Today
- 23 Feb, 2026 There's a conspiracy theory that suggests that since around 2016 most web activity is automated. This is called Dead Internet Theory, and while I think they may have jumped the gun by a few years, it's heading that way now that LLMs can simulate online interactions...
- Do you want to run OpenClaw? It may be fascinating, but it also raises significant security dangers. Jim Gumbley, one of my go-to sources on security, has some advice on how to mitigate the risks. While there is no proven safe way to run high-permissioned agents today, there are...
- How many millions of times have you seen this pattern in Go where a variable is pre-created just to make a pointer to it down the line? There is a high chance your codebase includes a utility to do that. // Something like this a := 123 aPtr := &a // Or like this func Pointer[T...
- 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. February 23, 2026 My path through programming has largely involved strategic avoidance: of complexity, fragility, excessive moving...
- If I can make it smaller, I should. If I can make it dumber, I should. Smaller, dumber things have more applications, go more places, and require less maintenance....
- Speculation about what’s really going on inside a tech company is almost always wrong. When some problem with your company is posted on the internet, and you read people’s thoughts on it, their thoughts are almost always ridiculous. For instance, they might blame product...
- I had a small, intrusive realization the other day that computers and the internet are probably bad for me. I mean that beyond the general advice to touch grass. From an ADHD and generalized anxiety perspective, computers and the internet have become an endless supply of poison...
- SITUATION: there are 14 competing AI labs. “We can’t trust any of these people with super-intelligence. We need to build it ourselves to ensure it’s done right!" “YEAH!” SOON: there are 15 competing AI labs. (See: xkcd on standards.) The irony: “we’re the responsible ones” is...
- How working within hard limits produced some of the most elegant software in history, and what we can learn from it....
Yesterday
- February 22, 2026 Here is the most spectacular demo of present AI systems: pull out your phone, initiate Gemini’s live voice mode, say “please translate this conversation between English and Japanese”, and allow the system to act as a responsive and competent live...
- If code is free, why aren’t all apps native? The state of coding agents can be summed up by this fact Claude spent $20k on an agent swarm implementing (kinda) a C-compiler in Rust, but desktop Claude is an Electron app. If you’re unfamiliar, Electron is a coding framework for...
This week
- Your pricing page promises usage-based credits and hybrid plans. Your billing system runs on two duct-taped Stripe subscriptions and a spreadsheet. Everyone changed their pricing in 2025. Almost nobody changed what's behind it. The post Your pricing sucks (and your billing...
- 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. February 20, 2026 Here’s an interesting and surprising nugget in a recent post by Justin Duke, he of Buttondown: From both onboarding...
- 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. February 20, 2026 Here’s a gimlet post from Benn Stancil, on this weird manic moment: Vertigo is the sensation of spinning. It is...
- I’ve been wanting to add indications of my various other online activities to my blog for a while now. I just turned on a new feature I’m calling “beats” (after …
- Optimal Caverna Gameplay via Formal Methods You know what's better than gloating after winning a board game? Winning every possible board game. And you know what's better than that? Having a machine-checked proof that you win every possible board game. Caverna: The Cave Farmers...
- I first learned of systems thinking in the domain of city planning, and that is apparently also where the idea comes from. It was described to me in the context of building new residential buildings and effects on local bird populations. Birds don’t always perceive glass...
- I try to limit my time on stage these days, but one exception this year is at DDD Europe. I’ve been involved in Domain-Driven Design, since its very earliest days, having the good fortune to be a sounding board for Eric Evans when he wrote his seminal book. It’ll be fun to be...
- If you've hung around agile circles for long, you've probably heard about the concept of servant leadership, that managers should think of themselves as supporting the team, removing blocks, protecting them from the vagaries of corporate life. That's never sounded quite right to...
- 17 Feb, 2026 Update (Feb 18, 2026): After a productive discussion on Reddit and additional benchmarking, I found that the solutions I originally proposed (batched writes or using a synchronous connection) don't actually help. The real issue is simpler and more fundamental than I...
- In this new AI world, “taste” is the thing everyone claims is the new supreme skill. But I think “care” is the one I want to see in the products I buy. Can you measure care? Does scale drive out care? If a product conversation is reduced to being arbitrated exclusively by...
- I’ll start with some more tidbits from the Thoughtworks Future of Software Development Retreat ❄ ❄ We were tired after the event, but our marketing folks forced Rachel Laycock and I to do a quick video. We’re often asked if this event was about creating some kind of new...
- I hate using Workday to apply to companies. I can’t speak to all the other things they offer, but the experience for job applicants sucks.Why do I have to create a separate account for each company that uses Workday to handle applications? Why do you ask me to upload my resume...
- Write transactions can lead to lock starvation and serious performance degradation when using SQLite with SQLx, the popular async Rust SQL library. In retrospect, I feel like this should have been obvious, but it took a little more staring at suspiciously consistent "slow...
Rows per page
