Approaching 50 Years of String Theory
Brian Greene has a new video out today, of himself talking to Edward Witten, mainly about string theory. Pretty much the usual decades-old hype, with nothing even slightly different than what a similar conversation would have consisted of 20 years ago. Of historical and psychological interest, Witten explains that when the anthropic landscape nonsense arrived, […]
Proving Bounds for the Randomized MaxCut Approximation Algorithm in Lean4
../randomized-maxcut Published on: 2025-12-19 For a given graph G = (V, E), a cut C is a set of edges such that there is a partition V = (A, B) where all edges e ∈ C have one vertex in A and the other in B. MaxCut is a very famous combinatorial optimization problem wherein […]
Raycaster (YC F24) Is Hiring a Research Engineer (NYC, In-Person)
Raycaster (raycaster.ai) (YC F24) builds a document IDE for high-stakes, regulated work in life sciences (CMC / quality / regulatory). The product turns messy, versioned documents (PDFs, Word redlines, tables) into a structured workspace where agents can search, cite, reconcile changes, and help draft. We’re hiring a Research Engineer who can both (1) ship production […]
What Does a Database for SSDs Look Like?
Maybe not what you think. Over on X, Ben Dicken asked: What does a relational database designed specifically for local SSDs look like? Postgres, MySQL, SQLite and many others were invented in the 90s and 00s, the era of spinning disks. A local NVMe SSD has ~1000x improvement in both throughput and latency. Design decisions […]
Airbus to migrate critical apps to a sovereign Euro cloud
Exclusive Airbus is preparing to tender a major contract to migrate mission-critical workloads to a digitally sovereign European cloud – but estimates only an 80/20 chance of finding a suitable provider. The aerospace manufacturer, which has already consolidated its datacenter estate and uses services like Google Workspace, now wants to move key on-premises applications including […]
A train-sized tunnel is now carrying electricity under South London
Electricity has started flowing through a deep-level tube train sized tunnel running through South London. New power cables map (c) National Rail The first of two new circuits that connect National Grid’s New Cross substation in Southwark with its Hurst substation in Bexley is now live, running for 18km beneath South London through tunnels up […]
Skills Officially Comes to Codex
Agent Skills let you extend Codex with task-specific capabilities. A skill packages instructions, resources, and optional scripts so Codex can perform a specific workflow reliably. You can share skills across teams or the community, and they build on the open Agent Skills standard. Skills are available in both the Codex CLI and IDE extensions. A […]
The Polyglot NixOS
Recently a colleague mentioned building NixOS images that run unchanged on multiple architectures. Given the past adventures on this blog with systemd-repart and cross-compiling NixOS, I decide to give this a go. tl;dr You can find a quick’n’dirty implementation here. Check the repo for details on how to build and run it. So do we […]
NTP at NIST Boulder Has Lost Power
reposting from the Internet time service list jeff.s…@nist.gov : Dec 19 05:18PM -0800 Dear colleagues, In short, the atomic ensemble time scale at our Boulder campus has failed due to a prolonged utility power outage. One impact is that the Boulder Internet Time Services no longer have an accurate time reference. At time of writing […]
Perfect Software – Software for an Audience of One
We have many names to describe personal tools. Malleable software speaks to how it behaves. Home-cooked software speaks to who makes it. I wanted a name that speaks to something deeper: how it feels. Perfect Software. I mean “perfect” in the way I mean a “perfect coffee”. There’s no such thing as the world’s best […]