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Front-page articles summarized hourly.

Who was "Not Even Wrong" first? [2023]

Peter Woit traces the origin of Pauli’s “It is not even wrong.” The evidence is murky: a 1992 Physics Today letter from Peierls says Pauli’s remark was not about a seminar but a reaction to a young theorist’s paper, possibly in 1957 to Everett’s Relative-State work; yet Jan Minkowski’s memoir recalls Pauli’s verdict at a 1946–48 ETH seminar; a Konrad Bleuler interview points to Stueckelberg as an earlier user. The blog notes memories are unreliable and the phrase subsequently spread in physics discourse, including Glashow’s 1986 usage.

I run multiple $10K MRR companies on a $20/month tech stack

Bootstrap multiple ~$10K MRR businesses on a $20/month stack by staying lean. Ditch cloud infra: rent a VPS ($5–$10) and ship a Go backend as a static binary. Use local AI: Ollama for prototyping, then VLLM for production, with Transformer Lab for training and laconic to manage context; llmhub abstracts models. When needed, use OpenRouter for cutting-edge models with seamless fallback. Cut costs further with Copilot per‑request pricing. Store data in SQLite (WAL) with a lightweight auth library. Result: scalable startups with minimal burn.

High-Level Rust: Getting 80% of the Benefits with 20% of the Pain

An author seeks a language with expressive types, a solid ecosystem, and developer experience. Rust is fast and safe but has a steep learning curve and weak devx. The author proposes 'High Level Rust': treat Rust as a high-level language by using type-first domain modeling (enums/structs, unrepresentable states) and functional-like code (immutability by default, pure functions, cloning). Use Domain-Driven Design and Arc-based services for DI and testing; accept some clone/perf cost on non-hot paths, with mutations for hot paths. Suited for web APIs, CRUD, and business logic; not ideal for hot paths, OS kernels, or concurrency. Ongoing LightClone work.

Tofolli gates are all you need

Could not summarize article.

Why meaningful days look like nothing while you are living them

An essay about a man’s ordinary day-trip in Kumamoto, following bronze One Piece statues after a stranger showed him a photo of Zoro. He travels by train to make a small pilgrimage, but there’s no ritual—just a day that feels like a walk. Years later, while watching the One Piece live‑action and taking a mushroom, he realizes the voyage itself—the long text of One Piece and its readers’ lives—acts like scripture: the treasure was the journey, and the road keeps walking you. The pilgrim often recognizes the pilgrimage only in hindsight, when life reveals its weight.

Simplest Hash Functions

An accessible tour of ultra-cheap hash functions, from rapidhash to a simple addition-based hash and a rotation sketch, arguing that hashing need not be cryptographic to be useful in non-adversarial or retrocomputing contexts. The author tests bit distribution, correlations, and collisions on real data, showing that extremely simple hashes can be unpredictable on long inputs but fail under structure (HashDoS or poor avalanche). They discuss improving entropy (folded multiplication, high-bit extraction, finalization) and compare to SHA-256, ending with a playful recipe: mix inputs, apply a bit avalanche, and hope for profit—caveats apply.

US – Iran negotiations end with no deal reached

Could not summarize article.

US appeals court declares 158-year-old home distilling ban unconstitutional

A U.S. appeals court (Fifth Circuit) ruled that the 1868 federal ban on home distilling is unconstitutional, saying it is an improper way for Congress to exercise taxation and actually reduces tax revenue by suppressing distilling. The decision, by Judge Edith Hollan Jones, sides with the Hobby Distillers Association and four members, upholding a 2024 district court ruling. The ban, from the Reconstruction era, carried up to five years' imprisonment and $10,000 fine. The ruling allows individuals to distill spirits at home for hobby or personal use, including experiments like apple-pie-vodka recipe.

The Brainrot Industrial Complex

Brainrot is the erosion of focus caused by high-stimulation, low-substance digital input. The Brainrot Industrial Complex describes a system that hijacks attention for profit, using dopamine to keep users engaged. Distraction is not new, but scale and intent have intensified; feeds, algorithms, and endless scroll pull the mind apart. While dismantling the system is daunting, individuals can reclaim attention: notice triggers, pause before scrolling, and choose what enters the mind. Builders should design tools that respect attention; a different internet is possible through intention.

Dcmake: A new CMake debugger UI

dcmake is a cross‑platform GUI debugger for CMake that uses CMake’s --debugger mode and the Debugger Adaptor Protocol. Built quickly with AI-assisted UI, it offers a Dear ImGui–based, dockable interface (Windows DirectX 11; macOS/Linux GLFW/OpenGL). It starts CMake paused, with F10 to step, F11 to dive, F5 to run, and supports -P scripts (not --build). An initial command can be entered in a top-left input. It aims for a Visual Studio–like workflow and will be included in w64devkit.

Used Graphify to turn incidents into a queryable knowledge graph

Rootly-graphify-importer turns Rootly incidents, alerts, and teams into a queryable knowledge graph via Graphify. It connects to the Rootly API, collects incidents, triggered alerts, teams, and the catalog for a window, and exports them to a corpus to build a graph with nodes for incidents, alerts, teams, and services and edges like triggered, affects, owns, responded_by, targets. Visuals include a service incident heatmap, on-call map, and cross-service failure patterns. Optional semantic enrichment with Claude Code or Codex infers themes and root causes, with confidence scores. Outputs: graph.html, GRAPH_REPORT.md, graph.json. Install: pip install 'graphifyy[rootly]'; set ROOTLY_API_KEY; run graphify rootly ...

Building a Z-Machine in the worst possible language – Whitebeard's Realm

An article about building a Z-machine emulator in Elm. The author tackles implementing Infocom’s Z-machine in a pure language, using Elm’s persistent data structures (RRB trie) to handle memory immutability. The result is a working Z-machine that runs .z3 games (Infocom v3), passes Czech compliance tests, and can run in a browser. The library provides a simple API (ZMachine.load, ZMachine.runSteps) with StepResult variants (Continue, NeedInput, NeedSave, NeedRestore, Halted, Error) and OutputEvent types (PrintText, NewLine, ShowStatusLine, etc.), demonstrated with a Zork1 example.

Excellence Is a Habit

Excellence is a habit, not a one-off act. The piece uses Artemis II’s success and Apollo 13’s lessons to argue for software resilience: practice relentlessly with automation, IaC, Chaos Engineering, and disaster drills; interpret instrumentation in context; avoid single points of failure and enable graceful degradation. Preparation and repeated problem-solving build resilience before crisis. The author invites applying these NASA-inspired habits to one’s own systems and engagements.

Anthropic loses appeals court bid to pause supply chain risk label

Could not summarize article.

Software Preservation Group: C++ History Collection

A historical archive of C++ materials—design documents, source code, standardization papers, and related writings—covering its birth as 'C with Classes' in 1979, through Cfront releases, to ISO WG21 standardization and later developments. Includes chronology, tutorials, libraries, and documentation, with sources from HOPL, Stroustrup, and SIGPLAN.

How a dancer with ALS used brainwaves to perform live

Electronic Specifier reports on Dentsu Lab's Project Humanity, which translates disabled users' intentions into digital movement. Initially using EMG sensors to map residual muscle activity to a full-body avatar for general-purpose interaction beyond assistive tools, with esports trials showing accessible interfaces. In December 2025, in Amsterdam, Breanna Olson (ALS) performed live using brainwave detection to translate neural signals into choreography via her digital avatar on stage, demonstrating a proof of expression. The work promises new pathways into the Metaverse, education, remote work for people with severe mobility impairments.

We spoke to the man making viral Lego-style AI videos for Iran

BBC's Top Comment examines Explosive Media's Lego-style AI videos used as pro‑Iran propaganda. The garish clips depict US hostility and Iran's resilience, sometimes featuring Trump or Israeli figures. The operator says Iran is a customer, reversing earlier denials. Experts call the content powerful, scalable propaganda (“slopaganda”) with hundreds of millions of views and broad state-media sharing. The material is often inaccurate and antisemitic, but AI makes it feel credible and timely, bypassing traditional media. This defensive memetic warfare risks misinterpretation and escalation as platforms clamp down while new accounts surface.

Americans still opt for print books over digital or audio versions

Print books still dominate in the U.S., but digital formats have grown. In Oct 2025, 75% of adults read a book in the past year: 64% print, 31% e-books, 26% audiobooks. Print has declined since 2011 (72% → 64%), while e-books and audiobooks rose (roughly 17% → 31%; 11% → 26%). Only 7% joined a book club. Reading patterns vary by education, age and race: higher education boosts all formats; Asian Americans read more e-books; White adults read more print; younger adults favor digital; women read more overall.

Building Slogbox

Slogbox is a slog.Handler that keeps the last N log records in an in-memory ring buffer. It stores raw slog.Record values (not preformatted strings) and resolves LogValuer eagerly at Handle time to snapshot attributes. Writes use a pre-allocated slice with wraparound and an RWMutex; writes lock briefly, reads snapshot under a read lock. Flushes happen outside the lock with at-most-once semantics. It supports age filtering via binary search, shared buffers for derived loggers, and an HTTP /debug/logs endpoint with optional streaming JSON (jsonv2). Use for health checks and debugging, not persistent logging.

The End of Eleventy

Brennan Brown argues that monetizing static-site generators via Build Awesome (a rebrand of Eleventy by Font Awesome) threatens open-source culture. He surveys SSG history (Jekyll, Hugo, Gatsby, Eleventy), explains Jamstack economics, and critiques the focus on paid features and in-browser editing rather than sustaining the user community. With Zach Leatherman’s move to Font Awesome, Build Awesome is seen as an existential risk to 11ty's ecosystem and independence. He contrasts this with his pay-what-you-can Berry House model and calls for sustainable, community-focused development rather than monetization of open tools.

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