A practical guide to observing the night sky for real skies and real equipment
The night sky is vast.For many beginners, and even experienced observers, that abundance becomes a barrier. Thousands of objects. Endless lists.Too many choices, too little clarity on where to begin. Stargazing Buddy removes that friction by offering a curated path into visual observing and astrophotography.
Beginning fully autonomous operations with the 6th-generation Waymo driver
Waymo will begin fully autonomous operations with its 6th-generation Driver —an important step in bringing our technology to more riders in more cities. This latest system serves as the primary engine for our next era of expansion, with a streamlined configuration that drives down costs while maintaining our uncompromising safety standards. Designed for long-term growth […]
Major European payment processor can’t send email to Google Workspace users
TL;DR: Viva.com, one of Europe’s largest payment processors, sends verification emails without a Message-ID header — a recommendation of RFC 5322 since 2008. Google Workspace rejects them outright. Their support team’s response to my detailed bug report: ”your account has a verified email, so there’s no problem.” A few days ago, I tried to create […]
The Future for Tyr, a Rust GPU Driver for Arm Mali Hardware
Benefits for LWN subscribers The primary benefit from subscribing to LWN is helping to keep us publishing, but, beyond that, subscribers get immediate access to all site content and access to a number of extra site features. Please sign up today! The team behind Tyr started 2025 with little to show in our quest to […]
Improving 15 LLMs at Coding in One Afternoon. Only the Harness Changed
In fact only the edit tool changed. That’s it. 0x0: The Wrong Question The conversation right now is almost entirely about which model is best at coding, GPT-5.3 or Opus. Gemini vs whatever dropped this week. This framing is increasingly misleading because it treats the model as the only variable that matters, when in reality […]
Rolling your own serverless OCR in 40 lines of code
A few months ago, I wanted to make my copy of Gelman’s Bayesian Data Analysis searchable for use in a statistics-focused agent. There are some pretty sophisticated OCR tools out there but they tend to have usage limits or get expensive when you’re processing thousands of pages. DeepSeek recently released an open OCR model that […]
The ”Crown of Nobles” Noble Gas Tube Display
In my day job I work with ion thrusters for spacecraft, which are essentially electric-powered rockets that fling Xenon gas out at super high speeds to provide thrust and allow satellites to change their orbit. Xenon is a rare element way up on the periodic table, and it’s great for in-space propulsion because it’s fairly […]
AI agent opens a PR write a blogpost to shames the maintainer who closes it
{{ message }} Add this suggestion to a batch that can be applied as a single commit. This suggestion is invalid because no changes were made to the code. Suggestions cannot be applied while the pull request is closed. Suggestions cannot be applied while viewing a subset of changes. Only one suggestion per line can […]
From specification to stress test: a weekend with Claude
Over a weekend, between board games and time with my kids, Claude and I built a distributed system with Byzantine fault tolerance, strong consistency and crash recovery under arbitrary failures. I described the behaviour I wanted in Allium, worked through the bugs conversationally and didn’t write a line of implementation code. Here is the prompt […]
The missing digit of Stela C
One bad thing about archeologists is that some of the successful ones get a big head. People used to think the Olmecs, who made these colossal stone heads, were contemporary with the Mayans. But in 1939, an archaeologist couple, Marion and Matthew Stirling, found the bottom half of an Olmec stone that had part of […]