Colder weather means November’s the first month with two newsletters in a long while. Let’s hope I can keep up the pace as we head into the holiday season!

• Comment on “Thinking about Thinking with LLMs” (Simon Willison): When I submitted my most recent blog post to Lobsters I was not expecting Simon Willison to say he “couldn’t agree more”, but it was certainly a high point of my blogging career so far! His comment mentioned Brad Fitzpatrick’s chapter in Coders at Work, which has also had an impact on me since I read it over the holidays in 2022. I thought his take at the end was a great addendum to the post:

  There’s so much low-level stuff that [LLMs] can help me understand way faster than if I was to try and dig out the details myself. Just this morning I was poking at WebAssembly compiled binaries and learned a decent amount about how that format works. Curiosity engines!

• Towards interplanetary QUIC traffic (Adolfo Ochagravía): I love outer space, I love technical blog posts, so this was a slam-dunk for me. I didn’t know much about QUIC but it was an interesting exercise to see how the requirements of the Deep Space Network can be translated into a protocol designed for terrestrial usecases.

• More Than DNS: The 14 hour AWS us-east-1 outage (Jonathon Belotti): Jonathon shows a deep sense of software systems as a part of larger human systems. I’ve been working in the industry for almost half a decade but I still haven’t truly developed this skill yet. Amidst an outage can be a difficult time to zoom out and reflect on organizations and culture, but it’s often the most important time to do so.

• A Very Early History of Algebraic Data Types (Hillel Wayne): Another great piece of digital archaeology from Hillel. This is history as a discipline as much as anything I’ve seen in the computer science field: his sources here aren’t perfect, and Hillel artfully fills in the gaps to create a convincing and informative narrative.

• I use Typst now (Chris Biscardi): While I haven’t had to write any LaTeX since undergrad, Typst has caught my eye a while back as an interesting typesetting alternative with a lot of potential for more than just academic papers. They recently added HTML output, making it possible to integrate easily into a SSG blog.

  I’ve long been trying to figure out how to write talk slides in text files and also cross-post as blog posts with speaker notes. Markdown isn’t expressive enough to do this well, and Typst has a great export story for PDFs, so I’m somewhat interested in trying this out. I’m not sure if I really want to add another file format to this blog just yet, but I’ll certainly be keeping an eye on this space!