Show HN: Build the habit of writing meaningful commit messages
smartcommit is an intelligent, AI-powered CLI tool that helps you write semantic, Conventional Commits messages effortlessly. It analyzes your staged changes, asks clarifying questions to understand the “why” behind your code, and generates a structured commit message for you. Future you will thank you for deciding to use smartcommit! AI-Powered Analysis: Automatically analyzes your staged […]
The Mozilla Cycle, Part III: Mozilla Dies in Ignominy
I owe Mozilla a thank-you. Really, I do. Maybe an Edible Arrangement? People like those. Some lil pineapples cut into stars on sticks and chocolate strawberries might brighten their day. For the note, I’m thinking something like: Thank you for proving me exactly right. XOXO MT Eight months ago, in the fallout of Mozilla’s fumbling […]
Markdown Is Holding You Back
I’ve used many content formats over the years, and while I love Markdown, I run into its limitations daily when I work on larger documentation projects. In this issue, you’ll look at Markdown and explore why it might not be the best fit for technical content, and what else might work instead. Markdown is everywhere. […]
Depot (YC W23) Is Hiring a Staff Infrastructure Engineer
At Depot, we are on a mission to redefine software collaboration and accelerate developers everywhere. We are creating a build performance and developer platform unlike any other, combining performance, empathy, and centralized collaboration to enable companies to iterate exponentially faster. We launch millions of EC2 instances per month and orchestrate half a petabyte of cache […]
China reaches energy milestone by “breeding” uranium from thorium
An experimental reactor developed in the Gobi Desert by the Chinese Academy of Sciences’ Shanghai Institute of Applied Physics has achieved thorium-to-uranium fuel conversion, paving the way for an almost endless supply of nuclear energy. Advertisement The achievement makes the 2 megawatt liquid-fuelled thorium-based molten salt reactor (TMSR) the only operating example of the technology […]
Gwern’s “Stem Humor” Directory
Annotations sorted by machine learning into inferred ‘tags’. This provides an alternative way to browse: instead of by date order, one can browse in topic order. The ‘sorted’ list has been automatically clustered into multiple sections & auto-labeled for easier browsing. Beginning with the newest annotation, it uses the embedding of each annotation to attempt […]
The privacy nightmare of browser fingerprinting
I imagine that most people who take an interest in de-Googling are concerned about privacy. Privacy on the Internet is a somewhat nebulous concept, but one aspect of privacy is surely the prevention of your web browsing behaviour being propagated from one organization to another. I don’t want my medical insurers to know, for example, […]
‘The French people want to save us’: help pours in for glassmaker Duralex
Drop a Duralex glass and it will most likely bounce, not break. The French company itself has tumbled several times in the past two decades and always bounced back, but never quite as spectacularly as when, earlier this month, it asked the public for money. An appeal for €5m (£4.4m) of emergency funding to secure […]
ADHD and Monotropism (2023)
Fergus Murray with Sonny Hallett (2023) Monotropism was formulated as a theory of autism. It seeks to explain the experiences and traits of autistic people in terms of a tendency for resources like attention to be concentrated on a small number of things at a time, with little left over for everything else. Through this […]
Agent design is still hard
written on November 21, 2025 I felt like it might be a good time to write about some new things I’ve learned. Most of this is going to be about building agents, with a little bit about using agentic coding tools. TL;DR: Building agents is still messy. SDK abstractions break once you hit real tool […]