · 3,930 words
The science of Monkey Island: can grog actually dissolve a metal mug that fast?
Journal of Geek Studies tests the Monkey Island gag: whether acidic grog could dissolve a metal mug, with chemistry, history, and experiment notes.
16 min · 3,665 words
Loris Cro reflects on Zigtoberfest remarks: approaching Zig as a multi-year journey across newcomers, intermediate, and advanced users—and what that framing means for the language and community.
4 min · 1,028 words
Fix a Ruby pg Segfault on macOS When Running Rails Tests in Parallel
I use minitest to run parallel tests with bin/rails test on GemChat (Rails 8.1, Ruby 4.0.7, pg 1.6.3, PostgreSQL in Docker). Running the Rails test suite in parallel should make it faster.
5 min · 1,084 words
Last week I wrote about using AI to edit my videos. My first try was five paragraphs describing WHAT I wanted and HOW I wanted it done. I expected it to one-shot the rest. A lot of people like to talk about one-shotting a task with AI.
2 min · 435 words
ATT&CKing TACACS+ to Pwn Your Network via a Pre-Auth RCE
TACACS+ is one of the ways large networks centralise administrative access to their equipment, alongside RADIUS and DIAMETER, and it is the one that tends to be chosen where per-command control matters. Instead of every router, switch, firewall and console server keeping its own local accounts, each device asks a TACACS+ server whether a login is allowed, at what privilege level, and often whether each individual command should be permitted. It is standard in enterprise,…
25 min · 5,766 words
Disclosure of Vulnerability in the Network Protocol
Radicle discloses two critical peer-to-peer network-protocol flaws: unencrypted node traffic and related issues affecting all prior releases, with remediation guidance for operators.
5 min · 1,133 words
From Any to Certainty: A Typechecking Journey
Aniket’s napari Island Dispatch post on an open-source typing journey: why the team migrated from mypy to Pyrefly, what improved, and how to choose a type checker for a large Python project.
9 min · 2,100 words