RL Throws Away Almost Everything Evaluators Have to Say When you get feedback on your work, it usually tells you what went wrong and how to fix it. But existing reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms

British businesses face a summer of soaring travel costs and disrupted supply chains as the United Kingdom emerges as the European economy most vulnerable to a deepening jet fuel crisis triggered by t

4-minute read OR: Reinventing a (crappier) Vi(m) This is a post about my new text editing program yvi. I like reinventing wheels. At least I do when it comes to making things like art , craft, food

Plastic Flowers to Protect the Hive Agentic development has fundamentally changed the software ecosystem. Modern coding agents are trained and prompted to seek out tools that will help with their ass

Since January, Replit’s iOS app has been stuck on the same version. The rankings show it slipping. First to second, then to third in Apple’s free developer tools category. In March, The Information r

Nginx (engine x) is a powerful, high-performance web server and reverse proxy server that has gained immense popularity due to its speed, scalability, and flexibility. It is widely used for serving st

In Saline Township, Michigan, as in most municipalities, homeowners who want to build a new house know what a complicated and lengthy process it can be: Navigating permit requirements, zoning changes,

This paper presents a practical architecture for last-mile delivery routing at scales reaching one million stops under realistic operational conditions, including vehicle capacity, package volume, rou

Violin makers, aka luthiers, traditionally learn from hands-on experience how to craft parts and select materials to shape an instrument’s final sound. MIT engineers hope to streamline that painstakin

McDonald’s misses Q2 estimates across the board, as consumers pull back on dining out. Nonetheless, McDonald’s stock surged $10, suggesting it’s not a big deal or that the worst is over: People may

Get Inkscape 1.4.4! Changes and Bug Fixes Highlights Inkscape 1.4.4 is a maintenance and bugfix release, which brings you 20 crash fixes , among them for three nasty bugs where Inkscape wouldn't e

Signed By Default Camp As with many discussions in the programming space, there are “wars” between different ways of doing things. These are typically about minor aesthetic preferences, such as: Tab

Understanding in real time how we move, operate, and interact within living and working spaces is crucial to applications in smart buildings, elder care, and automated industry. Myriads of systems hav

War is bad. Don’t start one. But we’re already in a class war and we’re losing. Where by “we” I mean most people; the winning side comprises, roughly, the richest 0.1% of the population, who are morph

When meeting in person isn’t an option, we turn to video calls for conversations too important for email or chat. Whether you’re talking to a doctor, hosting an executive meeting, or checking in with

If you've paid any attention to Google lately, you know that it wants us using its AI tools. So much so that Chrome apparently downloads a 4GB file containing details for running Gemini Nano, Google's

Borges wrote a story about a man named Funes who, after a horseback accident, acquires the ability to perceive and remember everything. Every leaf on every tree. Every ripple on every stream at every

Gen Z is unsubscribing: A study has found that more than half of the younger age demographic cancels and renews streaming subscriptions based on the availability of one TV series or film, and nearly a

With over 7% market share, BYD is now the top-selling EV brand in the UK so far in 2026, surpassing Tesla, Kia, and Volkswagen to take the top spot. And it’s not just the UK, BYD is outpacing the comp

tl;dr we reworked our query execution engine to 2x real world performance by using cache-friendly, tiled columnar execution. Think about a timeseries query engine as processing a two-dimensional matr

reCAPTCHA will continue to be the core bot defense pillar of the broader Fraud Defense platform. Existing reCAPTCHA customers are automatically Fraud Defense customers, with no migration required, no

For the last several years, I’ve been building and maintaining developer tools in my spare time, chiefly mise. What started as a simple rewrite of asdf in Rust has become an incredibly successful loc

Most of us search Google the same way we always have: type a few words, scroll, click something that looks close enough, and hope. For a while, that worked. Google handed us a list of links and let us

In 2023, I wrote about how Val Town moved away from Supabase and toward a more conventional database setup. We were using a lot of Supabase's functionality, including their authentication. So when it

Multiple notable groups, including Stop Killing Games, Mozilla, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, and numerous others have come together to pressure the UK government to stop "[undermining] the open

This is read by an automated voice. Please report any issues or inconsistencies here . Just across the road from the site of the first international conference on transitioning away from fossil fuels

Hi there, it's Dan, a technical co-founder of an ed-tech startup, host of Señors at Scale - a podcast for Senior Engineers, Organizer of ReactJS Barcelona meetup, international speaker and Staff Softw

We’ve agreed to a partnership with SpaceX that will substantially increase our compute capacity. This, along with our other recent compute deals, means that we’ve been able to increase our usage limit

Appearing Productive in The Workplace Parkinson’s Law states that work expands to fill the time available. In the era of AI, workers now have a tool that expands to fill whatever a large language mod

Listen to a narrated version of this essay: It didn’t dawn on me that there might be a few holes in my education until I was about 35. I’d just bought a house, the pipes needed fixing, and the plumbe

If you liked this piece, please subscribe to my premium newsletter. It’s $70 a year, or $7 a month, and in return you get a weekly newsletter that’s usually anywhere from 5,000 to 18,000 words, includ

There are lots of things that affect the quality of photographs. The biggest one is the skill of the photographer behind the camera. I don't have any tips for that, so for the rest of this blog I'll

With the rather excellent Steam Controller now on its way to the lucky few that managed to order one, Valve has released a full set of CAD files for their new hardware. The idea is to let enterprising

The FBI has launched a criminal leak investigation focusing on an Atlantic magazine journalist who wrote a deeply unflattering account last month of Director Kash Patel’s work habits, two people famil

Some age verification systems are no match for enterprising children, who have found that drawing on a fake mustache with a makeup pencil is enough to skirt the blocks of adult websites. U.K.-based n

"Shark Tank" investor Kevin O'Leary is defending his plans for a Utah data center that was just approved by state officials despite community backlash. Loading audio narration... O'Leary is dismissi