Estimates are difficult for developers and product owners
Product Owner: Hey, how long do you believe Feature F will take? Developer: Idk. We haven’t even started working on it and it’s bound to stir up some old issues. Estimates come in various disguises, but when you peek under the trench coat there is always the question: “How long — and using what amount […]
Why Fighter Jets Ban 90% of C++ Features [video]
I Tried and Failed to Rebuild the 1996 Space Jam Website with Claude
Can Claude Recreate the 1996 Space Jam Website? No. Or at least not with my prompting skills. Note: please help, because I’d like to preserve this website forever and there’s no other way to do it besides getting Claude to recreate it from a screenshot. Believe me, I’m an engineering manager with a computer science […]
Locks in PostgreSQL
We’ve already discussed some object-level locks (specifically, relation-level locks), as well as row-level locks with their connection to object-level locks and also explored wait queues, which are not always fair. We have a hodgepodge this time. We’ll start with deadlocks (actually, I planned to discuss them last time, but that article was excessively long in […]
Scala 3 slowed us down?
Is this clickbait? Not really. Is this the fault of the language or the compiler? Definitely not. Rather, it was part of a rushed migration. Sharing the lessons learned in the process. I was refreshing one of our services. Part of this process was to migrate codebase from Scala 2.13 to Scala 3. I’ve done […]
Dollar-stores overcharge cash-strapped customers while promising low prices
On a cloudy winter day, a state government inspector named Ryan Coffield walked into a Family Dollar store in Windsor, North Carolina, carrying a scanner gun and a laptop. Inside the store, which sits along a three-lane road in a county of peanut growers and poultry workers, Coffield scanned 300 items and recorded their shelf […]
Goodbye, Microsoft: Schleswig-Holstein Relies on Open Source and Saves Millions
(Bild: Imilian/Shutterstock.com) Schleswig-Holstein saves 15 million euros in license costs by migrating from Microsoft to free software. The conversion is significantly cheaper. The state administration of Schleswig-Holstein is making a remarkable U-turn in its IT strategy and consistently relying on open source [1]. After the migration from proprietary Microsoft software to free solutions was initially accompanied […]
At least 50 hallucinated citations found in ICLR 2026 submissions
Title Average Review Rating Paper Link Citation Check Scan Link Example of Verified Hallucination Comment TamperTok: Forensics-Driven Tokenized Autoregressive Framework for Image Tampering Localization 8.0 TamperTok: Forensics-Driven Tokenized Autoregressive Framework for Image Tampering Localization | OpenReview https://app.gptzero.me/documents/4645494f-70eb-40bb-aea7-0007e13f7179/share Chong Zou, Zhipeng Wang, Ziyu Li, Nan Wu, Yuling Cai, Shan Shi, Jiawei Wei, Xia Sun, Jian Wang, […]
The Anatomy of a macOS App
Programs running in windowing environments, applications as we used to know them, have more complicated requirements than those run from a command line. Rather than embed all the resources they require for windows, menus and the rest in a single file, Mac OS broke new ground by putting those into resources stored in the app’s […]
Google Titans architecture, helping AI have long-term memory
The Transformer architecture revolutionized sequence modeling with its introduction of attention, a mechanism by which models look back at earlier inputs to prioritize relevant input data. However, computational cost increases drastically with sequence length, which limits the ability to scale Transformer-based models to extremely long contexts, such as those required for full-document understanding or genomic […]