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A good design doc can save you years of development time. Writing a design doc forces you to think through important decisions before you waste time on the wrong implementation or paint yourself into a corner. It’s also the best way to coordinate design decisions among teammates and partner teams.

I’ve written design docs as a developer at Google, Microsoft, and within my own companies. The specifics vary, but the underlying principles remain the same. A design doc should articulate the hard problems you’re solving and help your teammates give you feedback.

Tool: OPFS + Pyodide test harness

I've been pondering if Datasette Lite - the Python Datasette application run entirely in the browser using Pyodide and WebAssembly - might be able to edit persistent SQLite files stored on the user's computer.

That's what OFPS (Origin Private File System) is for, so I had Claude Code for web build me this playground UI to try it out in different browsers.

Tags: browsers, pyodide, datasette-lite

Two men pleaded guilty in the United Kingdom this week to criminal charges stemming from an August 2024 cyberattack that crippled Transport for London, the entity responsible for the public transport network in the Greater London area. The duo were key members of a prolific cybercrime group known as Scattered Spider, and their guilty pleas came on the first day of what was expected to be a six-week trial.

Some skepticism of vitamin D skepticism

A frozen registry is the one place a package can never be patched again.

..."was having a stroke while doing a poo"

Today's links Spying on kids to save kids from spying is very, very stupid: First they came for the VPNs. Hey look at this: Delights to delectate. Object permanence: RIP Darwin's tortoise; ISPs conspire to create copyright jail; Waxy v fair use; Broken Windows is BS; Google i...

It’s crazy how much Fullmetal Alchemist mimics how AI is playing out. We pour human souls into a philosopher’s stone that we think will solve all our problems and cure death. It doesn’t exactly do this, but you can use it to create homunculi that behave like people, Chat, Claude, GLM. The homunculus is a puree of the souls that were used to create it.

Prompt Injection as Role Confusion First, I absolutely love this: This is a blog-style writeup of the paper. I wish every paper would come with one of these. Academic writing is pretty dry - the impact of a paper can be so much higher if you publish a readable version to a...

North is right. 0.52"/pixel (18'x9' field) FWHM=4.5" The pair of galaxies near the center is NGC 6285 (top) and NGC 6286 (bottom). The lower one has a distinct tidal trail below it, and a faint bridge to the upper galaxy is visible. Both sit around z=0.018. The edge...

I don’t prompt Claude anymore. I have loops running that prompt Claude and figuring out what to do. My job is to write loops. — Boris Cherny Over the last months I have watched more and more people build something on top of coding agents that feels meaningfully different f...

Last week, the Tasmanian Greens announced they’ll move for an urgent parliamentary inquiry into the AI data centres going up across the north of the state. I think this is a very good idea. These projects appear to have been approved without any specific regulations or parliamentary oversight, and the public has barely had the chance to have a say. The announcement also put a new number on the record: in Budget Estimates, under Greens questioning, Energy Minister Nick Duigan confirmed Firmus plans to draw 400 to 500 MW across two or three “AI factory” sites, which is more than Bell Bay Aluminium’s 335 MW, currently the state’s single biggest power user.

This morning on Hacker News I saw Moebius: 0.2B Lightweight Image Inpainting Framework with 10B-Level Performance, describing a small but effective inpainting model - a model where you can mark regions of an image to remove and the model imagines what should fill the space. ...

I have a copy of SICP, or as it is also known, The Wizard Book. This book is widely praised, but I can’t take the time to work my way through all of it. However, sometimes I jump into parts of it that look interesting. Today, we’ll see how to support multiple represen...

Let f be an even function with period π. Then the following remarkable theorem by Lobachevsky holds. This theorem is useful in Fourier analysis and signal processing. It’s useful to know even in the special case f(x) = 1. For a “jinc” analog, see this paper. *** Every time I see the name Lobachevsky I […]

The post Lobachevsky’s integral formula first appeared on John D. Cook.

The high schooler who developed everyone’s forums and guestbooks in 1996 didn’t really think about security when he was building all that software. But Matt’s Script Archive was more than exploits.

Today's links Good politics: Just make people's lives better. Hey look at this: Delights to delectate. Object permanence: WWII online; Xbox security blunders; Homeless bloggers; Thermal printer racing game; Robbing a bank to get healthcare in jail; Crumb v Trump; "The Blues B...

Consistency serves a purpose in visual design, but it seems to have become the purpose of a lot of visual design. Look no further than these evolutions of macOS icons (image courtesy of BasicAppleGuy): The Creator Studio icons are undeniably consistent visually: rounded r...

Over the years, I've worked for organisations with various levels of risk tolerance for business travellers. Some have been (rightly) paranoid and others have been (wrongly) placid about the threats their employees face. The fact is, individuals are often targeted for espionage, blackmail, or other state-sponsored attacks. Here's a list of some of the different advice I've received, roughly…