London’s Pedicabs: Sex, loathing, and highway robbery

The inside story of how the capital's most chaotic and least understood form of transport actually works

The beauty of concrete

Why are buildings today simple and austere, while buildings of the past were ornate and elaborately ornamented? The answer is not the cost of labor.

EVERYONE IS BEAUTIFUL AND NO ONE IS HORNY

MODERN ACTION AND SUPERHERO FILMS FETISHIZE THE BODY, EVEN AS THEY DESEXUALIZE IT

Carnivorous Plants Have Been Trapping Animals for Millions of Years. So Why Have They Never Grown Larger?

Plants that feed on meat and animal droppings have evolved at least ten times through evolutionary history

Why Some LED Lights Feel Uncomfortable: Understanding PWM Flicker and Better Alternatives

I recently spent a few weeks running a conference for a community of researchers and writers in a historic chateau in the French…

Chinese graduates in UK turn to gig work amid job crunch: ‘it helps me survive’

Chinese graduates are riding out Britain’s job crunch by running errands for other expats. Some are earning a small fortune

Backyard Coffee And Jazz In Kyoto, Japan

A "magical" experience, and what we get when we let people pursue their passions

A Walking Man

Thinking about Jiro Taniguchi's seminal manga

I Deleted My Second Brain

Why I Erased 10,000 Notes, 7 Years of Ideas, and Every Thought I Tried to Save

What Would a Kubernetes 2.0 Look Like

As we approach the 10 year anniversary of the 1.0 release of Kubernetes, let's take stock of the successes and failures of the project in the wild. Also what would be on a wish list for a Kubernetes 2.0 release.

NVIDIA is full of shit

Engineered Addictions

How silicon valley is putting a price tag on your attention - and relationships

People Keep Inventing Prolly Trees

A novel data structure has been invented four times now, with three different names. We think that's a good sign.

Hardcoded Folder Icons in macOS

Locals Cheer as Tokyo “Mario Kart” Company Faces Charges

Street go-karts are Japan's most hated tourist attraction. Now, they're also drawing attention from the cops.

Overtourism in Japan, and How it Hurts Small Businesses

Why being super popular is not the goal of most small businesses

Introducing Vector Networks

Five Companies Now Control Over 90% of the Global Food Delivery Market

Why is my $8 burger $23 after fees - An average reddit user

Markdown and the Slow Fade of the Formatting Fetish

Like moss on a star destroyer

Japanese Grandparents Create Life-Size Totoro With Bus Stop For Their Grandkids

Best. Grandparents. Ever.

Animating in Public

On the importance of sharing your work.

Fonts for Complex Data

Retail displays, packaged goods, financial reports and apps all present readers with a dizzying array of data. Here are a few ways to make quick work of their long lists, tiny annotations, and mighty stacks of numbers.

Fast Streaming Inserts in DuckDB with ADBC

ADBC enables high throughput insertion into DuckDB

An Enchanting Experience

A day out at Wimbledon

Children of You

TODOs aren’t for doing

Ramblings

A lightweight way to add ambient social cohesion for remote teams.

Shamelessness as a strategy

I’ve enjoyed playing a game called Avalon recently. I won’t go too far into the rules, but it’s a hidden role game in the vein of Secret Hitler or Werewolf, where one team is “good”, trying to uncover who among them is “evil”, before the evil team wins.

Self-guaranteeing promises

A self-guaranteeing promise is verifiable and non-reversible. It does not require you to trust anyone.

Opinion | What My Daughter Told ChatGPT Before She Took Her Life

The medical profession has clear rules and responsibilities. What about the chatbots?

We Rewrote the Ghostty GTK Application

Sashiko-ori

About Sashiko Sashiko is a traditional Japanese stitch-weaving craft. It is said that the origins of sashiko can be traced back to the farmers who could only make clothes from hemp, and they regularly added hemp yarns to woven hemp cloth to make it more durable and retain heat. People used to hand-stitch the strands

Deep fun

Notes on the difficult business of enjoyment

How I accidentally became PureGym's unofficial Apple Wallet developer

Tired of fumbling with the PureGym app for 47 seconds every morning, I reverse-engineered their API to build an Apple Wallet pass that gets me in with a quick wrist scan. Along the way, I discovered their bizarre security theatre: QR codes that expire every minute while my ancient 8-digit PIN lives forever.

Bookmarkable by Design: URL-Driven State in HTMX | Loren Stewart

Build stateful HTMX applications using URL parameters as your state store, creating naturally bookmarkable and shareable interfaces

The Man Who Killed Google Search

quests, failure, desire

or: contra defensive postures

The Making Of: Dust 2

The story behind Dust 2 - the map that was never meant to happen and at best, I thought, would be a foolish attempt to repeat the success of Dust. I gave it a go anyway.

Design of complex tables

Diving deep into designing really complex financial tables

Streaming Real-Time Visualizations with ClickHouse, Apache Arrow and Perspective

Read about how ClickHouse can stream results in Arrow over HTTP, making it simple to integrate with high-performance visualization libraries such as Perspective.

My browser WASM’t prepared for this. Using DuckDB, Apache Arrow and Web Workers in real life

The Bear Manifesto

An outline of my philosophy and direction for the platform

Corrosion

Corrosion is distributed service discovery based on Rust, SQLite, and CRDTs.

You Are How You Act

You are the sum of your behaviors not your intentions

Assembling Community OS

DuckDB ADBC – Zero-Copy Data Transfer via Arrow Database Connectivity

Imgur Geo-Blocked the UK, So I Geo-Unblocked My Entire Network

Imgur started blocking UK users. Rather than installing a VPN on every device, I set up a network-wide proxy that tunnels Imgur traffic through a VPN automatically.

My productivity app is a never-ending .txt file

Persistent connections with gen_statem

How we can use the gen_statem behaviour to implement a resilient state machine that holds a connection to an external service.

Definite: Duck Takes Flight | Definite

duck-takes-flight is a simple example of streaming and concurrent read/write with duckdb and Apache Arrow Flight

Data-at-Rest Encryption in DuckDB

DuckDB v1.4 ships database encryption capabilities. In this blog post, we dive into the implementation details of the encryption, show how to use it and demonstrate its performance implications.

It is OK to Say “CSS Variables” Instead of (or Alongside) “Custom Properties”

TPAC 2025 just ended, and I am positively tired. Attending it remotely, my sleep schedule is chaotic right now. I have many ideas for CSS-related posts in my list of ideas for November, but almost all of them require at least some amount of research and crafting demos. Well! I found one note that I wanted to expand on, and which sounds tiny enough to be able to finish it in my altered state.

Why Python Developers Need DuckDB (And Not Just Another DataFrame Library) - MotherDuck Blog

Understand why a database is much more than just a dataframe library | Reading time: 6 min read

Staying in the arena

One of the things that can seem difficult to understand for people who merely tolerate having a job is why anyone would continue working if they didn't have to. You often see a version of this incredulity when the peanut gallery weighs in on the choices of billionaires. Why do these Very Rich People continue to do things – especially t...

Rainbow Six Siege Hacked as Players Get Billions of Credits and Random Bans - STG Play

Rainbow Six Siege appears to have been hacked as global server outages hit all platforms, with players reporting billions of credits, dev skins, and random bans while Ubisoft calls it a server incident.

Making Crash Bandicoot – part 1

In the summer of 1994 Naughty Dog, Inc. was still a two-man company, myself and my longtime partner Jason Rubin. Over the preceding eight years, we had published six games as a lean and mean duo, b…

Migrating my web analytics from Matomo to Umami

Migrating 10 years of analytics from Matomo to Umami.

Last Year on My Mac: Look back in disbelief

If someone had told me 12 months ago what was going to happen this past year, I wouldn’t have believed them. Skipping swiftly past all the political, economic and social turmoil, I come to th…

API File Systems

Delegated types in Rails: a real-life application - Remi Mercier - Software Developer

Delegated types are a modelization pattern introduced in Rails in 2020. And developers have mostly been scratching their head for a few years trying to use them in their applications. Today, I want to share a real-world use case. I'll walk you through my pre-existing domain architecture, my initial requirements, my mistakes, how I eventually used delegated types, what I learned and my open questions.

Street Fighter II, The World Warrier

It’s hard to justify Tahoe icons

Looking at the first principles of icon design—and how Apple failed to apply all of them in macOS Tahoe

Icons in Menus Everywhere — Send Help

A Social Filesystem — overreacted

Formats over apps.

una.im | Follow-the-leader pattern with CSS anchor positioning

Learn how to create a dynamically re-anchored pointer element.

All in on event sourcing

The idea of event sourcing is completely different from what we usually build. Let's understand why it's useful and how to approach it using a poker platform as an example.

Drag Gestures on the Web

Drag gestures are far less common on the web than on mobile. I wanted to try how they feel on the web, so I built this iOS 26 inspired gesture with Motion as an exercise.

Exploring retro print with CMYK Halftone

We love using shaders to bring high‑end image processing to Paper, and we like to make them fast and easy to tweak. We are introducing an image filter that captures the feel of analog printing. Here's how it works, and how to make it yours.