This week
- We Live in the Dependently Typed Future Now In the thirty-four days between the fourth of September and the seventh of October, the following things happened. Claude formalized Fermat's Last Theorem in Lean. OpenAI announced a finite-time blowup for the Navier-Stokes equations,...
Last week
- Everyone knows how to read a book. Beginning at the first page, you read each word in order, stopping periodically to think, until you arrive at the last word…
About a month ago
- Poor bottlenecks. Always seen as problematic, antithetical to efficiency. But bottlenecks aren’t universally bad. Think about it: a bottle’s neck is designed to constrain the amount of liquid that can flow out. A decrease in bandwidth is its entire purpose! Otherwise an...
- Sep 14, 2026I watched Alexis King's Constructive Data Modeling talk and was surprised by how simply the Parse, don't validate author and former Haskell compiler contributor defines what a type system is for, which features are necessary, and how precisely you should model your...
about 1 month ago
- On the Navier–Stokes Millennium Prize Problem introduces an impressive result from OpenAI, who used an unreleased model to produce a resolution to the Navier–Stokes existence and smoothness problem, one of …
- The difference between a medicine and a poison is dosage. Often we talk about certain habits, in programming or life, are good or bad. But few things are simple binaries. Some vary with context: reading a book is a good thing sitting in my garden, but not while driving my car....
2 months ago
- For much of human history, we’ve evaluated code quality via code review: someone reads what you wrote and makes sure it’s clean, thoughtful, fast, understandable, and tests well. For agents, that approach doesn’t scale well; there’s just too much code for anyone to read. As a...
3 months ago
- When you’re on fire, problems are transparent: they’re solved simply by the act of looking at them. Even complicated layers of multiple problems can simply be glanced through like stacked panes of glass. But nobody can work that way all the time.
- (This blog post was adapted from the transcription obtained from my YouTube video at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l6lxgYeVZqs) When Linus Torvalds developed the first Linux kernel, he had studied the Minix sources, he had studied computer architecture, he had the base...
- In the two previous posts, we learned about chain complexes and their homology groups. We are now ready for another foundational concept needed to understand QEC from a topological perspective: in this copost, we dive into cohomology! When learning about the surface code, we saw...
- SIMD has a reputation for being complex. I've met many very good software engineers who dismiss it as something too complex to learn or a niche optimization meant for only the highest-performance software, not useful in everyday programming.
- Go's concurrency is one of the main reasons people like the language. You write go f(), send values through channels, and the runtime scheduler runs thousands of goroutines on just a few OS threads. It feels effortless.None of that machinery exists in C. Which made me wonder:...
- As a software engineer, how well do you have to understand your own codebase? My guess is that people who work on small codebases with low-turnover teams (say, Redis or games like The Witness) would say “obviously you have to understand it completely, otherwise you can’t do good...
- Before we begin, I want to say I don't care that much if you disagree with me. There's no sound precise mathematical definition of Object Oriented, no ISO standard, and no grand arbiter who decides what is and what is not OO (although I believe Casey Muratori may have applied...
4 months ago
- I submitted talk proposals about Pystd, the from-scratch written standard library for C++ (custom design, not a implementation of the ISO specification) to a bunch of conferences. Unfortunately all of them were rejected, so it's blog posting time. A controversial opinion Pretty...
- A lot of fast code starts as a boring loop.Modern hardware can perform the same operation on multiple values at once (e.g. SIMD and SIMT), and sometimes we write code directly for those execution models but other times, a compiler starts with regular-looking code and rewrites it...
- For a while now I've used a reference blog called #pondlife to explore various tools and ideas for constructing sites.
- Prism: An Impure Functional Language With Typed Effects This is going to be a very nerdy post, so bear with me. Here is the shortest version of the pitch: fn fib(n) = var a := 0 var b := 1 var i := 0 while i < n do let t = a + b a := b b := t i += 1 a This is a mutable loop with...
- In the previous post, we introduced algebraic topology through one of its most important objects: chain complexes. We saw how chain complexes can be constructed from cellulations of manifolds and how they give rise to CSS codes. But the main reason both mathematicians and...
- Lately I have been working around sandboxing, storage, and networking, and a lot of that work keeps coming back to files, which makes sense since Unix has organized itself around everything is a file for over fifty years. Your terminal and random number generator are device...
- One of the many nice language features in Python are keyword arguments. They make some types of APIs concise and readable. Like so: Unfortunately C does not have keyword arguments and, by extension, neither does C++. Adding them as a language feature would take 15-20 years of...
- Technical debt lives in your code. Cognitive debt lives in your head. Intent debt lives in the artifacts you never wrote - the goals, constraints and rationale that explain why the system is the way it is. It's the one kind of debt your agents can't pay down for you, and the one...
- The masterwork of Terry A. Davis is his eclectic operating system, TempleOS, which he worked on until his tragic death in 2018. In terms of technical excellence, TempleOS rates well in some respects and poorly in others. For example, it earns the achievement, coveted in OS dev...
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