Travis Emslander

If you want a visceral hit of late-90s web nostalgia—or if you weren't around to experience the era of copper-wire modems firsthand—56k.rip is an expertly crafted simulation…

Anthropic has adopted standard instruction naming for agent instructions, supporting the broader markdown specification. Previously, developers configuring coding agents…

Sprite Fusion published a fascinating writeup on using AI (specifically GPT-6 Astra) to create playable Game Boy Advance ROMs. The author guided the model to generate and…

ParcelScope put together an impressive interactive 3D visualization of buildings in Los Angeles. The project visualizes an enormous volume of municipal and architectural…

Neal Agarwal (of neal.fun) released another brilliantly creative web game: Unusual Suspects. In the game, you play the role of a police sketch artist listening to witness…

Check out this walkable 3D cyberpunk city rendered entirely in ASCII text. The developer built a fully navigable 3D world with retro-futuristic aesthetics, lighting effects,…

How to survive boiling water is a fascinating deep dive that has nothing to do with software or AI. Instead, it follows a curious microbiologist down a rabbit hole…

Brian Houck, an Applied Scientist at DX, wrote a thought-provoking piece titled What are code reviews even for?. The article examines the hidden risks of delegating code…

I really enjoyed this writeup detailing an engineer's experience rescuing a broken utility company website. Rather than piling on more client-side frameworks, the author went…

Taken is an eye-opening project that demonstrates just how much telemetry and device data a modern web browser exposes to any website you visit without asking for…

Bartosz Ciechanowski published another masterclass visual essay, this time focusing entirely on floating point numbers and how they work. I remember covering IEEE 754…

I recently came across an open source project from Posit called ggsql (A grammar of graphics for SQL). The concept of a "Grammar of Graphics" (popularized by Leland Wilkinson…

Anthropic stirred up considerable controversy by testing pricing tiers that restrict Claude Code access exclusively to expensive $100/month or $200/month plans. Simon…

The Claude Opus 4.7 release introduced an unexpected change: an updated tokenizer. Modifying a tokenizer mid-stream is fairly unusual; typically, tokenizer architectures are…

If you explore open-weights models on Hugging Face, you quickly run into a dizzying array of quantization variants (Q4, Q8, FP16, etc.). It can be confusing to know what…

Simon Willison wrote about OpenAI's GPT-5.4-mini and GPT-5.4-nano models. The nano model in particular shows impressive capabilities for its size, standing out as one of the…

I recently came across gws, an open source CLI tool for Google Workspace (covering Gmail, Drive, Sheets, Docs, and more). While it's an unofficial project not affiliated with…

MOSS is a fun MS Paint-style drawing app with an interesting twist: each brush is a tiny JavaScript program that defines how it behaves as you draw. There are dozens of…

A software engineer decided to teach his dog to vibe code games. Having the same dog breed myself (a cavapoo), I was immediately hooked. The experiment is delightfully silly:…

As AI models become increasingly proficient at writing code from detailed specifications, automated tests have become more valuable than ever. In effect, a comprehensive test…

Raspberry Pi's stock price surged 30% recently, with many attributing the run to the popularity of using these single-board computers to host personal AI agents like OpenClaw…

When working with AI to produce code, especially for building net-new apps and prototypes, it can quickly become difficult to understand the changes it made and verify how…

Mario Zechner wrote a great writeup on building his own coding agent as both a learning experience and out of frustration with existing tools constantly changing behavior and…

I learned from Simon Willison's blog about exe.dev, a hosting service that gives you up to 25 VMs for $20/month. The really interesting part is that it's entirely SSH-based.…

I saw this GitHub PR comment from Adam Wathan, CEO of Tailwind Labs and creator of the Tailwind CSS framework. The PR proposed adding an endpoint for text-only documentation…

Simon Willison shared a snippet that someone on Reddit posted from a Gemini session where the user provided feedback they received from ChatGPT on code Gemini wrote. The…

Google introduced "Code Wiki", which uses AI to create a wiki of your codebase. Currently it's limited to working with open source public repositories, so if you maintain…

I came across a thoughtful comparison of Go, Rust, and Zig by Sinclair Target. Rather than falling into the usual trap of declaring which language is "best," the author…

A great reminder, through someone else's pain, to verify commands agentic AI wants to run. A user on Reddit posted that while working with Claude Code it deleted their home…

Software engineering usually means translating requirements into deterministic algorithms. But with LLMs, an intriguing question arises: where is the line between writing…

GitHub has become so synonymous with version control that it's easy to forget Git itself is completely decentralized. While hosted platforms like GitHub are great for…

I came across a great tutorial called Idiomatic awk. Anyone working in Unix environments eventually encounters intricate shell pipelines using sed and awk that work…

OpenAI recently introduced an AI-powered browser, but giving an LLM free rein over web browsing creates massive security challenges. LLMs remain fundamentally vulnerable to…

I happened upon a fascinating video of Switch Angel making music live by writing code. At first, I wasn't sure if the code on screen was actively driving the audio…

I've been fascinated with Harper Reed ever since hearing him on a podcast. He has a storied technical background, including serving as CTO for the 2012 Obama re-election…

IKEA's assembly manuals are famous for being completely wordless: using only diagrams, the same instructions work seamlessly in every country around the globe. Here's a…

OpenAI recently introduced Sora 2, an invite-only beta for their video generation model that looks like a formidable step forward. A standout capability is "cameo" creation,…

Google released an update to its image generation models called Nano-Banana. While it is highly capable, release notes don't always make it obvious what practical workflows…

My wife and I are big fans of Nintendo's Animal Crossing. We first got into it years ago on the GameCube and, like many others, revisited it when New Horizons came out on the…

David Heinemeier Hansson (DHH) of Ruby on Rails and 37signals fame has created a new Linux distribution called Omarchy. What's compelling about this distro is that it is…

Simon Willison recently gave a great presentation on LLM security. He does a fantastic job of covering primary attack vectors like prompt injection, but also frames system…

I came across a fascinating YouTube video exploring the acoustics of birdsong. The creator uses spectrograms to break down the incredible vocal mechanics birds use to produce…

Cloudflare released a TypeScript library to implement an OAuth 2.1 provider on Cloudflare Workers. What's interesting about it? They used an LLM (Anthropic's Claude) to write…

I really enjoyed this post by Matthias Endler titled Reinvent the Wheel. As you might guess, the post takes issue with the age-old engineering dogma not to reinvent the…

Recently, Grok (the AI model in X / xAI) went a bit off the rails. No matter what people asked, it kept steering answers back to discussions of "white genocide" in South…

While listening to one of my usual podcasts, they talked about an odd new meme called Italian Brainrot. Apparently it started when someone created a TikTok video featuring an…

Someone found an interesting approach for dealing with a continuous barrage of bots scraping their website. While bots can be harmless web crawlers for search engines, there…

I enjoyed this essay by Pete Koomen titled AI Horseless Carriages. In it Pete, who is a GP at Y Combinator and co-founder of Optimizely, discusses his observation that many…

There is a very interesting article titled Hacking US crosswalks to talk like Zuck is as easy as 123. It details some clever hackers updating crosswalks that normally have a…

I came across this interesting little experimental web framework called MonkeysPaw. The concept is that rather than writing code, you describe what you want in text via…

I enjoyed reading this blog post called The Frontend Treadmill about an engineering director's opinion that chasing the latest, greatest web frontend is a waste of time and a…

A fascinating use case surfaced on Reddit: someone had a 27-year-old Windows executable written in Visual Basic 4 that wouldn't run on modern Windows. They uploaded the .exe…

I read a really insightful blog post from the CEO of Fly.io about their failed attempt at offering GPU-enabled fly machines. Fly.io makes deploying apps straightforward, and…

I saw a very impressive demonstration of Google Gemini 2.0's Live API on YouTube. The real-time, low-latency audio and visual interaction is remarkably slick. It's something…

I came across an article detailing the discovery of a vulnerability in Google's systems that could leak the Google account and email address of any YouTube channel. While…

I've read about htmx several times and it has always intrigued me, as I find modern frontend web development absurdly complex—even if I've wondered whether it might be tricky…

This retrospective from Simon Willison on key learnings related to LLMs in 2024 was a great read. I had very much been feeling the stagnation of the generative AI hype cycle…

I found this research into why legalese is so confusing and hard to read fascinating. I had always assumed legalese was required for airtight legal precision. But it turns…

I came across an article about an odd event in Washington state back in 1954 related to the windshields of cars. I won't spoil the whole story, but even though it has zero…

A common point of confusion I often see is how public/private key encryption works. A great example is when asking engineers to share their public SSH key for a jump host:…

I enjoyed this fun post about creating a page to list every UUID that exists. The premise is completely tongue-in-cheek, but it ends up being a fascinating technical…

I came across an article titled Something weird is happening with LLMs and chess. It delves into the surprise discovery that when presented with a list of chess moves,…

Over the weekend I decided to do something that had been on my to-do list for quite some time: follow along with some Coding Train YouTube videos about ml5.js. Daniel…

I came across this interesting project from Microsoft called GenAIScript. It's a framework for creating LLM-based programs, looking sort of like a jQuery for LLMs—it even…

An article called The Part of PostgreSQL We Hate the Most discusses a fundamental design decision PostgreSQL made for its Multi-Version Concurrency Control (MVCC). Due to…

I get a lot of interesting articles from Y Combinator's Hacker News. Someone created a project called HN Update that gives you a 15-minute audio update of top stories. It…

A while back Claude released something they called Artifacts. The idea is that it can show an interactive graphical view when answering questions, which is especially…

A very interesting hot take argues that it's hard to see a future for AI companies. Their costs are out of control, and the author makes the case that this doesn't appear to…

A security researcher wrote up a great blog post about discovering a way to use embedded YouTube videos in Google Slides to craft an attack that could trick someone into…

One thing I really appreciate from my Computer Science education was learning about B-Trees. I also had the rare opportunity in my first job after college to actually apply…

I came across this fun Substack post about using "linear optimization" to have a game of pong match random songs. The post describes identifying the constraints for the…

In this article, a security researcher discovered vulnerabilities in a system that the TSA utilizes for special flight programs for frequent flyers such as crew members. It's…

I came across a research paper from Google on issues with SQL syntax and an idea of how it can be improved upon called SQL Has Problems. We Can Fix Them: Pipe Syntax In SQL.…

I read this responsible disclosure on a Slack AI feature and a claimed ability to use indirect prompt injection to retrieve data normally inaccessible to a user due to being…

I came across this interesting article about a company named ASML. While I had never heard of it, it sounds critical for chip making and powering Nvidia and the AI industry…

I enjoyed this short post about good url structures. Like the post mentions, I've also observed GitHub has a great URL structure and have often used the comparison URL to…

I came across an article with a provocative title: Story Points are Pointless, Measure Queues. It's an interesting read and something worth considering for any engineering…

I recently read a great article on anti-patterns in Event-Driven Architecture. It's fairly concise, but packed with useful gems—such as being careful about leaky…

I read a great article titled Design Docs at Google that discusses how design documents are structured and used across engineering teams at Google. There are a lot of…

A major barrier for many use cases with LLMs is hallucination. RAG (Retrieval-Augmented Generation) is frequently discussed as a solution. While I thought I understood what…

I recently read this newsletter article about scaling ChatGPT from The Pragmatic Engineer. It's a fascinating look into how ChatGPT works under the hood and the unique…

While not strictly technical, I really enjoyed this article titled Make Better Documents. The central theme is simplicity. Many people aim to sound sophisticated or include…

I came across this writeup by Simon Willison on exploring video inputs with Google Gemini. As a multimodal model, Gemini can accept text, images, and video as input. It's…

I came across this excellent article of regrets and endorsements reflecting on four years of infrastructure decisions at an AI startup. There are a lot of great takeaways…

I came across this blog post from the CEO of Antithesis. The author previously created FoundationDB, a distributed database supporting ACID transactions. The compelling part…

I wanted to share this great article about "Flow Fields". I had never heard of flow fields or the specific noise functions discussed, but it's a really fun read. It includes…

I came across an ACM article about learning from the specific perspective of programmers: 10 Things Software Developers Should Learn about Learning. I also happen to be…

I ran across this post by someone who created technical documentation for their house. It's an unusual concept, but the idea makes sense: when you own a property as complex…

I came across a collection of best practices for REST APIs. While it's one person's opinion, I really enjoy reading through writeups like this because they condense a great…

I came across this writeup on migrating to OpenTelemetry for application performance analytics. Adopting OpenTelemetry replaces vendor-provided agents, allowing you to…

I ran across an interesting post on Mastodon explaining that if you tether your laptop to your phone's cellular connection, some phone carriers detect it and throttle your…

I was recently talking with someone about LLMs like ChatGPT and mentioned a piece by Stephen Wolfram (whom I'm becoming a bigger and bigger fan of) called What is ChatGPT…

I'd like to share this blog post about embeddings by Simon Willison. What are embeddings? Well, that's what the blog post explains, but my quick attempt at summarizing is…

In the article Microfrontends should be your last resort, the author makes the case that most companies interested in using a microfrontend (MFE) approach should probably…

I came across designer Soren Iversen, who creates design mockups for silly and insane product functionality for fun. Here's just one quick example of a LinkedIn option to…

If this video is for real, the generative AI capabilities in Photoshop are crazy. Has anyone played around with this, and does it actually work like shown in the video?

This is a super fun demonstration of doing real-time conversion of images from a video stream to pixel art style. While it's not super fluid, it's sort of more fun seeing it…

Someone wrote about their experience using the ChatGPT API to help identify and extract postings on Hacker News about books. From what I understand, he separately obtained…

I came across this newsletter article about building the Threads app. It was an interesting read on some of the technology decisions and how they hit a tight schedule and…

Chrome canary builds now have a new "anchor" concept for CSS positioning which should be in future versions of Chrome. There is also development on a polyfill. This is…

We all know about Wikipedia, it attempts to catalog all of human knowledge. I became aware earlier this week of Wikenigma, which does the opposite and catalogs all that we…

Troy Hunt is the creator of Have I Been PWNED, a service we use at Field Nation to block logins that use passwords that were exposed in known data breaches. He wrote this…

I recently read this explainer on Datalog. I've never actually heard of this alternate query language. It is pretty interesting, and a couple of the use cases seem like…

Someone playing around with the Bing ChatGPT product believes they uncovered some initial prompts/instructions the chatbot has in how it does every conversation. It's very…

I came across this funny little comic book about debugging called The Pocket Guide to Debugging by Julia Evans. I thought this little book is great. It's not only funny, but…

Not all engineers are aware, but floating points are attempts at representing a fraction in binary. They are often not able to be an exact representation of the number and…

There's been a lot shared here and posted elsewhere on the internet about the amazing things large language model AI like ChatGPT can produce. I thought I'd share this funny…

I enjoy watching Marques Brownlee (MKBHD) on Youtube. He's a tech youtuber who mostly reviews computers, phones, and other gadgets. Recently I started listening to a podcast…