Gild Just One Lily
“Gilding the lily” isn’t always bad. In design, a touch of metaphorical gold — a subtle animated transition, a hint of color, or added depth in a drop shadow — can help communicate a level of care and attention that builds trust. But first? You need a lily. Nail the fundamentals. Then, gild it carefully. […]
Microsoft Increases Office 365 and Microsoft 365 License Prices
New Microsoft 365 Pricing Goes into Effect on July 1, 2026 On December 4, 2025, Microsoft announced a range of price increases for Microsoft 365 monthly licenses. The new pricing (Figure 1) goes into effect from July 1, 2026, the start of Microsoft’s FY27 fiscal year. Figure 1: Microsoft 365 License pricing from July 1, […]
How Exchanges Turn Order Books into Distributed Logs
1. The Parallel Between Exchanges and Databases Let’s think about the scale of exchanges for a moment: thousands of orders hitting the system every millisecond, yet every participant, from HFT firms in New York to pension funds in Singapore, sees the exact same sequence of events. This is distributed systems engineering at its finest, operating […]
IBM to Acquire Confluent
We are excited to announce that Confluent has entered into a definitive agreement to be acquired by IBM. After the transaction is closed (subject to customary closing conditions and regulatory approvals), together, IBM and Confluent will aim to provide a platform that unifies the world’s largest enterprises, unlocking data for cloud/microservices, accelerating time-to-value, and building […]
Alignment Is Capability
Here’s a claim that might actually be true: alignment is not a constraint on capable AI systems. Alignment is what capability is at sufficient depth. A model that aces benchmarks but doesn’t understand human intent is just less capable. Virtually every task we give an LLM is steeped in human values, culture, and assumptions. Miss […]
Bit flips: How cosmic rays grounded a fleet of aircraft
Radiation from space that led to more than 6,000 Airbus aircraft needing emergency computer updates could become a growing problem as ever more microchips run our lives. “We need medical equipment,” the pilot of a JetBlue passenger jet announced over the radio to air traffic control. His plane, an Airbus A320 commercial airliner had suddenly […]
Flow: Actor-based language for C++, used by FoundationDB
foundationdb/flow at main · apple/foundationdb · GitHub {{ message }} You can’t perform that action at this time.
A ‘toaster with a lens’: The story behind the first handheld digital camera
One question never stopped being asked: when would this technology be viable? “I had to come up with an answer. So I called the research labs, and I said, ‘How many pixels would I need in order to have equivalent film quality of 110 film‘, which was like the worst film format you could find.” […]
How the Brain Parses Language
Even in a world where large language models (LLMs) and AI chatbots are commonplace, it can be hard to fully accept that fluent writing can come from an unthinking machine. That’s because, to many of us, finding the right words is a crucial part of thought — not the outcome of some separate process. But […]
Nango (YC W23) is hiring back-end engineers and dev-rels (remote)
You need to enable JavaScript to run this app.