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Everything filed under Programming, newest first.
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As If Yesterday, in Partly in the Right, I asked where the information comes from when an agent produces a result, and what checks it. Today I have a sharper version of that question, and a new piece of evidence to ask it about.
13 min · 2,972 words
What Heraldry and Japanese Mon Can Teach Us About Building Visual-Identity Generators
Ben Overmyer compares Western heraldry and Japanese mon as generative systems—and what those rule-bound visual languages teach about building software that invents coherent coats of arms and marks.
13 min · 3,070 words
PotemkinOS: an operating system where the model writes the userland
Gabe Ortiz’s joke-with-a-build: a Linux image with no userland—only a kernel, inference engine, C compiler, and eight tools—so the model must invent its own shell, ls, and eventually a Kubernetes facade three villages converge on.
3 min · 699 wordsagent-assisted
Watching discussions happening online, I see a frequent unfortunate tic I’ll call the Expert Asterisk. A beginner is asking for help, and experts are answering. Then in the spirit of completeness, an expert throws in a fact or detail far from the learner’s abilities or needs.
3 min · 580 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
Postgres AT TIME ZONE 'UTC' does NOT do what you think it does
A practical Postgres footgun: AT TIME ZONE 'UTC' converts timestamptz to timestamp without time zone—so month math and equality break unless you apply AT TIME ZONE twice.
2 min · 538 words
Teaching GPU programming in p5.js: now with compute shaders
Dave Pagurek brings GPU compute shaders into p5.js for teaching—why graphics education needs modern GPU abstractions, and how students can write compute shaders in a friendly creative-coding environment.
17 min · 3,974 words
A font compiler that makes every LLM token the same width—why monospace-per-token helps visualize chain-of-thought, plus an interactive preview of fonts built from a font + tokenizer pair.
7 min · 1,527 words
Modern Object Pascal Introduction for Programmers
A practical introduction to Modern Object Pascal for programmers coming from other languages: units, classes, generics, memory management, exceptions, and more—maintained by Michalis Kamburelis and the Castle Game Engine project.
75 min · 17,153 words
Felix Rieseberg reflects on software made with AI agents—what “mechanical means” changes about craft, authorship, and how engineers should think about work they no longer type by hand.
12 min · 2,730 words
Introducing Casita: A content-addressed store for source code and build artifacts
Domen Kožar introduces Casita, a content-addressed object store for source code and build artifacts—an argument for rethinking Nix-style packaging from the package manager up.
7 min · 1,723 words
Don't couple your Go code to GitHub
Iain Cambridge explains why Go import paths that hard-code github.com couple your module to a forge: how vanity import paths and module proxies let you keep fetchability without baking GitHub into every import.
3 min · 595 words
Building FynPDF on macOS, Maheep Kumar walks through failed AI UI-testing approaches (screenshots, VNC, XCUITest, generic computer-use) and why a small AXUIElement test API finally let agents drive the app in the background.
2 min · 443 words
Teaching a World Model to Play Pokémon
Training a JEPA-style LeWorldModel on Pokémon Red screenshots and button presses, then using CEM latent planning to select a starter—why latent collapse, SIGReg, and rollout fine-tuning mattered, and 52/100 plans succeeding after tuning.
2 min · 574 words
Digital Audio on the ZX Spectrum's 1-Bit Beeper
Michael Martin wraps a ZX Spectrum series with a practical write-up on coaxing high-quality digital audio from the machine's 1-bit beeper—covering techniques, trade-offs, and surprisingly good results on every Spectrum model.
21 min · 4,768 words
LLMs: Semantic Translation Machines
KnorpelSenf reframes LLMs as probabilistic semantic translators—great at moving an idea between representations, weak at inventing facts—and shows how that lens guided nearly all of a hard distance-matrix rewrite in Rust with LLM help.
2 min · 427 words
Rusty thoughts on "Parse, don't validate"
Eli Bendersky revisits Alexis King's 'Parse, don't validate' idea through a Rust lens—how types can carry parsed invariants, where validation still sneaks in, and practical patterns for keeping illegal states unrepresentable.
6 min · 1,485 words
LuaRocks.org Security Incident, September 2026
LuaRocks discloses a remote code execution vulnerability on LuaRocks.org exploited between July and August 2026, the coordinated fix, credential rotation, package integrity checks, and what users should do next.
4 min · 917 words
Infecting the Steam Link with NixOS
While rummaging through my closet the other day I discovered a [Steam Link](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steam_Link Hardware_device) I had bought on flash sale way back in 2018 still dutifully humming away all these years later. It occured to me that having an always on low power Arm device with Ethernet, WiFi, Bluetooth, and several USB ports would be handy, so thus began my journey to get NixOS running on the Steam Link.
13 min · 2,996 words
Go concurrency distilled This mini book provides a brief overview of many concurrency topics in Go. Each topic comes with interactive examples — feel free to experiment with them by changing the code and clicking Run . There's also a [PDF version](https://github.com/nalgeon/go conc distilled) with static examples. This is a quick refresher on Go concurrency, not a beginner's guide.
28 min · 6,445 words