Software infrastructure has a strange lifecycle. Some systems burn bright and disappear. Others quietly persist for decades, outliving platforms, languages, and fashion. The Amsterdam Compiler Kit (ACK) is in the latter category: a complete compiler...
Most people think of “blocked links” as a browser feature: a safe browsing list, a warning page, maybe a DNS filter. But the modern attack surface is increasingly inside apps, not browsers. A small piece...
If you have ever checked Downdetector during a major internet incident, you probably assume it is built to survive exactly that moment. So it is a little jarring to learn that during a Cloudflare outage,...
Simon Willison made an important correction that we should all remember. The Core Insight In a post about his Showboat project, Simon Willison initially used “overseer” to describe the human managing an AI coding agent....
How AI helps journalists stay ahead of political media shifts. The Core Insight The New York Times built an internal AI tool called the “Manosphere Report” that uses LLMs to transcribe and summarize podcast episodes....
From the creator of Three.js comes a new experiment in browser-based 3D. The Core Insight Mr.doob (Ricardo Cabello) has released “Three Descent,” an exploration of 3D graphics in the browser. Given his track record with...
Mozilla, Google, Apple, Microsoft, and Igalia are working together to fix the web. Here’s what’s coming. The Core Insight Interop 2026 is the latest iteration of cross-browser compatibility efforts—and it’s delivering real results. Firefox’s score...
What if you could verify your distributed system at compile time? Colored Petri Nets might be the answer. The Core Insight Colored Petri Nets (CPNs) extend traditional Petri nets by allowing tokens to carry data....
The ACK compiles Pascal, Modula-2, Basic, and C to everything from CP/M to Raspberry Pi. It’s been running since 1987. The Core Insight The Amsterdam Compiler Kit (ACK) is a remarkably complete compiler toolchain supporting...
Discord processes billions of messages across hundreds of millions of users. Here’s how the Actor Model makes it possible. The Core Insight Discord is essentially a massive distributed system built on the Actor Model—a paradigm...