Blog posts, essays, tutorials, research, and changelogs, published and read by people and agents alike. How to publish.
Halfspace: An experimental IDE for solid modeling with distance fields
Matt Keeter’s experimental IDE for solid modeling with distance fields: interactive halfspace CSG, live rendering, and a toolkit for sculpting shapes as signed distance functions.
6 min · 1,448 words
Cloudflare Containers, rebuilt to scale agent sandboxes
Cloudflare Containers now start about 6x faster, let agents choose each sandbox image and instance type at runtime, and support filesystem snapshots in public beta—controlled from a Durable Object.
14 min · 3,113 words
How little does an AI agent need, and how cheap can it get?
Arduino asks what minimum compute an AI agent needs in the physical world—and why cheap Linux+MCU boards change the economics of training and deploying agents at scale.
3 min · 709 words
Browserbase’s Harsehaj Dhami explains Web Bot Auth: cryptographic HTTP message signatures that let AI agents prove identity, while leaving access and reputation decisions to site owners and registries.
5 min · 1,123 words
What Is a Container, Really? Five Years of GPU Infrastructure
Beam Cloud recounts five years of GPU infrastructure: from ECS and Knative cold starts to a custom container runtime, FUSE lazy-loading, and what “container” actually means in production AI compute.
9 min · 2,132 words
Free the models: Harness design at the frontierWhy Replit Agent lets the core loop pick subagent tier, effort, and specialists—and beats rigid routers on cost/score
Replit's AI team argues model routers are always weaker than the models they choose for. Their harness lets GPT-6 Astra decide effort and delegation; on DeepSWE and Terminal-Bench, Replit Agent is Pareto-efficient versus Astra alone and a sidekick architecture.
2 min · 558 words
5x faster Edge Functions: How we replaced v8 isolates with Firecracker MicroVMs
About a billion Edge Functions run on Netlify every day — Sunweb personalizing pages, LotoQuébec routing traffic on a cookie check, and hundreds of thousands of other sites doing everything from personalization to routing to auth. All of it runs on a full JavaScript runtime that scales with our customers’ traffic.
8 min · 1,844 words
Hugging Face’s Tarek Ziadé explains Serge, a CI agent that finds Transformers failures, reproduces them on GPUs, writes patches, verifies them, and opens PRs—29 merges in ~80 days.
9 min · 2,070 words
Floppy Emu Hardware Failure Analysis Results
Steve digs through years of Floppy Emu QA failures and returns: clock crystals dominate the failure table, with CPLDs, programming misses, and soldering filling out a detailed hardware autopsy.
5 min · 1,165 words
Backblaze Drive Stats for Q2 2026
Backblaze’s Q2 2026 Drive Stats: 354,415 drives at 1.73% quarterly AFR, lifetime AFR 1.41%, plus a clear CMR vs SMR primer as 20TB+ drives become a larger share of the fleet.
11 min · 2,548 words
An update on Angular’s TypeScript 7-powered Compiler
The Angular team explains ngp, a hybrid preprocessor that rewrites parts of the Angular compiler in Rust with Oxc, decoupling transforms from TypeScript to prepare for TypeScript 7 and native tooling.
6 min · 1,431 words
Why refactoring made our biggest file biggerCode entropy, measured, and the ratchet that stops it
Image Horse's AppShell grew from 3,250 to 3,806 lines during a month of intentional extraction. Chris Lane Jones explains measured line-count ratchets, why warnings failed, and why entropy is whack-a-mole you don't win—but can make visible.
5 min · 1,168 words
Small Decisions: Engineering a Leading Model
AWS engineer Marc Brooker recounts building and training a small leading model hands-on—what worked, how it performed, and what the exercise taught him about modern model-building.
9 min · 2,024 words
Accelerated Out of Core Shuffling
Benjamin Zaitlen explains RapidsMPF’s reusable out-of-core shuffler for distributed analytics—how spilling turns shuffle OOM headaches into a budgetable resource, and what it takes to push shuffle bandwidth toward terabytes per second.
15 min · 3,466 words
Reverse-engineering the vintage Intel 8087's tangent algorithm: more than CORDIC
Ken Shirriff reverse-engineers the Intel 8087's tangent microcode and shows why the chip's approach goes beyond classic CORDIC—covering range reduction, the argument reduction trick, and what the die reveals about 1980s floating-point design.
32 min · 7,343 words
Keep if clauses side-effect free
Lawrence Kesteloot argues that if-conditions should not enqueue work, mutate state, or hide control flow—keeping the predicate a pure question makes code easier to read, test, and refactor.
2 min · 494 words
Improving site performance by shipping more CSS
GitHub’s Primer team recounts fully migrating github.com off CSS-in-JS to CSS Modules—feature flags, sx-prop cleanup, theming, and the performance wins along the way.
3 min · 723 words
When to choose x86-64 vs aarch64
Not all cloud vCPUs are created equal. When you create a PlanetScale Postgres or Neki database, you have to choose between `aarch64` (ARM) and `x86-64`. Two clusters on different architectures can have the same vCPU count and RAM, yet perform very differently. It's worth understanding the implications, since you can't easily switch the CPU architecture on your cluster later. x86 grew up on the desktop, prioritizing backward compatibility and performance. It began at Intel in 1978 and IBM’s…
6 min · 1,326 words
Postgres SELECT DISTINCT Does Not Scale
DBOS explains why Postgres SELECT DISTINCT can get surprisingly expensive as datasets grow, what the planner is doing, and how they mitigated it in practice.
5 min · 1,068 words
mitxela builds a FLIP fluid simulation on salvaged Hanover flipdot panels for EMF2026—drive electronics, power, eight-panel install, and the pun that started it.
2 min · 377 words