Technology Commentary

Resolving scoping and shadowing to produce unique variables for our names

Authored by: Venkatesh Wagh

Predictions for journalism; paperbacks are dead; feeling the fear.

Digital tech has flattened our experience of the world to text under a glass touchscreen, writes Amelia Wattenberger in a beautifully-illustrated essay....

When you crap in Los Angeles, it goes to the ocean through what you see above: the Hyperion sewage processing plant on the south side of LAX. Now imagine this plant as the heart of a fecosystem tha…

Weeknotes 368 - Building an AI Chair, following the recipe by James Bridle, triggered thoughts and links. This and more on ThingsCon, and the captured news of the last week.

Learn how to design a maintainable badge system starting from an MVP and progressively adding progress tracking, flexible logic, and scalable foundations.

Transform your badge system from manual updates to automatic event-driven evaluation. Learn how to decouple badge logic, create maintainable evaluators, and build systems that scale.

American NASA scientist and mathematician

Averages can fail in failure modeling large systems.

Three decades of making things on the internet

TLDR: I made a CLI tool that can resolve an IP address to a country, US state and even a city. https://github.com/jimaek/geolocation-tool It works well and confirms ipinfo's findings. Recently, I read how ipinfo finally proved what most technical people assumed: VPN providers don't actually maintain

Why AI coding is faster but the real work takes just as long

Even with the documentation on the topic, many people completely misunderstand what the context system is for, and what problem it actually solves. For those not familiar with Odin, in each scope, there is an implicit value named context. This context variable is local to each scope and is implicitly passed by pointer to any procedure call in that scope (if the procedure has the Odin calling convention). The main purpose of the implicit context system is for the ability to intercept third-party code and libraries and modify their functionality. One such case is modifying how a library allocates something or logs something. In C, this was usually achieved with the library defining macros which could be overridden so that the user could define what they wanted. However, not many libraries support this, in any language, by default which meant intercepting third-party code to see what it does and to change how it does it is generally not possible.

Event-driven architecture diagrams are great to look at: decoupled producers & consumers, message buffering, and automatic retries. But in…

56 Git command cards in a sleek poker deck design. Perfect for developers who want to learn Git commands quickly.

Ring is an innovative and practical general-purpose multi-paradigm language. The supported programming paradigms are imperative, procedural, object-oriented, declarative using nested structures, functional, meta programming and natural programming.

A deep technical dive into optimizing the NHTSA VPIC database for offline VIN decoding across Node.js, browsers, and edge computing.

Last week a request for comments (RFC) was issued around establishing an LLVM AI Tool Use Policy

In programming and software architecture, an Evolution Pattern is a reusable, high-level strategy for modifying or evolving existing software systems over time. An evolution pattern tries to keep software relevant for old and new users by whatever means are available, as new needs arise. Versioni

Load balancing is the process of distributing traffic among multiple servers to improve a service or application's performance. Learn how load balancers work.

You have to find new ways of going faster.

If you experience headaches and eye strain, these might be worth a shot.

Dave Winer, OG blogger, podcaster, developed first apps in many categories. Old enough to know better. It's even worse than it appears.

When Anthropic introduced Agent Skills, I was initially a bit skeptical of the problem they solved–can we just use prompts and tools?–but I’ve subsequently come to appreciate them, and have explicitly implemented skills in our internal agent framework. This post talks about the problem skills solves, how the engineering team at Imprint implemented them, how well they’ve worked for us, and where we might work with them next. This is part of the Building an internal agent series.

One of the most useful initial extensions I made to our workflows was injecting associated images into the context window automatically, to improve the quality of responses to tickets and messages that relied heavily on screenshots. This was quick and made the workflows significantly more powerful. More recently, there are a number of workflows attempting to operate on large complex files like PDFs or DOCXs, and the naive approach of shoving them into the context window hasn’t worked particularly well. This post explains how we’ve adapted the principle of progressive disclosure to allow our internal agents to work with large files.

One of my provocative claims was that the lifespan of the chips may be significantly shorter than the accounting treatment given to them.

The wind and rain has swung east again and it’s stormy and very dark out, and so I’m out of the house and spending the day at the library which is such a nice bright and warm place to b…