I publish a monthly email newsletter with personal updates and interesting things I read or learned that month. The latter is archived below. If you’d like to be added to the newsletter, email me.
Fewer questions were asked last month on Stack Overflow than during its first month of operation.
Every contribution to Claude Code in December by its creator was via Claude Code.
X.com, Boris ChernyA year ago, Claude struggled to generate bash commands without escaping issues. It worked for seconds or minutes at a time. We saw early signs that it may become broadly useful for coding one day.
Fast forward to today. In the last thirty days, I landed 259 PRs -- 497 commits, 40k lines added, 38k lines removed. Every single line was written by Claude Code + Opus 4.5. Claude consistently runs for minutes, hours, and days at a time (using Stop hooks)
India received $140B in personal remittances in 2024. That's more than the profit of their largest 70 publicly traded companies combined ($120B). The U.S. accounts for roughly 30%.
A good blog post on software work estimation
The common view is that a manager proposes some technical project, the team gets together to figure out how long it would take to build, and then the manager makes staffing and planning decisions with that information. In fact, it’s the reverse: a manager comes to the team with an estimate already in hand, and then the team must figure out what kind of technical project might be possible within that estimate.
Central Stockholm renters face a 20-year wait due to rent control
If you’re looking for a standard rental contract in Stockholm, you’ll have to be prepared to wait. Apartments are allocated through a waitlist, and in 2025, new tenants in the city center had waited an average of 21 years. Rents are regulated, and can be far below half of market rents at the most attractive addresses.
Gemini's performance on the "Needle in a Haystack" test blows competition out of the water.
google seemingly solved efficient attention, Celeste
A 2014 interview with Walter Isaacson at Khan Academy
Yeah, and I'm trying to say if you look at Ben Franklin, the most important scientist of his period. Even though you probably don't... You know, we think of him as a doddering dude playing his kite in the rain. Single fluid theory of electricity that comes from his electricity experiments is up there in that century, you know, with Newton, even. I mean, he's the best experimental scientist of his time. Jefferson would have thought you were a Philistine if you didn't study botany and everything else. Nowadays, people like a Ben Franklin don't do electricity experiments.
