📝 Articles
A $4 ESP32 can now see you breathe through walls — and that's both a miracle and a problem
The README line that made me put down my coffee
There’s a GitHub project that surfaced on r/github this week, and it opens with a sentence that reads like it was written by someone who has fully understood the implications of what they built and decided to lead with the facts:
“Turn any …
Firefox is now the last major browser that still runs uBlock Origin — and that should scare everyone
The Bluesky post that ended an era
Somewhere in the middle of this week, Mozilla posted a sentence on Bluesky that would have been completely unremarkable a decade ago and is now, somehow, a political statement:
“Our support for uBlock Origin isn’t going anywhere.”
It landed the …
Stack Overflow lost 99% of its questions — and the reason is more uncomfortable than 'AI killed it'
The number that made me stop scrolling
There’s a chart that’s been making the rounds on r/programming this week, and I’ve now looked at it maybe forty times, and it still does something unpleasant to my stomach every single time.
The number at the top of the story is this: Stack …
DeepSeek V4 Pro and the harness that ships with it — open weights aren't enough anymore
The day a model launch stopped being just a model launch
Yesterday, DeepSeek dropped V4 Pro, and the most interesting part wasn’t the model. That’s a strange sentence to write, because on paper the model is genuinely impressive: a Mixture-of-Experts behemoth with 1.6 trillion total …
Nine PBS lost 50TB and 70 years of history — and the cloud isn't the villain you think
A story Kafka would have rejected as too implausible
Let me walk you through what happened to Nine PBS, the public television station in St. Louis, because every time I re-read the timeline I find a new layer of absurdity.
The station stored 50 terabytes of archival material — roughly 70 years of …
Nvidia just found a way to fund the AI boom with your retirement — and nobody's happy about it
Two stories broke this week that are secretly one story
The first: Nvidia announced partnerships with Apollo, BlackRock, Blackstone, Brookfield, Goldman Sachs and KKR to build financing platforms meant to mobilize more than $500 billion for AI infrastructure. The money would come largely from …
On comments — the information only a code comment can carry, and why AI agents need it most
Bright orange, on purpose
There’s an essay that’s been doing the rounds on r/programming this week, and it opens with the kind of personal detail that tells you the author means it. Jon Gjengset — better known in Rust circles as jonhoo, the person behind crates like haphazard, evmap, and …
Should open source ban AI? The r/opensource debate and the copyright question nobody can answer
The moderators had to ask
There’s a pinned post on r/opensource right now that reads like a community bracing for a flood. The moderators are asking the subreddit to define a policy on AI-assisted contributions — specifically the thing everyone now calls “vibe-coding” — and the …
Thermite SIMD — write your kernel once, let Rust melt every CPU you own
“Melt your CPU” is a joke. The library is not.
I have a soft spot for projects whose tagline is slightly unhinged. Thermite SIMD, a Rust library that popped up on r/rust this week, describes itself with four words: “Melt your CPU.” The README then immediately clarifies that …