A series of vignettes from my childhood and early career
A short set of anecdotes, apropos of nothing. When I was younger, I really liked programming! I loved the sense of accomplishment, I loved the problem solving, I loved sharing what I made with the people around me to both amuse and assist. One particularly wise adult (somewhere around 1996) took me aside and said, […]
Addressing the adding situation
Addressing the adding situation Written by me, proof-read by an LLM. Details at end. Yesterday we saw how compilers zero registers efficiently. Today let’s look at something a tiny bit less trivial (though not by much): adding two integers. What do you think a simple x86 function to add two ints would look like? An […]
Advent of Compiler Optimisations 2025
Introducing the Advent of Compiler Optimisations 2025 Today I’m announcing a project that’s been in the making for around a year. As my time off draws to a close, I’ve been working on an “Advent of” type project, to be released one a day from the 1st of December until the 25th. This December will […]
Comparing AWS Lambda ARM64 vs. x86_64 Performance Across Runtimes in Late 2025
If you know me at all, you know I’m a big proponent of serverless services when they’re used for the right workloads. I helped launch a new product that increased usage by over 30x so far this year. Choosing serverless was a big part of why that launch went as smoothly as it did. Given […]
Rootless Pings in Rust
Sending a ping by creating an ICMP socket normally requires root: you can’t create a raw socket to send ICMP packets without it. The ping command line tool works without root however, how is that possible? It turns out you can create a UDP socket with a protocol flag, which allows you to send the […]
Why Replicate is joining Cloudflare
We’re happy to announce that as of today Replicate is officially part of Cloudflare. When we started Replicate in 2019, OpenAI had just open sourced GPT-2, and few people outside of the machine learning community paid much attention to AI. But for those of us in the field, it felt like something big was about […]
Frequently Asked Unicycling Questions
As a unicyclist, I draw a certain amount of attention, and whether it be a busy sunny Saturday morning or 21:00 on a grim Monday evening, people are inclined to ask me questions. I imagine the spectacle and presumed friendliness of someone riding a unicycle contributes to people’s willingness to enquire, and I’ve had some […]
Apple Releases Open Weights Video Model
TL;DR STARFlow-V is the first normalizing flow-based causal video generator demonstrating that normalizing flows can match video diffusion models in visual quality while offering end-to-end training, exact likelihood estimation, and native multi-task support across T2V/I2V/V2V generation. Abstract Normalizing flows (NFs) are end-to-end likelihood-based generative models for continuous data, and have recently regained attention with encouraging […]
Decreasing Certificate Lifetimes to 45 Days
Let’s Encrypt will be reducing the validity period of the certificates we issue. We currently issue certificates valid for 90 days, which will be cut in half to 45 days by 2028. This change is being made along with the rest of the industry, as required by the CA/Browser Forum Baseline Requirements, which set the […]
What will enter the public domain in 2026?
At the start of each year, on January 1st, a new crop of works enter the public domain and become free to enjoy, share, and reuse for any purpose. Due to differing copyright laws around the world, there is no one single public domain — and here we focus on three of the most prominent. […]