Project Fetch: Phase Two
Michael Ilie, C. Daniel Freeman, and Kevin K. Troy In August 2025, we ran an experiment to see how much Claude could help Anthropic employees—who were not robotics experts—perform sophisticated (and amusing) tasks with an off-the-shelf robotic quadruped (henceforth, a robodog). We called this Project Fetch. We found that access to our state-of-the-art model at […]
Epoll vs. Io_uring in Linux
First, I want to tell you how exactly I got to this point and why I started researching different options for handling asynchronous I/O on Linux… Last year, my students and I built a reverse proxy server called TinyGate. It was super simple, worker-based, and it basically worked well. Of course, I didn’t expect it […]
Not just books: renting a sewing machine from the library can improve democracy
This culture of borrowing, Vänttinen explains, is rooted in deep-seated pragmatism that stretches back to Finland’s rural past, when people routinely shared farming machinery. ”Today, many people in cities live in small homes, and they might need a sewing machine only once a year,” says Vänttinen. ”So why buy one? People prefer not to spend […]
Pre-2022 Books
I noticed that I seem to, subconsciously, gravitate towards books published on or before 2022, and somewhat discount books published after, especially from authors I haven’t heard of. A part of me tells me I shouldn’t feel this. I like and use LLMs often for coding work, and I know that they can create great […]
Alice is impatient
My name is Marc Brooker. I like to build things that work, and do cool stuff. I like building big things. I also dabble in machining, welding, cooking, and skiing. I am an engineer at Amazon Web Services (AWS) in Seattle, where I work on agentic AI, especially safety and policy for agentic AI. Before […]
A Love Story
Across human history, societal disruptions have exposed the fault lines of our relationships. For thousands of years, marriage served mostly a societal function. Aristocrats used it as a tool to consolidate wealth and property across generations. Meanwhile, serfs worked the land for feudal lords, who often controlled their marriages so that couples could be economically […]
Unauthorized alert sent to cell phones across Brazil
Summary Cell phones across several Brazilian states received an unauthorized alert on Saturday morning displaying the word ’misantropi4,’ which translates to ’misanthropy.’ Brazil’s National Civil Defense warning platform has been temporarily taken offline. The unauthorized message reached the major cities of São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro. AI-generated summary was reviewed by a CNN editor. […]
PostgresBench: A Reproducible Benchmark for Postgres Services
For years, we have focused on building fast systems. ClickHouse is an example of that focus. Performance is not a feature we add later. It is a core design goal from the start. We applied a similar approach when building our managed Postgres service. The result is offering one of the fastest managed Postgres services […]
Show HN: Make PDFs look scanned (CLI or in the browser via WASM)
A CLI that takes a PDF and degrades it to look like a physical scan of a printout — skew, grayscale, warm paper tone, scanner grain, defocus, edge shadow, and JPEG compression artifacts. Also runs client-side in the browser via WASM. Each page is rasterized to an image, run through the effect pipeline, and reassembled […]
Agency stole bestselling author’s book, used AI to relaunch as their own
Last week, a MetaFilter member posted a link to what appeared to be a new website for The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows, John Koenig’s decade-long project to make a “dictionary of made-up words for emotions that we all feel but don’t have the words to express.” The polished site includes everything you’d expect from a […]