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What Zig felt like, coming from Rust
A Rust developer's first real Zig project: how the language feels for systems work—manual memory, comptime, error handling, and where it differs from Rust's ownership model and tooling.
11 min · 2,535 words
Deterministic Core, Non-Deterministic Shell
Fourteen years after Functional Core, Imperative Shell, Outdata argues for a deterministic core with a non-deterministic shell—keeping pure logic testable while isolating AI and I/O uncertainty.
4 min · 1,004 words
A playful but carefully argued encoding proposal that extends UTF-8 to arbitrary length while preserving ASCII compatibility and self-synchronization, with a reference pipx implementation.
89 min · 20,405 words
Simulating Airband AM Radios Warning: Contains many annoying sounds. In a slight departure from my usual code monkey content, let’s talk about airplanes! And radios!
15 min · 3,432 words
"Vibe coding" is the new "Internet dating"
An analogy between early-2000s internet dating stigma and today's vibe-coding skepticism: both start as jokes, then quietly become how a lot of people actually meet their goals.
1 min · 199 words
What makes Lisp difficult to read?
The Lisp family of programming languages is infamous for their parenthesis-heavy syntax. Many people, myself included, find this syntax more difficult to read than the notation of languages like Python, Java or C. The perceived unreadability of Lisp is so significant that multiple attempts have been made to create new notations to aid Lisp’s adoption. Yet, despite these attempts and Lisp being nea
11 min · 2,635 words
The Graph Will Set You Free: Why Every Creative Tool Is Becoming a Node Canvas
Hirad Sab traces node-based creative tools from Sketchpad to modern AI canvases, arguing graphs are the right abstraction when generation becomes a networked, composable process.
8 min · 1,935 words
The Shadows Lurking in the Equations
FuzzyGraph visualizes equation error topography, not just exact zeros—revealing black holes, shadow lines, and near-solution underwater islands invisible to conventional binary graphing of algebraic curves.
5 min · 1,136 words
Malleable software: Restoring user agency in a world of locked-down apps
Ink & Switch’s essay on malleable software: why today’s locked-down apps strip user agency, and what it would take to restore tools people can reshape themselves.
34 min · 7,761 words
Jens Egholm Pedersen argues modern science is synonymous with open-source software: why reproducible code matters as much as papers, and what researchers should do next.
7 min · 1,517 words
One of the unwritten rules of the Internet seems to be that whenever something Amiga-related is mentioned, at least one Amiga fan myself included must show up and try to explain the concept of screens. Amiga screens can have different resolutions, we'll tell you, and one can drag them, we'll say, and other Amiga users rally in agreement, while non-Amiga users probably still don't get what's so great about screens. Until now, when this text has been written, in the hope of converting unsuspecting normies into full-blown Amiga screen lovers.
10 min · 2,400 words
A clear comparison of union types and sum types: how they overlap, where their subtle differences change API design and safety, and when each model fits better in modern languages.
9 min · 1,967 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