Bijou64: A variable-length integer encoding
April 2026 It’s nice when you work on security and accidentally get some performance for free. This is the story of a small encoding called bijou64 — a variable-length integer (varint) encoding that we developed for the Subduction CRDT sync protocol. It was intended to fix a subtle signature-verification bug by making each number only […]
It Will Never Be the Year of the Linux Desktop
Every year someone says that this is the year of the Linux desktop. It is never the year of the Linux desktop. There are many reasons for this. Drivers. Games. Adobe. Microsoft Office. Battery life. The thing where you close the lid of a laptop and open it again later to find that it passed […]
Please Use AI
Be sure to use AI when makingyour next, I don’t know, meal plan,for example. Definitely do not callyour friend who loves to cook and ask herfor her favorite recipes or tips or ways to save time making meals, because you will endup talking for longer than you had hoped,hearing, perhaps, about her father’s cancer diagnosis […]
Expertise in the Age of AI
2026-05-12 Tagged: llms Does it make sense to hire junior engineers in the age of coding agents? Junior engineers are expensive, both in salary and seniors engineers’ time. This cost was partially recouped through code contributions, but today, it’s more effective to directly maximize the output of your senior engineers. The hiring market reflects this […]
Local Git Remotes
As part of working on cani I was also using a variety of git remotes. One of the remotes was hosted on a server I have at home. Here’s how I set that up. Let’s say the server has a project in a folder called cani. This folder has the code and a .git/ directory: […]
We should be more tired than the model
Lately, I’ve been feeling like I’m losing control over the code I write when I work with agentic code generation. When I finish an agentic session, I get all the outward signs of having written code, but none of the internal processes that happen when we write code by hand. As a quick primer, the […]
The UK Government’s Low Value Purchase System Is a Waste of Time
It can be hard running a small business. If you want to sell to a large organisation like the UK Government, there are forms to fill in, checks to comply with, tenders to bid on, and a hundred other things. Luckily, there’s the RM6237 Low Value Purchase System to make everything better. If a department […]
We should be more tired than the model
Lately, I’ve been feeling like I’m losing control over the code I write when I work with agentic code generation. When I finish an agentic session, I get all the outward signs of having written code, but none of the internal processes that happen when we write code by hand. As a quick primer, the […]
Cedana (YC S23) Is Hiring
The Problem AI and HPC infrastructure suffers from scarcity and high costs, so when failures happen they are costly in terms of time and money. Cluster productivity directly determines research output and revenue. Achieving high utilization and throughput is increasingly challenging due to the complexity of workloads, hardware, and operations. Cedana’s Solution Cedana maximizes AI+HPC […]
Is AI causing a repeat of Front end’s Lost Decade?
Mauro Bieg on May 23, 2026 What AI is doing to the jobs of programmers feels very familiar to a lot of us frontend developers – because it has happened to us before. Let’s first look at the transformation of the frontend and agentic coding through the lens of deskilling, and then look at both […]