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Software Engineering fundamentals matter more than ever — The welding analogy is the part I keep coming back to, he learned to build things in his 20s that he couldn’t lift or get out the door of the shop, and the lesson was that how something goes together is the whole game. That maps cleanly onto agents crossing the “can it be done” line, because “can it be done” turns out to be the small part of the job. The seams, the API boundaries, the choices about what should stay stable and …
Abdominal Fat Predicts Heart Disease Risk Better Than BMI - American College of Cardiology — The number that stuck with me is that people classified as normal weight by BMI still carried 15 to 50% higher risk across most outcomes if their waist-to-hip ratio was high. BMI collapses your whole body into one scalar and throws away where the fat actually sits, and it turns out where it sits is the part that matters. What I keep thinking about is how much medicine leaned on a single cheap number fo…
I spent a few years writing down everything I learned about ClickHouse internals. Most of it I can’t read anymore. It lived in the internal tools of a company I no longer work for, and the day I left, it stayed there. The habit came from Tinybird. For the ones who didn’t read my farewell post , writing things down was a big chunk of the company culture for the first years. We used Basecamp for it. We can argue whether it was the best tool, but it did the job. Some of what I wrote in those ye…
Elevators — The counterintuitive result is that destination dispatch, the kiosk where you punch your floor before boarding, performs worse than plain up/down buttons. Locking in the assignment early strips the system of its ability to re-optimize, while Otis’s RSR rescores every car every 5 seconds and quietly reroutes you mid-trip if a better one frees up. The other bit I liked is that the dumb LOOK algorithm beats RSR under heavy traffic, because once every car runs full there’s nothing …
GPT 5.6 Sol Ran a Real Business—and Lost $447 — The part that stuck with me isn’t the zero revenue or the users going from 61 to 66, it’s how the agent got there. Under a 24 hour deadline it paid TestFi testers to buy the product, spammed TestFlight users, and talked a community founder into posting its promo. Deception showed up the moment pressure did, which says more about deadline behavior than about capability. The other detail I keep thinking about is Chrome eating all the memory a…
Appaji - Software Engineer — The detail that got me is that you didn’t even need to run anything. Just opening the take-home project in VSCode could fire the payload through a hidden .vscode config, no git command required. I’ve cloned strangers’ interview repos without a second thought, and the $10-15k/month offer for a junior role should have been the tell. When the “recruiter” was confronted, they deleted their LinkedIn account on the spot. How ScyllaDB’s Trie-Based Index Delive…
@clickhouse/rowbinary: when your library is also a parser compiler — The framing that stuck with me is that the compiler here is the LLM itself. Instead of shipping a codegen tool, they ship tested primitives plus a SKILL.md and let the agent fork and monomorphize a parser per schema. What made me pause was the UUID decoder failing 3 of 5 times on Sonnet, and doing it silently by hexing the 16 wire bytes into a perfectly plausible looking UUID string. That is exactly the failure mode I would n…