I’ve been testing Google’s new Gemini 3 model. It is very good. But rather than give you benchmark numbers, I’m going to show you how far AI has come in three years by asking the AI to demonstrate it. It has been slightly less than three years since the release of ChatGPT. A few days before that…

Issues involving the care of vulnerable people are some of the few issues that still resonate across the political spectrum. In New York, Mayor Zohran Mamdani campaigned to victory on universal child care, among other affordability concerns. On the campaign trail in 2024, President Donald Trump’s…

Anthropic released its most capable artificial intelligence model yet on Monday, slashing prices by roughly two-thirds while claiming state-of-the-art performance on software engineering tasks — a strategic move that intensifies the AI startup's competition with deep-pocketed rivals OpenAI and…

We’re going to largely skip markets again, because the sweater is rapidly unraveling in other areas as I pull on threads. Suffice it to say that the market is LARGELY unfolding as I had expected — credit stress is rising, particularly in the tech sector. Many are now pointing to the rising CDS for…

Claude Opus 4.5, and why evaluating new LLMs is increasingly difficult 24th November 2025 Anthropic released Claude Opus 4.5 this morning, which they call “best model in the world for coding, agents, and computer use”. This is their attempt to retake the crown for best coding model after significant…

Nobel Prize-winning economist Simon Kuznets is often cited, perhaps apocryphally, as having said that there are four types of countries: developed, underdeveloped, Japan, and Argentina. Japan, an island lacking natural resources and defeated in war, had every reason to be underdeveloped. Argentina,…

The future of AI agents is one where models work seamlessly across hundreds or thousands of tools. An IDE assistant that integrates git operations, file manipulation, package managers, testing frameworks, and deployment pipelines. An operations coordinator that connects Slack, GitHub, Google Drive,…

The PivotNine Blog 19 September 2025 Justin Warren Blog NPM FOSS npm open source parasocial xz It is a remarkable triumph of free and open source software (FOSS) that it is so useful and so reliable that it has become ubiquitous. So reliable, in fact, that organisations of all shapes and sizes have…

Over the course of 2025, every single major cloud provider has failed. In June, Google Cloud had issues taking down Cloud Storage for many users. In late October, Amazon Web Services had a massive outage in their main hub, us-east-1, affecting many services as well as some people’s beds. A little…

There have been a few discussions about what Flathub should do to push developers to maintain their apps on the latest versions of the published runtimes. But most of those lack important details around how this would actually happen. I will not discuss in this post the technical means that are…

Five months ago, my lifelong profession of software development changed completely. My profession was born in the 1940s, created to help fight demons. Our first encounter with the strange new angels of agentic AI is changing every aspect of it. Hardly anyone has noticed yet. The Profession Built on…

SSDs have all but replaced hard drives when it comes to primary storage. They're orders of magnitude faster, more convenient, and consume less power than mechanical hard drives. That said, if you're also using SSDs for cold storage, expecting the drives lying in your drawer to work perfectly after…

Determinism is a key concept to understand when writing code using durable execution frameworks such as Temporal, Restate, DBOS, and Resonate. If you read the docs you see that some parts of your code must be deterministic while other parts do not have to be. This can be confusing to a developer new…

Home Health Assistant Professor of Biomolecular Engineering Tal Sharf’s lab used organoids to make fundamental discoveries about human brain development. November 24, 2025 Tal Sharf (right, senior author), Tjiste van der Molen (middle, postdoctoral researcher), and Greg Kaurala (left, staff…

Google has resumed work on JPEG XL in Chromium, but there is no timeline for Chrome release News Venkat Tech Journalist News 2 min. read Nov 22nd, 2025 3:41 PM EEST XINSTALL BY CLICKING THE DOWNLOAD FILE A message from our partner Fix Windows 11 OS errors with Fortect: Download Fortect and install…

Japan's high-stakes gamble to turn island of flowers into global chip hub 50 minutes ago Suranjana TewariAsia business correspondent, Hokkaido, Japan Getty Images Hokkaido is a tourism and agricultural region, but Rapidus is making chips there too The island of Hokkaido has long been an agricultural…

This essay is half of a 2-part series about ego, empathy, and humility for developers and technical leaders. For advice on how to execute the ideas in this essay, you might also enjoy My Working Principles For Managing Ego, Empathy, And Humility. In our daily lives empathy and humility are obvious…

I know, this title might come as a surprise to many. Or perhaps, for those who truly know me, it won’t. I am not a fanboy. The BSDs and the illumos distributions generally follow an approach to design and development that aligns more closely with the way I think, not to mention the wonderful…

I haven't done a full-system backup since back in the olden days before Dropbox and Git. Every machine I now own is treated as a stateless, disposable unit that can be stolen, lost, or corrupted without consequences. The combination of full-disk encryption and distributed copies of all important…

Remember when you thought age verification laws couldn't get any worse? Well, lawmakers in Wisconsin, Michigan, and beyond are about to blow you away. It's unfortunately no longer enough to force websites to check your government-issued ID before you can access certain content, because politicians…

Here is an exuberant, garrulous, self-aware picture about an ageing and egomaniac film director and his two grownup daughters; it comes from Norwegian film-maker Joachim Trier, who gave Cannes the marvellous romantic drama The Worst Person in the World in 2021, starring the award-winning Renate…

See all topics Email Link Copied! In taking on the role of a filmmaker in his latest movie, Stellan Skarsgård sniffed a chance at payback. “I mean, what an opportunity for revenge,” the Swedish actor said, his eyes lighting up. Sprinkle an idiosyncrasy here, a mannerism there, soaked up from seven…

Graph showing unequal income growth Global changes in real income by income percentile - v1 The Elephant Curve, also known as the Lakner-Milanovic graph or the global growth incidence curve, is a graph that illustrates the unequal distribution of income growth for individuals belonging to different…

As I get older, I increasingly think about whether I’m spending my time the right way to advance my career and my life. This is also a question that your company asks about you every performance cycle: is this engineering manager spending their time effectively to advance the company or their…

Digg was having a rough year. Our CEO left the day before I joined. Senior engineers ghosted out the door, dampening productivity and pulling their remaining friends. Fraudulent voting rings circumvented our algorithms, selling access to our front page, and threatening our lives over modifications…

written on November 22, 2025 The more I work with large language models through provider-exposed APIs, the more I feel like we have built ourselves into quite an unfortunate API surface area. It might not actually be the right abstraction for what’s happening under the hood. The way I like to think…

The German occupation of Norway from 1940 to 1945 witnessed a remarkable building campaign to align this northern land with Hitler’s New Order. From gleaming highways and ideal cities to maternity centers for a purified Nordic race, plans to remake Norway into a model “Aryan” society fired the…

Credit: Robert Seymour / CC0 / Wikimedia Commons A couple weeks ago I wandered into a digression about toxic workplaces. Consider this week’s Nightcrawler another small detour into the forgotten value of boredom. Last Saturday, our four-year-old didn’t sleep well. So on Sunday morning, I did what…

Explore Best in Travel 2026 Poland Croatia Pakistan Search all of Lonely Planet Lonely Planet Destinations Not sure where to start? Get inspired by destinations chosen in this year's Best in Travel list. Start Discovering Not sure where to start? Get inspired by destinations chosen in this year's…

written on November 21, 2025 I felt like it might be a good time to write about some new things I’ve learned. Most of this is going to be about building agents, with a little bit about using agentic coding tools. TL;DR: Building agents is still messy. SDK abstractions break once you hit real tool…

written on January 24, 2025 Another day, another rant about dependencies. from me. This time I will ask you that we start and support a vibe shift when it comes to dependencies. You’re probably familiar with the concept of “dependency churn.” It’s that never-ending treadmill of updates, patches,…

All great books are in conversation with one another, often asking many of the same fundamental questions, sometimes suggesting roughly similar answers, and occasionally doing so with knowing winks across the centuries. Plato’s Republic and Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s Emile are two such books, and since…

The artificial intelligence revolution will be only three years old at the end of November. Think about that for a moment. In just 36 months AI has gone from great-new-toy, to global phenomenon, to where we are today – debating whether we are in one of the biggest technology bubbles or booms in…

Last year, my wife and I were driving south on Interstate 91, somewhere between Vermont and New York City, listening to episode five of the Ram Dass podcast, Here and Now. It wasn't my first listen; I had become addicted to playing and replaying the first seven episodes, all of which come from a…