Full Width 
Shortcuts 
Sign Up 
Log In 
Articles 
Reading List More from Home on Erik Bernhardsson
Writing code for a computer is hard enough. You take something big and fuzzy, some large vague business outcome you want to achive. Then you break it down recursively and think about all the cases until you have clear logical statements a computer can follow.
As I am en route to see my first total solar eclipse, I was curious how hard it would be to compute eclipses in Python. It turns out, ignoring some minor coordinate system head-banging, I was able to get something half-decent working in a couple of hours.
CIA produced a fantastic book during the peak of World War 2 called Simple Sabotage. It laid out various ways for infiltrators to ruin productivity of a company. Some of the advice is timeless, for instance the section about “General interference with Organizations and Production”:
Long story short: I'm working on a super cool tool called Modal. Please check it out — it lets you run things in the cloud without having to think about infrastructure. Scaling out, scheduling, containerization, using GPUs, setting up webhooks, and all kinds of other stuff.
This is is in many respects a successor to a blog post I wrote last year about what I want from software infrastructure, but the ideas morphed in my head into something sort of wider.
More in technology
A recent article revealed that OpenAI is purchasing tens of thousands of Mac minis and Mac Studios to give AI agents dedicated environments to run, make mistakes, and learn. It’s a smart infrastructure decision for agents meant to operate inside a computer clicking, navigating, using software: they need a full computer to practice on. But […] The post How little does an AI agent need, and how cheap can it get? appeared first on Arduino Blog.
If you follow my monthly roundups, (1) who are you?? please say hi (2) you’ll notice a smaller post this time. September was a busy month for me. Lots of feedback on a small post I published “Anecdotally, programmers dislike ‘reduce’”. I finally wrote up a phenomenon I’ve observed for years. It’s a short post that didn’t take long to write. I got a tremendous volume of feedback—more than anything I’ve ever written. Dozens of messages, hundreds of comments, shoutouts in popular newsletters…I’m even meeting up with old friends because of it! This industry, for better and worse, is moving away from the details. I like the details! I was heartened to see the number of people who care about the minutia of programming—enough to email some random guy on the internet. Cool links from online “What is the programmer interface for garbage collection? There isn’t one. Can’t get simpler than that.” From “Simplicity is Complicated”. Won’t attend, but the Small File Media Festival looks neat. “A lot of the time, the Linux problems are ‘designed by committee’ problems.” Loved this opinion from the Kate and Veronica podcast. “If there’s one thing the current wave of far-right autocrats has managed to do incredibly well, it’s to constantly keep themselves the centre of attention: constantly the thing that is debated, constantly positioned at the centre of the court as the obvious one to make decisions. This is why: patriarchal racist capital needs these ideas and people so it can continue to be the centre of attention. This is the logic of the big-tech-AI-sun-empire: keep everything oriented towards power, at all costs.” From part 1 of “Towards a Lunarpunk Practice”. Hope you had a good September.
Well, well, well, well, well, well, well, well, well, well, well, well, well, well, well. We're back. Sorry. We've been watching the onslaught of vulnerabilities flood the internet. Every man, dog, and their grandmas (apparently?) are now using LLMs to find and reproduce vulnerabilities - it’
