Thanks a lot, AI: Hard drives are sold out for the year, says WD
AI companies have bought out Western Digital’s storage capacity for 2026. It’s only February. By on February 15, 2026 Western Digital says its all sold out of hard drives for 2026, less than two months into the year. Credit: Alex Kraus/Bloomberg via Getty Images Looking to buy a new hard drive? Get ready to pay even […]
Evaluating AGENTS.md: are they helpful for coding agents?
Abstract:A widespread practice in software development is to tailor coding agents to repositories using context files, such as this http URL, by either manually or automatically generating them. Although this practice is strongly encouraged by agent developers, there is currently no rigorous investigation into whether such context files are actually effective for real-world tasks. In […]
The Israeli spyware firm that accidentally just exposed itself
The Surveillance Pipeline: How Israeli Occupation Technology Funds Global Control Israeli surveillance company Paragon Solutions briefly exposed its own spyware dashboard on LinkedIn, revealing the hidden architecture of a billion-dollar surveillance empire built on the backs of journalists, activists, and ordinary people. The technical slip-up is a moment of rare transparency in an industry built […]
Anthropic tries to hide Claude’s AI actions. Devs hate it
Anthropic has updated Claude Code, its AI coding tool, changing the progress output to hide the names of files the tool was reading, writing, or editing. However, developers have pushed back, stating that they need to see which files are accessed. Version 2.1.20 collapsed the output so that instead of showing, for example, the file […]
MessageFormat: Unicode standard for localizable message strings
Welcome to the home page for the MessageFormat Working Group, a subgroup of the Unicode CLDR-TC. The MessageFormat Working Group (MFWG) is tasked with developing and supporting an industry standard for the representation of localizable message strings. MessageFormat is designed to support software developers, translators, and end users with fluent messages and locally-adapted presentation for […]
picol: A Tcl interpreter in 500 lines of code
Picol is a Tcl-alike interpreter in 500 lines of code that I released 15th of March 2007. Recentely I looked at the source code and realized this was a better C programming example compared to what I recalled, so I’m putting this on GitHub to archive it, together with the main points of the original […]
Building SQLite with a small swarm
February 12, 2026 tl;dr I tasked Claude, Codex, and Gemini to build a SQLite-like engine in Rust. ~19k~ lines of code. Parser, planner, volcano executor, pager, b+trees, wal, recovery, joins, aggregates, indexing, transaction semantics, grouped aggregates, and stats-aware planning all implemented. 282 unit tests, all passing. background Treat software engineering like distributed systems, and force […]
Defer available in gcc and clang
About a year ago I posted about defer and that it would be available for everyone using gcc and/or clang soon. So it is probably time for an update. Two things have happened in the mean time: A technical specification (TS 25755) edited by JeanHeyd Meneide is now complete and moves through ISO’s complicated publication […]
JavaScript-heavy approaches are not compatible with long-term performance goals
This post is a (very long) opinion piece, albeit one that I hope is somewhat substantiated by the accompanying anecdotes. The TL;DR is that in my experience the title is a correct statement the vast majority of the time, and we should favour more server-centric approaches instead, when possible. What I mean by “JS-heavy approaches“ […]
Visualizing the ARM64 Instruction Set (2024)
Lately I’ve been doing a lot of work with the ARM64 instruction set, and I thought it would be fun to try to visualize it. ARM64 encodes every instruction as a 32-bit integer, so one way to visualize the instruction set is by plotting the instructions along a space-filling curve, such as a Hilbert curve, […]