The seed oil panic is hurting my cardiac patients
She came in wanting to do right by her husband. He’d been losing weight — the kind of weight loss that says something’s wrong — and she’d spent weeks trying to reverse it. Cream in his coffee, butter in his soups, all the gristle he could handle. She’d read somewhere that fat was the most […]
Microsoft’s 6502 BASIC is now Open Source (2025)
Today, we’re opening the vault—for real. For decades, fragments and unofficial copies of Microsoft’s 6502 BASIC have circulated online, mirrored on retrocomputing sites, and preserved in museum archives. Coders have studied the code, rebuilt it, and even run it in modern systems. Today, for the first time, we’re opening the hatch and officially releasing the […]
Constraint Decay: The Fragility of LLM Agents in Back End Code Generation
Abstract:Large Language Model (LLM) agents demonstrate strong performance in autonomous code generation under loose specifications. However, production-grade software requires strict adherence to structural constraints, such as architectural patterns, databases, and object-relational mappings. Existing benchmarks often overlook these non-functional requirements, rewarding functionally correct but structurally arbitrary solutions. We present a systematic study evaluating how well agents […]
Childhood Computing
By Susam Pal on 24 May 2026 I recently stumbled upon a nice blog post titled Childhood Computing. It made me think about my own childhood computing experience. I am much older than the author of the aforementioned post but like them, I love computers too. I have for most of my life. In 1992, […]
Mastering Dyalog APL
The “Mastering Dyalog APL” book is the de facto standard for people who are looking to learn Dyalog APL from a book. In today’s world technology changes rapidly, so a printed book about a programming language is at risk of becoming outdated. Attention This online version is a work in progress. It is missing chapters […]
Greg Brockman: Inside the 72 Hours That Almost Killed OpenAI
The AI race, the future of AGI, and the inside story of OpenAI. Greg Brockman is the co-founder and President of OpenAI, the company behind ChatGPT and GPT-5. He was the first engineer at Stripe before leaving in 2015 to help start OpenAI. In this rare conversation, Greg goes inside the moments that built, and nearly […]
Amazon Web Services – Four Years and Out
Today marks four years since I joined AWS. My last day will be Friday. I have to say being fired from AWS is actually a relief. There have been a lot of changes to the company since I joined in 2022, and the company I wanted to work for is no longer the same company. […]
The C64 Dead Test Font
May 24, 2026 A deep dive into the font of the “Dead Test” diagnostic cartridge of the C64, including an Easter egg, a look into the implementation, and, finally, some Commodore 8-bit character ROMs for download. Recently, having a cursory look around at the Web, this yielded an alarming result: there’s apparently no documentation of […]
Alexander Grothendieck Revolutionized 20th-Century Mathematics
What Albert Einstein was to 20th-century physics, Alexander Grothendieck was to 20th-century mathematics. He is much less well known because math gets technical even more quickly than physics does. But as with Einstein, Grothendieck’s impact came not just from his own results, revolutionary though they were. His work also reoriented his entire discipline in radical […]
The day my ping took countermeasures
Once my holidays had passed, I found myself reluctantly reemerging into the world of the living. I powered on a corporate laptop, scared to check on my email inbox. However, before turning on the browser, obviously, I had to run a ping. Debugging the network is a mandatory first step after a boot, right? As […]