amontalenti
In the book Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions, a two-dimensional world called “Flatland” is inhabited by polygonal creatures like triangles, squares, and circles. The protaganist, a square, is visited by a sphere from the third dimension. He struggles to comprehend the existence of another…
Everyone’s always hyping some shiny new tool that promises to make better software, faster. But in practice, change introduces risk. Why chase the unknown when we have decades of battle-tested techniques that have successfully built businesses in every domain? It’s much safer to stick with familiar…
Photo by Fachy Marín on Unsplash The Fire Season At a recent CEO dinner in Menlo Park, someone asked the familiar question: Are we in an AI bubble? One of the dinner guests, a veteran of multiple Silicon Valley cycles, reframed the conversation entirely. She argued for thinking of this moment as a…
Share Give a gift subscription I was bewildered when I encountered a new social class at Yale four years ago: the luxury belief class.1 My confusion wasn’t surprising given my unusual background. When I was three years old2, my mother was addicted to drugs and my father abandoned us. I grew up in…
NVIDIA frenemy relation with OpenAI and Oracle I’ve spent the last 48 hours completely falling down the rabbit hole of NVIDIA’s Q3 Fiscal 2026 earnings report. If you just skim the headlines, everything looks perfect: Revenue is up 62% to $57 billion, and Jensen Huang is talking about a "virtuous…
I've been building software professionally for nearly 20 years. I've been through a lot of changes - the 'birth' of SaaS, the mass shift towards mobile apps, the outrageous hype around blockchain, and the perennial promise that low-code would make developers obsolete. The economics have changed…
It has now been 30 years since WarCraft II: Tides of Darkness was released. After the great response to Warcraft: Orcs and Humans, released in November 1994, Blizzard began working on Warcraft II: Tides of Darkness. Development stared in the first months of 1995, and the game was released in North…
If You’re Going to Vibe Code, Why Not Do It in C? Stephen Ramsay Or hell, why not do it in x86 assembly? Let’s get a few things out of the way before I go any further with this seemingly impertinent thought, because it’s nowhere near as snarky as it sounds. First, I don’t particularly like vibe…
December 9: Wikipedia still can't be sold We're sorry we've asked you a few times recently, but it's Tuesday, December 9—please don't wait until tomorrow to help. We're happy you consult Wikipedia often. If everyone reading this gave $2.75 today, we'd hit our goal in a few hours. Just 2% of our…
Anna Possi works behind the counter of her bar, where she has worked since 1958, in Nebbiuno, Italy, September 30, 2025. REUTERS/Claudia Greco In the village of Nebbiuno, perched on the Piedmont hills overlooking Lake Maggiore, Anna Possi is pulling espressos at Bar Centrale — just as she has done…
Memos from Howard Marks Listen to Memo Archived Memos Subscribe Is It a Bubble? Ours is a remarkable moment in world history. A transformative technology is ascending, and its supporters claim it will forever change the world. To build it requires companies to invest a sum of money unlike anything…
How does a distributed system reliably determine when one of its members has failed? This is a tricky problem: you need to deal with unreliably networks, the fact that nodes can crash at arbitrary times, and you need to do so in a way that can scale to thousands of noes. This is the role of a…
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2025-12-08
Note: This post was updated with additional details regarding AWS Lambda.
Last year we announced basic support for Python Workers, allowing Python developers to ship Python to region: Earth in a single command and take advantage of the…
Being exceptional is less about rare talent and more about the choices you make every day. It’s a set of habits that quietly outwork everyone else. Below are five habits for anyone who wants to do exceptional. Show extreme care Care is visible. It shows in the neatness of your file names, the tone…
Startups have a notorious failure rate – some estimates say 9 out of 10 startups eventually fail. Yet, contrary to what many first-time founders expect, startups rarely fail because a giant competitor swoops in or because of some external “homicide.” Instead, most startups die by “suicide,” meaning…
Q&A The Polyglot Neuroscientist Resolving How the Brain Parses Language December 5, 2025 Is language core to thought, or a separate process? For 15 years, the neuroscientist Ev Fedorenko has gathered evidence of a language network in the human brain — and has found some similarities to LLMs. Read…
10th December 2025 I’ve started using the term HTML tools to refer to HTML applications that I’ve been building which combine HTML, JavaScript, and CSS in a single file and use them to provide useful functionality. I have built over 150 of these in the past year, almost all of them written by LLMs.…
Dictionaries are ubiquitous in Python code; they are the data structure of choice for a wide variety of tasks. But dictionaries are mutable, which makes them problematic for sharing data in concurrent code. Python has added various concurrency features to the language over the last decade or…
Arno J. Mayer was the last of the great Jewish American intellectuals who were refugees and exiles from fascism in Europe. His passing last December represents an important marker in modern intellectual history, an end point from which to look back and take stock, as well as to look forward. His…
Categories SEO July 15, 2024 by Vincent Schmalbach Picture this: It's ten years ago, and you've just launched a new WordPress blog. Within hours, sometimes even minutes, your content is indexed by Google. You search for a unique sentence from your latest post, and there it is, right on the first…
GM! ☕️ The time has come, friends: Today’s issue will be my last of 2025. Things will be quiet here, and paid subscriptions will pause until January while I finish my client year and draw close to home for the holidays. In addition, I am working on a print zine that will snail mail to paid…
Accelerate innovation, reduce costs, and secure your data with AWS cloud storage. ads via Carbon Occasionally I've run into situations of confusion on the exact differences between the following related concepts in Python: a container an iterable an iterator a generator a generator expression a…
Here's a preview from my zine, HTTP: Learn Your Browser's Language! If you want to see more comics like this, sign up for my saturday comics newsletter or browse more comics! get the zine! get the zine! read the transcript! https://examplecat.com:443/cats?color=light%20gray#banana scheme (https://):…
Discussed on Hacker News, lobste.rs and r/programming. Lately I’ve been reading Sean Goedecke’s essays on being a Staff+ engineer. His work (particularly Software engineering under the spotlight and It’s Not Your Codebase) is razor-sharp and feels painfully familiar to anyone in Big Tech. On paper,…
I’m at the point where I’m migrating all my projects to uv, and new Python projects don’t use any other package manager. I finally got around to migrating this site to use it, using the very handy migrate-to-uv tool. So it’s time to update my recommended Python setup. My old Python setup was very…
Smarter ways to watch TV How to break free from smart TV ads and tracking Sick of smart TVs? Here are your best options. Scharon Harding – Dec 12, 2025 7:30 am | 0 Credit: Aurich Lawson | Getty Images Credit: Aurich Lawson | Getty Images Story text Size Width * Links * Subscribers only Learn more…
Google has made its ‘next generation brand typeface’, Google Sans Flex, available for download — under an open source license, which is welcome news. A modern sans serif font purpose-designed for use on screens and OSes, Google Sans Flex is a ground-up, multi-axis rebuild of the proprietary Google…
12th December 2025 One of the things that most excited me about Anthropic’s new Skills mechanism back in October is how easy it looked for other platforms to implement. A skill is just a folder with a Markdown file and some optional extra resources and scripts, so any LLM tool with the ability to…
This title is an obvious nod to The 1999 article Why Johnny Can’t Encrypt, and To encrypt email in 1998 you’d run GnuPG from a terminal, importing the recipient’s public key into your local keyring then copying your email text into a file then encrypting the file for that public key: gpg -e -r alice…
Overview Developers Industry Insights Product News Events Partners Company Blog/ Developers/ Best Practices/ Goodbye Microservices: From 100s of problem children to 1 superstar Time to read: July 10, 2018 Written by Twilion Microservices is a service-oriented software architecture in which…
Obie Fernandez 8 min read·1 day ago -- Something that’s been true for me for a long time, long before coding agents showed up, is that the initial effort involved in any programming work happens before the first line of code is written. I say this as someone who routinely “thinks with his fingers,”…
The best measure of serenity may be our distance from the self — getting far enough to dim the glare of ego and quiet the din of the mind, with all its ruminations and antagonisms, in order to see the world more clearly, in order to hear more clearly our own inner voice, the voice that only ever…
A mind is a strange place, strange and solitary — the only place where, with all our passions of reason and all our calculations of emotion, we render reality what it is; the only place where truth is won or lost, where beauty means anything, where mathematics, God, and the color of your mother’s…
Disclaimer - I believe LLMs are an incredible tool for software development and knowledge work overall. I use tens of thousands of tokens every day for my tasks. LLMs will become a foundational part of software development. As a pebble dropped into a lake, they will inevitably find the bottom on…
Philosophical paradox The paradox of hedonism, also called the pleasure paradox, refers to the practical difficulties encountered in the pursuit of pleasure. For the hedonist, constant pleasure-seeking may not yield the most actual pleasure or happiness in the long term when consciously pursuing…
NOTE Images have been lost. Other avenues had struck no luck. I’ll try again later. Any and all emphasis, missing punctuation, cool grammar is all by Anthony Bourdain. The only modifications I have made is to the layout, to represent li.st as closely as possible with no changes to the content. NOTE…
Introduction SSH stands for Secure Socket Shell, and it is probably the most used protocol today to establish a secure connection between two computers. In this article, I want to explain how can access a remote computer through a SSH connection. SSH Client vs SSH Server Two computers are involved…
Following in Amazon's footsteps, two student projects independently use 'collaborative filtering' to bring recommendations and social networking to online music; soon they will join forces. By | November 11, 2025 | Tags: Dot-com, 2002, Season 4 Last.fm circa 2003; via Last.fm Flickr account. What we…
We are not here to make code i’ve been thinking a bit about this comment by @apaleslimghost in practice “let code die” often means “let someone from the ingroup kill your code”. if someone’s new at strudel/hydra and does something weird/unexpected/“wrong” it’ll get deleted by someone more…
On the 18th of April in 1906, a Wednesday, a small company was started in Rochester, New York that made paper for photography. The Haloid Company wasn’t alone in this, not even in its own area, being neighbors with Eastman Kodak. Having been founded by a group of men led by George C. Seager, the…
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