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The internet is full of people dismissing lines of code as a measurement. People say things like

Lines of code written has been firmly established over the decades as a largely meaningless metric.

and

(Continue reading the full article on the web.)

I have been doing this for years, and the hardest parts of the job were never about typing out code. I have always struggled most with understanding systems, debugging things that made no sense, designing architectures that wouldn't collapse under heavy load, and making dec...

A financially motivated data theft and extortion group is attempting to inject itself into the Iran war, unleashing a worm that spreads through poorly secured cloud services and wipes data on infected systems that use Iran's time zone or have Farsi set as the default language.

Today's links Understaffing as a form of enshittification: A way to shift value from workers, patients and shoppers to investors. Hey look at this: Delights to delectate. Object permanence: Marvel v "superhero"; What's a photocopier?; "Up Against It"; "Medusa's Web"; AI can't...

Last month I added a feature I call beats to this blog, pulling in some of my other content from external sources and including it on the homepage, search and various archive pages on the site.

On any given day these frequently outnumber my regular posts. They were looking a little bit thin and were lacking any form of explanation beyond a link, so I've added the ability to annotate them with a "note" which now shows up as part of their display.

Here's what that looks like for the content I published yesterday:

I've also updated the /atom/everything/ Atom feed to include any beats that I've attached notes to.

Tags: atom, blogging, site-upgrades

Research: Starlette 1.0 skill

See Experimenting with Starlette 1.0 with Claude skills.

Tags: starlette

Research: PCGamer Article Performance Audit

Stuart Breckenridge pointed out that PC Gamer Recommends RSS Readers in a 37MB Article That Just Keeps Downloading, highlighting a truly horrifying example of web bloat that added up to 100s more MBs thanks to auto-playing video ads. I decided to have Claude Code for web use Rodney to investigate the page - prompt here.

Tags: web-performance, rodney

Research: JavaScript Sandboxing Research

Aaron Harper wrote about Node.js worker threads, which inspired me to run a research task to see if they might help with running JavaScript in a sandbox. Claude Code went way beyond my initial question and produced a comparison of isolated-vm, vm2, quickjs-emscripten, QuickJS-NG, ShadowRealm, and Deno Workers.

Tags: sandboxing, javascript, nodejs, claude-code

Tool: DNS Lookup

TIL that Cloudflare's 1.1.1.1 DNS service (and 1.1.1.2 and 1.1.1.3, which block malware and malware + adult content respectively) has a CORS-enabled JSON API, so I had Claude Code build me a UI for running DNS queries against all three of those resolvers.

Tags: dns, cors, cloudflare

Tool: Merge State Visualizer

Bram Cohen wrote about his coherent vision for the future of version control using CRDTs, illustrated by 470 lines of Python.

I fed that Python (minus comments) into Claude and asked for an explanation, then had it use Pyodide to build me an interactive UI for seeing how the algorithms work.

Tags: vcs, pyodide, bram-cohen, crdt

Starlette 1.0 is out! This is a really big deal. I think Starlette may be the Python framework with the most usage compared to its relatively low brand recognition because Starlette is the foundation of FastAPI, which has attracted a huge amount of buzz that seems to have ov...

Kabushikigaisha Hitachi Seisaku-sho

I shipped some updates to my notes site. Nothing huge. Just small stuff. But what is big stuff except a bunch of small stuff combined? So small stuff is important too. What follows is a bunch of tiny details you probably don’t care about, but they were all decisions I had to...

Het Internationaal Energie Agentschap zegt dat we zuinig aan moeten doen vanwege de oorlogen in het Midden Oosten. Ministers in Den Haag zeggen dat het niet hoeft, want er zijn hier geen tekorten (!). Doet wel erg denken aan ‘COVID blijft in Brabant’. Kennelijk een Nederlandse traditie!
Maar, natuurlijk komen die tekorten ook naar ons toe, de benzine is nu al stervensduur. Maar heeft het zin om nu in de zomer slim met energie te doen?

I've mentioned previously my great affection for Alpha Microsystems hardware, which are rather obscure computers nowadays, but back in the 1980s and 1990s were fairly sophisticated 68000-based multiuser systems that turned up in all kinds of vertical markets. For example, my...

Here's a mildly dystopian prompt I've been experimenting with recently: "Profile this user", accompanied by a copy of their last 1,000 comments on Hacker News. Obtaining those comments is easy. The Algolia Hacker News API supports listing comments sorted by date that have a ...

Agentic Engineering Patterns > Git is a key tool for working with coding agents. Keeping code in version control lets us record how that code changes over time and investigate and reverse any mistakes. All of the coding agents are fluent in using Git's features, both ...

Turbo Pascal 3.02A, deconstructed In Things That Turbo Pascal is Smaller Than James Hague lists things (from 2011) that are larger in size than Borland's 1985 Turbo Pascal 3.02 executable - a 39,731 byte file that somehow included a full text editor IDE and Pascal compiler. ...

Congrats to the @cursor_ai team on the launch of Composer 2!

We are proud to see Kimi-k2.5 provide the foundation. Seeing our model integrated effectively through Cursor's continued pretraining & high-compute RL training is the open model ecosystem we love to support.

Note: Cursor accesses Kimi-k2.5 via @FireworksAI_HQ hosted RL and inference platform as part of an authorized commercial partnership.

— Kimi.ai @Kimi_Moonshot, responding to reports that Composer 2 was built on top of Kimi K2.5

Tags: kimi, generative-ai, ai, cursor, llms, ai-in-china

Dave Rupert puts words to the feeling in the air: the unspoken promise of AI is that you can automate away all the tasks and people who stand in your way. Sometimes I feel like there’s a palpable tension in the air as if we’re waiting to see whether AI will replace designer...