2026W03
A few interesting articles I read over the past few days
This is the output of an automated process. Every Sunday, a script retrieves articles I've saved and read, uses AI to expand my quick notes into something more coherent, then publishes them. This post is one of those articles.
- I’m addicted to being useful — This hit close. The idea that some of us are fundamentally wired to solve problems, and engineering just happens to fit that dysfunction perfectly. I’ve been thinking about whether my drive to build things comes from genuine interest or just this compulsion to be useful. His point about how this actually protects against burnout when you can satisfy it rings true.
- How ClickHouse handles strings — The overlapping memory reads technique is wild. Reading the same characters multiple times on purpose because it makes branch prediction work better. I keep coming back to how much performance work is about understanding what the hardware actually does, not what we think it should do.
- How to figure out what to do with your life — I’m at this exact crossroads. The thread didn’t load properly but the title alone captures where I am right now.
- Raising money fucked me up — The part about projecting expectations onto yourself hit hard. He realized his investors weren’t actually pressuring him, he was doing it to himself. I see this pattern in how I think about my own work. The shift from “what problem does this solve” to “how big does this feel” is something I need to watch for.
- Personal information firehose — A personal algorithm that learns what matters to you without manual filters. The idea feels right but the obstacles are real - training on small personal datasets instead of massive global ones, working across fragmented channels, dealing with restricted APIs. Still figuring out if this is technically possible or just wishful thinking.
- Don’t fall into the anti-AI hype — Antirez building a BERT inference library in pure C with AI assistance in hours instead of weeks made this concrete for me. The skill that matters is knowing what to build and how to guide the tool, not typing the code yourself. I’m still working through what this means for how I spend my time.
- The Unbearable Joy of Sitting Alone in A Café — The observation that you can’t control what other people think, revealed just by sitting still without your phone. I don’t do this enough. There’s something about being alone in public that forces a different kind of attention than being alone at home.
- If you think @Sentry isn’t serious about AI, I’d recommend… — David Cramer’s internal push for everyone at Sentry to go all-in on AI. Watching companies navigate this shift in real time.
- ~/rbv/2025 — Raquel’s point about almost forgetting to enjoy herself struck me. Also her take that intellectual giftedness is less important than finding people who actually want to understand you. The whole review feels like someone recalibrating after a hard year.
- Deconstructing cultural codes — Cowen’s approach is to learn as many cultural systems as possible - art, music, industries, religions - to understand how things actually work. The problem is cultural codes are multiplying faster than anyone can learn them. This feels relevant to how I think about understanding different parts of tech.
- The Sauna Algorithm: Surviving Asynchrony Without a Clock — Using causality instead of time to coordinate. Wait for the person who arrived after you to leave, guaranteeing you stayed long enough. The sauna framing makes the distributed systems concept click in a way that formal definitions don’t. Events ordered by what caused what, not by clock time.