the cartridge was a score
Mission: Impossible on the N64 had no decomp, no recomp and no PC port for 28 years. One night of static recompilation got it running natively at 60 FPS with mouse aim. Nelson Goodman would say the game stopped being a painting and became a piece of music, and the real work was everything the score never wrote down.
At sixty frames a second, Ethan Hunt stood still. On three frames in every eight he didn't move at all, then jumped a whole step to catch up. The fix for that is the most interesting thing in the repo.
who the compiler was for
In a sixty-second clip Casey Muratori explains why AI coding isn't for him: it puts English between you and the program, and he loves the poking. He's right about himself and right that it isn't a compiler. He's backwards about the field, because everyone he's polling got in by passing the exact gate AI just took down.
also: the child rendered the castle · the bot is not in a hurry · three games to sell one
ninety-two percent
AI-attributed layoffs have pulled back since spring, and it’s tempting to read that as the scare passing. Goldman Sachs reads it the other way: technology …
also: the last dinosaur · a household again · the lint was the receipt
context-free
Formal languages and natural ones aren’t opposite designs. They’re the same design, tuned for receivers who know very different amounts. Here is a …
also: what do you keep it in · in your own image · the solvent that is not consumed
one beep, ten microphones
Someone in the house heard a beep a little before 12:13 AM and wanted to know what it was. I handed the question to an agent with access to the camera recorder. …
also: run the full test suite · Where the Sandbox Ends · the sandbox and the wall
the multi-organization problem
Ten years of short posts were circling one object: a person who belongs to many organizations at once, with tools that assume one and methods that assume a task. Here is the theory in one place, what three fields and forty years of software actually know about it, whether anyone has solved it, and what a solution needs.
also: the room that forgot what it was for · eleven minutes and four seconds · a root to stand on
the audit part 2 how to audit an argument you didn't make 2026-10-09
the end of the wire part 10 of 10 we gave it a shell 2026-10-01
the shape of your ask
When my coworkers ask me something, I become the ask.
I am just a vessel, taking the shape of your ask.
That isn’t a complaint. Someone has a question about the network and for an hour I’m the network person. Someone hands me a customer and I’m writing the spec. Tomorrow it’s something else, and I’ll be that.
Keats wrote about it in 1818. He said the poet “has no Identity,” and is “continually in for—and filling some other Body.” He meant writers. It also fits the person everyone pings.
The skill isn’t any one shape. It’s staying empty enough to take the next one.
the input a poet wants
A homophone is a hash collision: different words, same sound.
In a toolchain, that’s the bug. Lexer, parser, namespaces, type checker. Every stage is there to cut the readings of a program down until only one is left. An ambiguous grammar doesn’t ship. Code that means two things is code nobody can safely change.
Writers go the other way. They look for the collision and build on it.
John Donne, sick and expecting to die, around 1623, talking to God: When thou hast done, thou hast not done, / For I have more. Done, finished. Donne, the man. God isn’t through forgiving him, and God doesn’t have him yet. One sound, one claim, made twice. A few lines later: thy Son / Shall shine as he shines now. Sun and Son, one light.
A compiler throws out exactly the input a poet goes looking for.
build the tool
When you reach for AI to solve a task, you have two options: have it do the thing, or have it build a tool that does the thing.
The first is expensive every time. The second is expensive once.
Building the tool might be complicated too — AI doesn’t always get infrastructure right on the first try. But only one of these options compounds.
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