amontalenti
Time marches on, but literary discourse is eternal. The last week has seen a revival of the “should aspiring fiction writers actually read books?” debate. I won’t bother bothering you with the origins or the arguments. Obviously, good artists study their mediums. They also tend to enjoy the art…
Now that Apache Kafka 4.2.0 has been released, Queues for Kafka is ready for production use. I thought I'd take the opportunity to share some of the thinking behind Queues for Kafka. I've spent many years developing enterprise messaging and streaming technologies, most recently Apache Kafka. I've…
The world’s top AI models can be prompted to generate near-verbatim copies of bestselling novels, raising fresh questions about the industry’s claim that its systems do not store copyrighted works. A series of recent studies has shown that large language models from OpenAI, Google, Meta, Anthropic…
Writing code is cheap now The biggest challenge in adopting agentic engineering practices is getting comfortable with the consequences of the fact that writing code is cheap now. Code has always been expensive. Producing a few hundred lines of clean, tested code takes most software developers a full…
The first edition of this series on Neoliberalism and Its Enemies looked at how the Hewlett Foundation has characterized the neoliberal era in its grant-making. I got some pushback from people who accused me of using a straw man rather than any of the more sophisticated definitions one can find in…
The term “neoliberalism” has been kicked around academic circles for a couple of generations now, meaning different things at different times. More recently, though, it became a term used in mainstream political discourse. The events of the last few years — including Bernie Sanders’ self-described…
A note: the following essay is not mine. It was written by Mark Pesce in 1997 and published here. I’m reposting it on default.blog to share it with a new audience and to keep it accessible. All credit to Pesce, a name I keep encountering in my travels through cyberspace. In 1997, before social…
21 Feb, 2026 Code is on the right monitor, and Slack is on the left. A YouTube playlist flows through my noise-canceling earphones. My fingers hit Alt+Tab before I even make a conscious decision, moving back and forth between the browser and the terminal. We call this multitasking. we mistake it for…
ClaudeAIStumbling into AIdbt How do you use your LLM coding agent? Mine is usually Claude the proofreader, Claude the bash monkey, Claude the webdev. All these things are about tasks completed. Read this, write that code, fix that web page. This week I gave Claude a new job. I had an existing data…
The software industry doesn't agree on much. Tabs versus spaces, monoliths versus microservices, whether stand-ups are useful or performance art—pick a topic and you'll find engineers ready to die on both hills. But for about forty years, we had one consensus: lines of code is a terrible metric.…
25th February 2026 - Link Blog Claude Code Remote Control (via) New Claude Code feature dropped yesterday: you can now run a "remote control" session on your computer and then use the Claude Code for web interfaces (on web, iOS and native desktop app) to send prompts to that session. It's a little…
Tests Are The New Moat Open source projects grow over time. They are a product of incremental development. A project starts lean, gains adoption, pivots to accommodate that adoption, and maintains backwards compatibility throughout this process. These lean projects become large ships. Historically,…
Before the lights dimmed for the film, “The Lady from Shanghai” at Vidiots, Aidan Gannon and Jason Fine were busy perusing the aisles of endless DVDs. For these young cinephiles, the Eagle Rock hub isn’t just a theater — it’s a gateway to film history. In a matter of minutes, the 24-year-olds found…
25th February 2026 I gave a talk this weekend at Social Science FOO Camp in Mountain View. The event was a classic unconference format where anyone could present a talk without needing to propose it in advance. I grabbed a slot for a talk I titled “The State of LLMs, February 2026 edition”, subtitle…
There’s a certain kind of person who’s becoming extinct. You’ve probably met one. Maybe you are one. Someone who actually understood the tools they used. Someone who could sit down at an unfamiliar system, poke at it for twenty minutes, and have a working mental model of what it was doing and why.…
Abstract For large UNIX projects, the traditional method of building the project is to use recursive make . On some projects, this results in build times which are unacceptably large, when all you want to do is change one file. In examining the source of the overly long build times, it became…
Table of Contents Introduction KeePass has long been the gold standard and darling of the tech world, earned through its unrelenting commitment to security, stability, and data sovereignty. However, the XML format which the KDBX file format has been predicated on since 2007 has become a persistent…
“Sandhogs,” they called the laborers who built the tunnels leading into New York’s Penn Station at the beginning of the last century. Work distorted their humanity, sometimes literally. Resurfacing at the end of each day from their burrows beneath the Hudson and East Rivers, caked in the mud of…
We designed FDM-1, a foundation model for computer use. FDM-1 is trained on videos from a portion of our 11-million-hour screen recording dataset, which we labeled using an inverse dynamics model that we trained. Our video encoder can compress almost 2 hours of 30 FPS video in only 1M tokens. FDM-1…
For nineteen years, until his retirement in 1885, Herman Melville would awake, slick back his dark hair and unsnarl the snags from his beard, don a uniform of dark navy pilot cloth and affix to his chest the brass badge of a U.S. Customs Inspector. Operating at the Lower Manhattan docks, Melville’s…
(Credits: Far Out / A24) Tom Taylor@tomtaylorfo Thu 24 April 2025 9:43, UK Follow us on Google Discover The year is 1975, and David Byrne is holed up in art school on Rhode Island feverishly cogitating how to shrink his own head. He would soon crack the case, figuring out that the “easiest way to do…
AI demand is surging across consumers, developers, and businesses. Meeting that demand and providing everyone access to our products requires three things: compute, distribution, and capital. Today we’re announcing $110B in new investment at a $730B pre-money valuation. This includes $30B from…
There is a popular belief that Hemingway averaged 10 words per sentence. Studies don’t confirm it – the estimate is closer to 15. He was surely a master of short sentences, but that was a deliberate style. The shortening of speech we see today is not. Researcher Arjun Panickssery tracked how the…
Imagine visiting your repository in the morning and feeling calm because you see: Issues triaged and labelled CI failures investigated with proposed fixes Documentation has been updated to reflect recent code changes. Two new pull requests that improve testing await your review. All of it visible,…
On day one, to even begin programming anything, programmers must understand how to write text files, and use an interpreter, or compiler, or assembler, to turn them into executing programs. Soon after, they must roughly understand what memory is, and how to use addresses and pointers (even if…
Part I: Why auctions work When selling a unique asset, auctions usually work. Your equity is a unique asset, and when you raise money, you are selling a big chunk of it. There’s no “right” price for your equity and there aren’t that many interested buyers. An auction allows you to figure out who is…
Systems thinking heuristic The purpose of a system is what it does (POSIWID) is a heuristic in systems thinking coined by the British management consultant Stafford Beer, who stated that there is "no point in claiming that the purpose of a system is to do what it constantly fails to do". It is…
Introduction I wanted a text that would bring together the ideas behind many of the more recent distributed systems - systems such as Amazon's Dynamo, Google's BigTable and MapReduce, Apache's Hadoop and so on. In this text I've tried to provide a more accessible introduction to distributed systems.…
What AI coding costs you February 15, 2026 aiclaudeessay Every developer I know uses AI for coding now. The productivity gains are real, but there are costs that don’t show up on any dashboard. Imagine a spectrum. On the far left are humans typing on the keyboard, seeing the code in the IDE. On the…
Carson Gross February 27, 2026 I teach computer science at Montana State University. I am the father of three sons who all know I am a computer programmer and one of whom, at least, has expressed interest in the field. I love computer programming and try to communicate that love to my sons, the…
The breathing light – officially “Sleep Indicator Light” – debuted in the iconic iBook G3 in 1999. It was originally placed in the hinge, but soon was moved to the other side for laptops, and eventually put in desktop computers too: Power Mac, the Cube, and the iMac. The green LED was replaced by a…
Phillip Lopate may be the greatest living expert on New York writing and the personal essay. He wrote the book on both, or rather, anthologized both, with Writing New York and The Art of the Personal Essay—which, needless to say, also makes him an excellent teacher of writing. If you happen to find…
/ February 25, 2026 The German auteur’s recent book presents a strange, idiosyncratic vision of the concept of “truth,” one that defines how he sees the world and his art. Copy Link Facebook X (Twitter) Bluesky Pocket Email Werner Herzog, 1984. (Frederic Garcia / Gamma-Rapho via Getty Images) In…
← All Posts February 28, 2026 Preface I’ve always enjoyed the literary form of the interview, and hoped that once I would be able to dabble in it. Here’s how I finally got motivated. A fantastic documentary about Python was recently released on YouTube, and in the aftermath of the viewing party,…
“Find your purpose.” It has become such common advice that few question it. But rather than inspirational, it can feel like a burden. How do I go about finding this and what if I never do? This is “purpose anxiety” — the gnawing sense that one’s life should have an overarching purpose, but it’s…
A lot of my readers call me a cynic when I say things like “you should do things that make your manager happy” or “big tech companies get to decide what projects you work on”. Alex Wennerberg put the “Sean Goedecke is a cynic” case well in his post Software Engineers Are Not Politicians. Here are…
This is a brief guide to my new art project microgpt, a single file of 200 lines of pure Python with no dependencies that trains and inferences a GPT. This file contains the full algorithmic content of what is needed: dataset of documents, tokenizer, autograd engine, a GPT-2-like neural network…
Before Cormac McCarthy became Cormac McCarthy, the man and the novelist, he was Charles Joseph McCarthy Jr., or Charlie McCarthy for short. He was the third child of six and the oldest son born to an Irish Catholic family in Rhode Island that moved to Tennessee during the Great Depression. To his…
Robert Tinney passed away on February 1st, 2026. If you were into computers in the '80s, you may not know his name, but you definitely know his work: He was the artist behind the beautiful hand-painted covers of the influential computer hobbiest magazine Byte from the December 1975 issue until the…
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