Factorio that you can touch
Hello,we have very unusual Friday facts for you. Journey to the physical world Pard It all started in the hot summer of 2024 when we worked really hard to finish the Space Age DLC. The game was almost ready, but we wanted some feedback from our players. A decision was made to organise a playtesting […]
Allow Carriers on Planes
The FAA has one of my favorite examples of thoughtful rulemaking. They haven’t banned flying with a baby on your lap, because the extra cost would mean many parents would drive instead. Since driving is far less safe than flying, a ban would lead to more deaths. I’d love to see more of this “all […]
First Principles Thinking
I’ve re-read Sunil Pai’s “the senior engineer death spiral” several times this week. It’s very good. If you haven’t read it, start there. It’s resonating with me because I think almost every senior engineer has felt some version of being stuck. You get good at what you do, then things change, and the experience you’ve […]
ASML says it sold ‘absolutely nothing’ in Europe in 2026
As the world’s only supplier of EUV lithography systems, ASML is Europe’s largest company by market capitalization, currently valued at around $660 billion. But it earned almost nothing in Europe this year, down from 1% of total profits in 2025 and 5% in 2024. Why? European chipmakers bought no lithography equipment from ASML in 2026 […]
Nobody Asked for a Crab Chair
In our last installment of “Good Intentions Gone Wrong: When Disability Engineers Go Bad,” we highlighted a particularly egregious Swiss wheelchair design featuring superfluous drones. Thankfully, not all engineers who receive blank checks to design disability solutions are that out of touch. More commonly, the lack of constraints that comes with deep corporate pockets results […]
I’m Tired of Being on the Network
You can tell how tired someone is of the always-online life pretty easily. When they get home, watch the distance between the phone and the body. The people who love being connected never let the thing leave them be it pocket, palm, face-down next to the fork. Everyone else sets it down the way you […]
Platform-Independent SIMD in Go
Go 1.26 and 1.27 include experimental APIs for Single Instruction Multiple Data (SIMD) operations. SIMD is a native feature of many modern CPUs that allows software to perform uniform operations across vectors of data very quickly, such as adding 8 pairs of float64 values in a single instruction. It can significantly speed up many computationally-intensive […]
Anthropic: The Situation Report
SSince May, teams on the ground in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) have been combating a rare strain of Ebolavirus called Bundibugyo (BDBV). Every day, relais communautaires knock on doors of homes, offer counsel, learn of recoveries and deaths, and refer anyone with suspicious symptoms to get care. In an outbreak like this […]
Show HN: Agentic CUDA Kernel Optimizer
An agentic CUDA kernel optimizer that turns workload descriptions into GPU implementations through an automated cycle of code generation, correctness checks, benchmarking, and refinement. Powered by LangGraph, the agent explores kernel implementations and launch configurations, queries GPU properties, and can research NVIDIA documentation for optimization guidance and inspect Nsight Compute counters to inform its next […]
An airport cooled by natural ventilation
At the arrivals terminal at Roland Garros airport on Réunion island, visitors are greeted by floor-to-ceiling windows framing the lush green mountains of the French Indian Ocean territory. What they may have also expected was the icy chill of air conditioning; this island just off Madagascar sits in the tropical zone to the south of […]