vim is kiki, and emacs is bouba

impressive team working on Niteshift - curious to see where this evolves!

Gemini doesn't seem to be great at identifying prime numbers. 99,999,991 is equal to 7 x 13 x 769 x 1429

NEW from Datadog: it's Lapdog! Ever wondered what your AI agent was actually doing? Our latest free project runs locally and traces reasoning and tool calls in Codex, Claude Code, and Pi. You can now see what your agent is REALLY doing, live: lapdog.datadoghq.com/

I strongly believe there are entire companies right now under heavy AI psychosis and its impossible to have rational conversations about it with them. I can't name any specific people because they include personal friends I deeply respect, but I worry about how this plays out. I lived through the great MTBF vs MTTR (mean-time-between-failure vs. mean-time-to-recovery) reckoning of infrastructure during the transition to cloud and cloud automation. All those arguments are rearing their ugly heads again but now its... the whole software development industry (maybe the whole world, really). It's frightening, because the psychosis folks operate under an almost absolute "MTTR is all you need" mentality: "its fine to ship bugs because the agents will fix them so quickly and at a scale humans can't do!" We learned in infrastructure that MTTR is great but you can't yeet resilient systems entirely. The main issue is I don't even know how to bring this up to people I know personally, because bringing this topic up leads to immediately dismissals like "no no, it has full test coverage" or "bug reports are going down" or something, which just don't paint the whole picture. We already learned this lesson once in infrastructure: you can automate yourself into a very resilient catastrophe machine. Systems can appear healthy by local metrics while globally becoming incomprehensible. Bug reports can go down while latent risk explodes. Test coverage can rise while semantic understanding falls. Changes happens so fast that nobody notices the underlying architecture decaying. I worry.

I'm interested in "trapped buildings": those that couldn't be built today (because of zoning and code changes) but also can't be substantially modified or demolished (because of historic protection rules). One of those phenomena that really makes one wonder what exactly we're trying to do. Has anyone ever estimated what fraction of buildings in major cities fall into this category? When I asked Claude about San Francisco, it concluded: "If forced to give a single number with a single confidence rating: roughly 100,000 buildings — about two-thirds of San Francisco's physical structures — sit in the trap as a practical matter. Confidence: moderate. The number could be 70,000 or 130,000 depending on how strictly you operationalize "can't be substantially modified.""

Here's Looking at Euclid by Helen Friel. Helen Friel is a paper engineer and she make beautiful things. Look at these paper sculptures of Oliver Byrne's version of Euclid's Elements. 😍

This is the the quote I've been citing a lot recently.

New personal best for running a half marathon! I didn't get greatest sleep and only did a handful of training runs in the weeks before - but still feeling proud of the results. Looking forward to more races!

You cannot think your way to a perfect design. Only building and testing, over many iterations, can reveal the flaws in your mental model and provide the feedback you need to create the best design possible.

Over the last couple weeks, I've been experimenting with a new way to teach folks about stability and metastable failures in distributed systems.

Excited to announce Claude for Open Source ❤️ We're giving 6 months of free Claude Max 20x to open source maintainers and core contributors. If you maintain a popular project or contribute across open source, please apply! claude.com/contact-sales/cla…

I started a software research company

THE UNBRIDLED GREATNESS OF TRAINS WILL ENDURE FOR A MILLION YEARS

@PostgreSQL has long powered core @OpenAI products like ChatGPT and the API. Over the past year, our production load grew 10× and keeps rising. Today we run a single primary with nearly 50 read replicas in production, delivering low double-digit millisecond p99 client-side latency and five-nines availability. In our latest OpenAI Engineering blog, we unpack the optimizations we made to to scale @Azure PostgreSQL to millions of queries per second for more than 800M ChatGPT users. Check out the full post here: openai.com/index/scaling-pos…

It's 2026. AI writes most of my code. Now what?

New blog post! Writing mutexes from scratch in Go rybicki.io/blog/2026/01/01/m…

TIL reentrant locks are considered harmful? These are locks that are OK to call .acquire() on by the same thread more than once. For example, Java provides ReentrantLock out of the box in java.util.concurrent.locks. But they aren't available in Go: groups.google.com/g/golang-n…

Happy New Year all!