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Technical Dimensions of Live Feedback in Programming Systems
4 days ago
- Live feedback is crucial in interactive programming systems but its design space is poorly defined.
- The paper introduces six dimensions to analyze live feedback: granularity, reactivity, velocity, moldability, bidirectionality, and materiality.
- These dimensions help characterize and evaluate live feedback designs in programming systems.
- Presented at PLATEAU 2026 and earlier at LIVE 2024, with related media appearances.
Wolf of Wall Street financier Jho Low seeks pardon from Donald Trump
4 hours ago
- Fugitive Malaysian financier Jho Low, key in the 1MDB scandal, seeks a pardon from U.S. President Trump to clear U.S. criminal charges.
- Low faces charges for allegedly misappropriating over $4.5 billion from 1MDB, part of one of the world's largest financial frauds; he denies wrongdoing and his location is unknown.
- A U.S. pardon request for Low is pending; Malaysian officials oppose it and urge the U.S. to help locate him for investigation and asset recovery.
- Malaysia temporarily lifted an Interpol red notice against Low to facilitate asset returns; in 2019, the U.S. recouped about $1 billion in assets from him.
The Deathbed Notes of Henry James (1968)
2 days ago
- Henry James dictated Napoleonic fragments during his last illness in 1915-1916, with his secretary Theodora Bosanquet and niece Peggy James transcribing.
- The dictation, initially unpublished and almost destroyed, reveals James's struggle with illness but retains his grand style and verbal power despite incoherence.
- James survived a stroke and pneumonia for over two months, receiving the Order of Merit before dying in February 1916; his ashes were brought to America.
Classic 7 is a Windows 10 LTSC mod to look 1:1 to Windows 7
3 hours ago
- Classic 7 is a Windows 10 modification designed to replicate Windows 7's appearance and features.
- It includes an OOBE recreation, Aero Glass, support for .themepack files, gadgets, and Windows Media Center.
- Missing features include 3D animations for windows, Flip 3D, and some incompatible system applications/gadgets.
- The modification is available for download for users interested in testing it.
US sells 30-year bonds at 5% yield for first time since 2007
6 hours ago
- The US Treasury has sold 30-year bonds at a 5% yield, marking the first occurrence since 2007.
- The article is behind a paywall, offering subscription plans such as Standard Digital, Premium Digital, and Premium & FT Weekend Print with varying prices and benefits.
- Subscription options include trial periods, annual payment discounts, and organizational access, highlighting the FT's appeal to over a million readers.
Notes from Optimizing CPU-Bound Go Hot Paths
2 days ago
- Go's idiomatic abstractions (generics, interfaces, closures) often hinder performance in hot loops due to lack of inlining, leading to significant call overhead.
- Generic functions in Go are not fully monomorphized like in C++ or Rust; they use GC Shape Stenciling, causing interface-style dispatch in hot paths.
- Performance workarounds include manual code duplication (e.g., 16 similar functions in a Brotli port) or code generation, but this increases maintenance burden.
- Benchmarks show substantial throughput penalties: generics (-15.18%), closures (-14.82%), and interfaces (-27.44%) compared to concrete implementations.
- Assembly analysis reveals extra instructions in non-inlined versions (e.g., reloading arguments, bounds checks, nil checks) that degrade hot loop efficiency.
- Go lacks intrinsics for operations like memory prefetching and SIMD (experimental in Go 1.26), forcing assembly use with non-inlinable call overhead.
- Compiler hints like //go:inline and //go:nobounds are absent, making it hard to force optimizations; workarounds include reshaping code or using unsafe pointers.
- Code layout sensitivity can cause benchmark noise (e.g., ±3-4% variations), complicating optimization validation due to lack of tools like BOLT for Go.
- CPU-bound Go code often requires specialization, duplication, and low-level tricks, diverging from idiomatic abstraction for performance gains.
- Trade-offs in Go's design (e.g., runtime model for GC) prioritize IO-bound workloads, making CPU-bound optimization more manual and less elegant.
LLMs are breaking 20 year old system design
4 hours ago
- The traditional cloud-native architecture assumes stateless compute with state in a database, scaling via vertical database scaling or horizontal application scaling.
- LLMs and agents challenge this by introducing long-running tasks, stateful compute (like agent memory), and bi-directional interaction, which don't fit stateless designs.
- Durable execution (e.g., Temporal, Inngest) addresses execution durability but doesn't solve the interaction problem, leading to polling workarounds that have latency and UX issues.
- Polling treats databases as message buses, highlighting a missing routing primitive in current web service architectures for addressing processes directly.
- WebSockets offer long-running bi-directional connections but are connections, not addresses, so they fail if the connection drops and can't reconnect to the same process.
- Pub/sub channels provide a durable, addressable transport where clients and servers connect by channel name, enabling stateful communication without polling or database threading.
- Combining durable execution with pub/sub channels allows workflows and clients to reconnect seamlessly, improving resilience and interaction for stateful processes like agents.
- LLMs amplify these architectural limitations due to their non-deterministic, costly nature, making stateless designs more painful and highlighting the need for new approaches.
- A new architecture is needed that includes routing primitives to address processes directly, integrating durable execution, pub/sub, and stateless HTTP for different roles.
Reddit Is (Mostly) Shuttering R/All, but There's Still a Way to Access It
7 hours ago
- Reddit consists of subreddits that users can subscribe to for a personalized front page.
- r/popular and r/all previously showed trending posts, with r/all having fewer filters and potential NSFW content.
- Reddit is deprecating r/all to simplify the platform and improve Home feed personalization, redirecting links to the Home feed.
- Users must now use r/popular to see trending posts, though 'old' Reddit users can still access r/all.
Why scrapping quarterly earnings is a bad idea
6 hours ago
- Scrapping quarterly earnings is argued to be a bad idea.
- The Financial Times offers various subscription plans including FT Edit, Standard Digital, and Premium Digital.
- Subscriptions provide access to curated articles, expert analysis, and quality journalism.
AI coders are carrying half-open laptops through airports, offices, ice rinks
5 hours ago
- AI enthusiasts often keep laptops ajar in public to let coding agents run without interruption, avoiding loss of progress since many tools rely on local or WiFi connections.
- Scenarios include parents at ice rinks, travelers in airports, students in school halls, and professionals in offices, with some feeling embarrassed but others finding community understanding.
- Techniques vary from slightly cracked screens to using terminal commands like 'caffeinate' on Macs, or makeshift solutions like turning laptops into 'tacos' or 'clamshells' in bags.
- The behavior has become a meme, acknowledged by OpenAI, and reflects a trend where users prioritize continuous AI-assisted coding over conventional laptop etiquette.
Software Engineers Are Obsolete
11 hours ago
- The author shares a personal journey from building a curated tutorial website from scratch to securing a developer job, highlighting early validation and creativity.
- The narrative reflects a shift in the tech landscape where AI tools now empower non-developers to create and launch products, reducing the traditional gatekeeping role of developers.
- Despite AI lowering barriers to entry, the author argues that new entrants may not become skilled engineers because they lack hands-on coding, debugging, and maintenance experience.
- The author emphasizes the enduring importance of software maintenance and the unique skills of developers who have learned through hands-on problem-solving and debugging.
- A parallel is drawn to past technology bets like Silverlight, cautioning against over-reliance on AI without considering long-term sustainability and the risks of obsolescence.
- The author positions themselves as a valuable expert for complex, long-term software challenges that AI cannot easily address, suggesting a future demand for traditional engineering skills.
Federalism for Anti-Fascists
9 hours ago
- The paper presents a constitutional framework for states to oppose federal authoritarian capture through five tiers: cooperative federalism, uncooperative federalism, soft secession, oppositional federalism, and constitutional non-compliance.
- It argues that states, particularly larger ones, have the economic and institutional capacity to function independently via soft secession, as shown by examples like California and Texas.
- The framework is grounded in established Supreme Court doctrines such as dual sovereignty, anti-commandeering, and the McCulloch valid exercise principle.
- Historical precedents include states prosecuting federal officers under state law, resisting the Fugitive Slave Act, legalizing cannabis despite federal law, and forming attorney general coalitions.
- The author compares this work to Erica Chenoweth's civil resistance research, aiming to provide a structured, empirical basis for state-led constitutional opposition.
- The paper is available as a free 125-page working draft on SSRN, with downloads helping to increase its visibility and impact ahead of peer review.
My life was changed by four sentences in four books
7 hours ago
- The author values books for their quiet, non-commercial nature, offering wisdom without ads or hype.
- A sentence in Aldous Huxley's 'Island' about switching jobs every two years inspired the author to quit their job at 22, leading to a life without traditional employment.
- Peter Knickles' seminar workbook introduced the National Association of Campus Activities, enabling the author to earn $1000-$5000 per gig as a musician and buy a house.
- Steve Pavlina's 'Personal Development for Smart People' emphasized the need for surprise to learn, prompting the author to leave America and live globally for lifelong growth.
- Felix Dennis' 'How to Get Rich' advised stopping wealth pursuit at a certain point to avoid misery, leading the author to avoid serial entrepreneurship and not work for money after selling a company.
Arena AI Model ELO History
7 hours ago
- AI labs frequently update models post-launch, potentially introducing nerfs like censorship, quantization, or performance degradation.
- LMSYS Arena uses API endpoints for raw model testing, but web interfaces may differ due to added system prompts, filters, or quantized versions.
- Data is sourced daily from the official LM Arena Leaderboard Dataset on Hugging Face, based on human evaluations for robust capability metrics.
- The chart shows each major AI lab's flagship lineage curve, tracking the highest-rated eligible model over time, not just the latest release.
- Flagship models (e.g., Opus) remain on the curve even if mid-tier models (e.g., Sonnet) are released, with inference variants collapsed to avoid fluctuations.
- New releases appear as labeled markers, often with score jumps, and degradation trends between releases are highlighted for visibility.
Building Software Requires Digestion
17 hours ago
- Scott Jenson critiques chatbot interfaces for being reactive and discouraging reflection, arguing they hinder deep cognitive work.
- The concept of 'Ma' from Japanese culture emphasizes the importance of pauses, which are not a lack of work but essential for creativity and problem-solving.
- Drawing an analogy to digestion, the author asserts that building healthy software requires time for synthesis and subconscious processing, similar to how the body breaks down food.
Munich's IT transition: open-source is the default for the new coalition
13 hours ago
- Munich's new 'Mango Coalition' (Greens/Rosa List, SPD, FDP/Free Voters) sets Open Source as the standard for municipal software procurement from 2026 to 2032.
- The coalition emphasizes digital sovereignty, adopting the 'Public Money, Public Code' principle to make taxpayer-funded software publicly available.
- The Open-Source Program Office (OSPO) will be upgraded to coordinate projects, engage with communities, and reduce legal hurdles for publishing municipal developments.
- The FDP/Free Voters faction will lead the new Digital Department, aiming to reshape Munich's IT architecture to reduce dependency on large software corporations.
- Open Source is viewed as an economic necessity to save costs on license fees, avoid vendor lock-ins, and address budget constraints requiring annual savings of half a billion euros.
- Digitalization efforts will focus on media-break-free processes, the Once-Only Principle for data collection, and AI to boost efficiency amid staff declines in administration.
- The coalition commits to privacy by design, data economy, and user control over personal information in municipal identity systems.
- Strategic continuity is maintained by keeping Alexander Dietrich from the CSU as Municipal Director, indicating collegial cooperation during financial challenges.
- The agreement provides planning security for the IT and Open-Source community, with a strengthened OSPO and clear political responsibilities to prevent past internal resistance.
- Munich aims to regain its status as a digital pioneer by embedding digital sovereignty in its administration, with success depending on overcoming inertia in the next six years.
Andrew's Layoff Checklist
7 hours ago
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- The text includes a reference to a layoff checklist by or for Andrew.
Golden Testing a CAD Library
3 days ago
- Author maintains a Haskell CAD library called Waterfall-CAD and added SVG support in 2025, enabling more testable visual regression testing.
- Testing 3D CAD outputs is difficult; visual regression testing compares images to stored snapshots and highlights changes, akin to golden testing.
- Implemented tests by converting SVG diagrams to images with Rasterific-SVG, comparing pixels for differences, and generating diff images on failure.
- Considers developing an open-source library for visual regression testing but faces challenges like supporting more pixel formats and customization.
Claude for Small Business
6 hours ago
- Launch of Claude for Small Business, a package of connectors and workflows integrating Claude AI into tools like QuickBooks, PayPal, HubSpot, Canva, DocuSign, Google Workspace, and Microsoft 365.
- Aims to help small businesses overcome lagging AI adoption by providing tailored solutions for tasks such as payroll planning, month-end closing, sales campaigns, and invoice chasing.
- Includes 15 ready-to-run agentic workflows and 15 skills across finance, operations, sales, marketing, HR, and customer service, with features like cash forecasting, error reduction, and campaign analysis.
- Emphasizes trust and data security, with user-initiated tasks, existing permission controls, and no default data training on Team and Enterprise plans.
- Partners with PayPal to offer AI Fluency for Small Business, a free online course on using AI safely and ethically, and launches a national tour for hands-on AI fluency training.
- Collaborates with nonprofits and CDFIs like Workday Foundation, LISC, Accion Opportunity Fund, and Pacific Community Ventures to support solopreneurs and improve access to capital through AI tools.
US citizen convicted of running secret Chinese 'police station' in NYC
8 hours ago
- US citizen Lu Jianwang convicted of operating a secret Chinese police station in NYC's Chinatown for China's Ministry of Public Security.
- The station, closed in 2022 after an FBI investigation, was allegedly used to target dissidents and further China's political agenda abroad.
- Lu faces up to 30 years in prison for acting as an illegal agent and obstruction of justice; co-defendant Chen Jinping has pleaded guilty.
- China denies these are police stations, calling them service centers, but rights groups report over 100 such outposts in 53 countries.

Hasty Briefsbeta

Technical Dimensions of Live Feedback in Programming Systems

Wolf of Wall Street financier Jho Low seeks pardon from Donald Trump

The Deathbed Notes of Henry James (1968)

Classic 7 is a Windows 10 LTSC mod to look 1:1 to Windows 7

US sells 30-year bonds at 5% yield for first time since 2007

Notes from Optimizing CPU-Bound Go Hot Paths

LLMs are breaking 20 year old system design

Reddit Is (Mostly) Shuttering R/All, but There's Still a Way to Access It

Why scrapping quarterly earnings is a bad idea

AI coders are carrying half-open laptops through airports, offices, ice rinks

Software Engineers Are Obsolete

Federalism for Anti-Fascists

My life was changed by four sentences in four books

Arena AI Model ELO History

Building Software Requires Digestion

Munich's IT transition: open-source is the default for the new coalition

Andrew's Layoff Checklist

Golden Testing a CAD Library

Claude for Small Business

US citizen convicted of running secret Chinese 'police station' in NYC