Reflections on AI at the end of 2025
AI researchers now accept LLMs aren't just "stochastic parrots." Chain-of-thought reasoning improves outputs through internal search and RL.
AI researchers now accept LLMs aren't just "stochastic parrots." Chain-of-thought reasoning improves outputs through internal search and RL.
Writer admits to being a pen/pencil snob with too many writing utensils, but insists they have it under control.
A guide to building a transparent keyserver in under 500 lines of code, featuring privacy protections, anti-poisoning measures, and witness cosigning.
A reflection on choosing which platforms to use and which professional fights are worth engaging in.
New hobby project called RSC Explorer has been launched.
The .github folder lets you customize and configure your GitHub repositories with special settings and files.
A dripping faucet led to finding a plumber through a neighborhood chat group instead of struggling with unhelpful local stores or corporate solutions.
Cloudflare suffered another major outage from a global config change, just two weeks after a similar incident, highlighting risks of instant worldwide deployments.
Author creates a fingerprinting class for nested data structures but struggles to write comprehensive tests for all possible data shapes.
mdBook's preprocessor plugin system lets external programs modify book content before rendering, supporting any language to transform Markdown files.
Email and task overload - the author is overwhelmed by accumulated emails and chores.
Claude Code's "plan mode" conflicted with "YOLO mode" permissions, so the author developed an alternative iterative workflow using markdown files instead.
Author wishes they had more time to study various topics of interest.
Gitanjali Venkatraman published an illustrated guide on Mainframe Modernization, clearly explaining the history, challenges, and solutions with quirky visuals.
Author now posts short "fragments" on their blog instead of Twitter, since Twitter's audience has fragmented across multiple platforms after Musk's takeover.
Programming is evolving toward specification, with developers increasingly describing what they want rather than how to implement it through layers of abstraction.
Blog post shares questions the author uses to generate blog topic ideas before writing.
Author wants simple analytics to track readers without obsessing over stats, balancing the need to know they're not writing into the void.
SSDs are ~1000x faster than old spinning disks, but modern databases were designed for slow disks. What would a database built from scratch for SSDs look like?
You don't need a title to be a leader—demonstrating leadership skills can earn you one later.