Today
- See below for links to recent things that have made me think. It’s quite the mix of mediums (animated videos, short posts, letters, and 6-hour podcasts), but it wasn’t until I gathered them that I noticed a recurring theme: sacrifice Sometimes the world imposes constraints on...
- To evaluate search we typically build a judgment list We transform clickstream data into evaluation data This labels a result......
- Trip Venturella released Mr. Chatterbox, a language model trained entirely on out-of-copyright text from the British Library. Here’s how he describes it: Mr. Chatterbox is a language model trained entirely …
- Pretext went viral for its beautiful canvas demos. But the community is showcasing the wrong feature....
Yesterday
- Apple recently updated all their OSs to 26.4, and there were plenty of Liquid Glass updates. Most of them for the better! Here are some of the changes that stood out to me, as well as a bit more grumbling about Liquid Glass in general (sorry). When I last wrote about Liquid...
This week
- I read three recent technical reports from Moonshot AI's Kimi K2.5 paper, Cursor's Composer 2 report and blog post, and Chroma's Context-1 write-up. Each report introduces something distinct. Kimi K2.5 trains an Agent Swarm where the model learns to decompose tasks into parallel...
- I’ve worked on a lot of unpopular products. At Zendesk I built large parts of an app marketplace that was too useful to get rid of but never polished enough to be loved. Now I work on GitHub Copilot, which many people think is crap1. In between, I had some brief periods where I...
- I have a new laptop—a 128GB M5 MacBook Pro, which early impressions show to be very capable for running good local LLMs. I got frustrated with Activity Monitor and decided …
- Job postings for Forward Deployed Engineers (FDEs) have surged, but many professionals don’t want the role because it’s more like solutions engineering than software development....
- According to the FT, demand for software engineers is rising again, and in relative terms is outperforming the wider jobs market. That’s the headline most people will take away. But the more important detail is that the growth is concentrated in more experienced roles, while...
- The shift from conductor to orchestrator: how to coordinate teams of AI coding agents in real-world software workflows. From subagents to Agent Teams to purpose-built orchestration tools, this talk covers the patterns, tools, and discipline required to thrive in the era of...
- A few days ago I wrote and published a blog post about how Swift interacts with C projects, using Raylib. Somehow, much to my delight, it has been posted on multiple social networks, like Reddit and Hackernews. Yesterday, again, I was bored. So I tried....
- Blog About Moonbound Shop This is a post from Robin Sloan’s lab blog & notebook. You can visit the blog’s homepage, or learn more about me. March 26, 2026 This is a genuinely interesting document: the Claude chat transcript, very well-presented, from a software developer’s...
- What about juniors? Start at the beginning. Last week I wrote about how the role of the most senior tech ICs has changed. Today, I wanted to share some thoughts on a more difficult topic: how the role of junior software engineers, folks just starting out on their career, has...
- Anthropic carried a study, done by getting its model to interview some 80,000 users to understand their opinions about AI, what they hope from it, and what they fear. Two things stood out to me. It’s easy to assume there are AI optimists and AI pessimists, divided into separate...
- This is the second chapter of my SQLAlchemy 2 in Practice book. If you'd like to support my work, I encourage you to buy this book, either directly from my store or on Amazon. Thank you! This chapter provides an overview of the most basic usage of the SQLAlchemy library to...
- Classic RAG expects a linear process 1 An LLM translates the user’s prompt into a query 2 We search on......
- It’s a popular joke among software engineers that writing overcomplicated, unmaintainable code is a pathway to job security. After all, if you’re the only person who can work on a system, they can’t fire you. There’s a related take that “nobody gets promoted for simplicity”: in...
- A JavaScript engine (e.g. V8, JavaScriptCore) executes JavaScript code. It doesn't know about things like files, HTTP requests, or timers.On the other hand, a JavaScript runtime (e.g. Node.js, Bun) is a more complete environment where JavaScript runs. It contains a JavaScript...
- Parkinson’s Law is mainly interpreted as “people fill the time available”. That line was really only a hook. The original paper is really about how organisations create extra work and headcount for themselves, regardless of whether there is more genuinely useful work to do. As...
- Big Citywide update today! I’ve added lowercase to the family, plus over 170 new characters, expanded diacritics and symbols, and a fresh round of refinements to existing letterforms, spacing, and stylistic sets. And because I’m doing things DIY Future Fonts style, this is a...
- March 25, 2026 Somewhere, some content specialist has the rather tough job of writing a monthly newsletter about alumin(i)um, and, honestly … they are doing a great job! I read the newsletter This is a sincere rec for Norsk Hydro’s newsletter—it’s fun, and more...
- Creating a subset of Go that translates to C was never my end goal. I liked writing C code with Go, but without the standard library it felt pretty limited. So, the next logical step was to port Go's stdlib to C.Of course, this isn't something I could do all at once. So I...
- Steve Krouse wrote a piece that has me nodding along: Programming, like writing, is an activity, where one iteratively sharpens what they're doing as they do it. (You wouldn't believe how many drafts I've written of this essay.) There’s an incredible amount of learning and...
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