Invisalign Became the Biggest User of 3D Printers
Joe Hogan sees a lot of smiles. When people ask him where he works, he responds with “Align Technology,” which inevitably prompts the follow up: “What’s that?” It’s the $12 billion company behind Invisalign, the hellish and expensive pieces of clear plastic worn about 22 hours a day that brute-force teeth into better alignment. After […]
Electronics for Kids, 2nd Edition
Praise for the first edition of Electronics for Kids: “I learned and retained more in this single book than I can recall learning from my own science teacher. Most importantly, I loved reading it. I often took it to work with me in my bag.”—The Huffington Post “There’s no better way to learn than by doing. […]
Conway’s Game of Life, in real life
When life gives you switches… A while back, I posted the following on social media: If you’re unfamiliar, Conway’s Game of Life takes place on a two-dimensional grid of square cells, each cell either alive (1) or dead (0). In each iteration, all live cells that have fewer than two neighbors die of “starvation”, while […]
We Have Learned Nothing
Click here to subscribe to print for your office or home. Any method for building a startup, once widely known, causes founders to converge on the same answers. If everyone follows the same bestselling startup techniques, everyone ends up building the same company and, with no differentiation, most of those companies fail. The truth is, […]
A sufficiently detailed spec is code
This post is essentially this comic strip expanded into a full-length post: For a long time I didn’t need a post like the one I’m about to write. If someone brought up the idea of generating code from specifications I’d share the above image with them and that would usually do the trick. However, agentic […]
Cook: A simple CLI for orchestrating Claude Code
~*~ ~*~ ~*~ Workflow loops for Claude Code, Codex, and OpenCode. cook ”Implement dark mode” review cook ”Implement dark mode” x3 cook ”Implement dark mode” v3 ”least code” cook ”Auth with JWT” vs ”Auth with sessions” pick ”best security” cook ”Work on next task in plan.md” review ralph 5 ”DONE if all tasks complete, else […]
Autoresearch for SAT Solvers
_ _ ____ _ _____ / __ _ ___ _ __ | |_/ ___| / |_ _| / _ / _` |/ _ ’_ | _____ / _ | | / ___ (_| | __/ | | | |_ ___) / ___ | | /_/ ___, |___|_| |_|__|____/_/ __| |___/ An autonomous AI agent that […]
Austin’s surge of new housing construction drove down rents
After decades of explosive growth, Austin, Texas, in the 2010s was a victim of its own success. Lured by high-tech jobs and the city’s hip reputation, too many people were competing for too few homes. From 2010 to 2019, rents in Austin increased nearly 93%—more than in any other major American city. And home sale […]
RX – a new random-access JSON alternative
REXC encoder, decoder, and data tool. Drop-in replacements for JSON.stringify and JSON.parse that produce smaller output, skip deserialization on read, and create near-zero heap allocations. JSON forces a tradeoff: parse everything up front (slow, memory-heavy) or don’t cache at all. REXC eliminates the tradeoff: 18x smaller — binary-encoded numbers, de-duplicated strings, shared schemas, prefix-compressed paths. […]
Linking Smaller Haskell Binaries (2023)
Publish date: Jan 7, 2023 Last updated: Jan 8, 2023 Haskell binaries can get quite large (think ~100MB), especially for projects with many transitive dependencies. Here are two strategies that can help at link time, the latter being more experimental. I used the test-pandoc binary from pandoc on GHC 9.2.5 below. This was nice because […]