Opus 5.5 is good at explainer videos
The whole product is one agent file, three tools, and this form. OpenComputer runs the agent, the microVM it renders in, the model gateway, and the session API the page polls. Agent One OpenComputer serverless agent, defined in TypeScript and deployed with opencomputer deploy. No framework, no queue, no server of ours. Model anthropic/claude-opus-5.5 through […]
Sourcehut account takeover via build logs (XSS in ansi2html)
Welcome to my first big impact vulnerability writeup! I like good stories, so let me describe some background first. I recently had a ‘great’ idea (I know, I know, I should stop having these) to set up a sr.ht instance that would pay people for hosting their projects. You can find it shamelessly plugged in […]
Using LLMs to trace alchemical knowledge and decode 17th century letters
Using GPT-6 and Opus 5.5 to trace alchemical knowledge and decode 17th century letters I’ve written previously about the pitfalls and use cases for AI in augmenting historical research, but things have changed significantly since 2024-25. Occasioned by the dueling releases of GPT-6 Sol and Opus 5.5 this week, I thought I’d share some early […]
Postgres SELECT DISTINCT Does Not Scale
Recently, there has been no shortage of popular blog posts about how Postgres scales or why you should use it for everything. In this post, we’ll do something a little different: describe an issue we had with a Postgres feature that intuitively should scale, but actually doesn’t. SELECT DISTINCT is an innocuous-seeming clause that finds all unique values […]
Stable (YC W20) Is Hiring
📬 About Stable Our mission is to make it simple to headquarter any business on the internet. Today, we provide companies with a business address and a dashboard to manage their physical mail online. Over 15,000+ companies like Brex, Doordash, and Gusto use Stable to automate their mailroom and act as their permanent business address […]
Show HN: Whiteboard (YC W26) – An open-source IDE for thoughtful software design
Whiteboard is an open-source desktop app where humans and agents can architect software together in a common workspace. Whiteboard plugs into the tools you already use – e.g. Claude Code, Codex, etc. – and gives your agent an SDK to draw on an in-app canvas to describe its work. Here’s a 1 min demo video […]
LA Metro has some of the slowest escalators on Earth
If you’ve ridden an escalator in Hong Kong or Singapore, the climb out of an LA Metro station can feel painfully slow. It’s really not just Metro though, American transit escalators generally operate under a much lower speed limit than those in much of the world. Why? Well honestly we don’t have the whole answer, […]
Why is the liver so weirdly regenerative?
the question everyone is asking dynomight.net/liver [Epistemic Status: Speculative unifying theory of biology.] I don’t know about you, but I greatly resent having to be a biological organism and subject to all the poor engineering and design decisions that entails. This has many manifestations. A recent one is often wondering, why is the entire body […]
I Have a Confession: I Built This Site with AI – Please Forgive Me
To be clear, none of the content, but the site engine itself is all AI built. It is a long and somewhat sad story. By the end, I hope you’ll forgive me. I was a scientist. I have a Ph.D. in Instrumentation Physics. I loved doing science. But for many reasons, some of them beyond […]
GitHub has not removed malicious imitation software after 3 weeks
On the 31st August I got an email from a customer, telling me that they had found an imitation of my data wrangling software on Github. I’m not linking to it, but here is a screenshot: It is using our product name and logo, without permission. I reported it to Github as an imitation on […]