How I Find Problems to Solve as a Staff Engineer
Note: this post was revised after publishing for increased clarity, based on reader feedback. “How do you find problems worth working on?” a senior engineer I mentor asked me recently. He’s trying to make the jump to staff engineer and realized that the role isn’t just about doing the work he’s assigned. He also needs […]
Fable and the End of the Free Lunch
There’s some talk today about how agentic coders are balking at Anthropic’s pricing and adopting alternatives. I was reminded of a thought I had in the weeks following Fable’s release: the free lunch was over. When Moore’s Law was in effect, it didn’t make sense to ruthlessly optimize your code. In 18 months, a CPU […]
The Vibe Tax
So you have decided to start on that long-awaited, from-scratch todo app. There are millions of such apps but this will be yours. Something tailored for your unique workflow. Normally you wouldn’t even take up such an endeavour. Any handwritten code takes time. And time is one thing you don’t have. Doesn’t help that you […]
Explain it to me like I’m ten
In 2012, the creator of the xkcd cartoon Randall Munroe unveiled Up Goer Five — a detailed diagram of the Saturn V rocket, annotated using only the most common 1,000 (sorry, “ten hundred”) words in the dictionary. It was a viral hit, as was the follow-up book, Thing Explainer (2015), and it produced an intriguing […]
A website for debloated open source alternatives
Categories ★ Featured ZoneMinder GPL-2.0 –replaces Synology Surveillance Station / QNAP QVR / Blue IrisMature open NVR: motion zones, PTZ, multi-camera recording. No vendor camera cloud.2 post(s) » Newest Project Replaces License Rating Posts noise-suppression-for-voice Krisp / NVIDIA Broadcast / Nahimic GPL-3.0 ★★★★★ (2) 0 ckb-next Corsair iCUE (keyboards, mice) GPL-2.0 – 0 pymobiledevice3 iTunes […]
GLM-5.3 (open-weight) beat Anthropic/OpenAI models – for 1/5 the cost
← All posts Which Model Tops Our Leaderboard? How the LLMs did in our realworld tests. Our focus here was real tasks that real people carry out, not academic metrics. We focus on single tasks to simplify the assessment. An agentic flow is ultimately a series of such tasks. Think of these like unit tests […]
Why Sal Khan’t: On Learning by Making but Teaching by Telling
This piece was also cross-posted on the Civics of Technology blog. This piece also has a followup post that you can find at Three Questions on Questions: On Asking, Knowing and Noticing Two pieces crossed my feed recently, both about Sal Khan and the AI tutoring revolution that wasn’t. The first was Matt Barnum’s reported […]
Coconut Oil Jet Fuel Matches Kerosene’s Efficiency in Engine Tests
(Credit: Photo by Yuriy Ivanovskiyo on Shutterstock) In a Nutshell Coconut oil-derived biofuel blended with standard jet fuel achieved thermal efficiency comparable to pure jet fuel in engine testing. Higher biofuel blend ratios reduced unburned hydrocarbon emissions, which researchers linked partly to the biofuels containing none of the aromatic compounds found in conventional kerosene. Carbon […]
How Complex Systems Fail
All of the interesting systems (e.g. transportation, healthcare, power generation) are inherently and unavoidably hazardous by the own nature. The frequency of hazard exposure can sometimes be changed but the processes involved in the system are themselves intrinsically and irreducibly hazardous. It is the presence of these hazards that drives the creation of defenses against […]
Slovakia finds Russian backdoor in traffic speed cameras
Risky Bulletin Newsletter August 19, 2026 Written by Catalin Cimpanu News Editor This newsletter is brought to you by Socket Security. You can subscribe to an audio version of this newsletter as a podcast by searching for “Risky Business” in your podcatcher or subscribing via this RSS feed. You can also add the Risky Business […]