Any Color You Like: NIST Scientists Create ’Any Wavelength’ Lasers
Lindell Williams (left) and Grant Brodnik align an optical fiber with the edge of an integrated photonics chip. Optical fibers act as pipes for light, enabling the light generated on these chips to be collected and routed off the chip for use in experiments and applications. Credit: R. Jacobson/NIST Computer chips that cram billions of […]
Optimizing Ruby Path Methods
Back in November last year, I started a new job at Intercom, and one of the first projects I got to work on was improving the Intercom monolith CI with some of my new colleagues. Interestingly, I never got around to talking about CI on this blog, even though I consider it to be one […]
Thoughts and feelings around Claude Design
I tried Claude Design yesterday and I have a theory for how this whole thing shakes out. As product teams scaled and design needed to justify itself inside engineering orgs, it was pushed toward systematization — and Figma invented its own primitives to make that work: components, styles, variables, props, and so on. Some concepts […]
College instructor turns to typewriters to curb AI-written work
Ratchaphon Lertdamrongwong, a sophomore at Cornell University, laughs with classmates while using a typewriter for a German writing assignment on Friday, March 20, 2026, in Ithaca, N.Y. The professor, Grit Matthias Phelps, brings out the typewriters once a semester for her students to use. (AP Photo/Lauren Petracca) Students use typewriters to complete a writing assignment […]
Graphs That Explain the State of AI in 2026
13 Apr 2026 9 min read Matthew S. Smith is a contributing editor for IEEE Spectrum and the former lead reviews editor at Digital Trends. IEEE Spectrum The capabilities of leading AI models continue to accelerate, and the largest AI companies, including OpenAI and Anthropic, are hurtling toward IPOs later this year. Yet resentment toward […]
The electromechanical angle computer inside the B-52 bomber’s star tracker
Before GPS, how did aircraft navigate? One important technique was celestial navigation: navigating from the positions of the stars, planets, or the sun. While celestial navigation is accurate, cannot be jammed, and doesn’t require any broadcast infrastructure, it is a difficult and time-consuming process to perform manually. In the early 1960s, an automated system was […]
Opus 4.7 to 4.6 Inflation is ~45%
Anonymous request-token comparisons from the community, showing how Opus 4.6 and Opus 4.7 differ on real inputs Loading… Submit a prompt Open source · stored rows contain anonymous submission IDs onlyNot affiliated with or endorsed by Anthropic. billchambers.me
Show HN: MDV – a Markdown superset for docs, dashboards, and slides with data
Write documents, dashboards, and slides in a Markdown superset. Add charts, KPI cards, tables, and styled regions with nothing more complicated than fenced code blocks and named styles. .mdv is strict CommonMark plus four additions: YAML front-matter for title, theme, named styles, and dataset references. Fenced blocks for data/visuals: ”`chart type=bar x=region y=sales. ::: containers […]
Migrating from DigitalOcean to Hetzner: From $1,432 to $233 With Zero Downtime
A real-world production migration from DigitalOcean to Hetzner dedicated, handling 248 GB of MySQL data across 30 databases, 34 Nginx sites, GitLab EE, Neo4j, and live mobile app traffic — with zero downtime. Why We Migrated⌗ Running a software company in Turkey has become increasingly expensive over the last few years. Skyrocketing inflation and a […]
Why Japan has such good railways
Japan is the land of the train. 28 percent of passenger kilometers in Japan are travelled by rail, more than anywhere else in the developed world. France achieves 10 percent, Germany 6.4 percent, and the United States just 0.25 percent. Travel in Japan is over a hundred times more likely to be by rail than […]