Calls, puts & mise en place

Appel & Mise

Vol. ISaturday, October 10, 2026 · 61° & overcast on the UWSThe daily, for Jeremy Ettlinger

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The lede

Deno is joining Cloudflare

Ryan Dahl, Deno · made the Sunday

Dahl is taking the whole Deno team into Cloudflare's Workers and Durable Objects groups, and the honest part is the shutdown schedule: the runtime gets one more year of monthly bug and security releases and then development stops, Deno Deploy runs six months before it closes with migration help for paying customers, JSR survives on Cloudflare infrastructure, and the team keeps rusty_v8 while working to fold it into workerd. The line to sit with if you deploy on Workers is where he says the effort is going — Durable Objects as the substrate for AI agent harnesses — because that is the second time this week Cloudflare has treated the stateful-object primitive as the interesting one, and it tells you which half of the platform will get the attention.

AI & Agents

Jesse Waites · made the Sunday

I pointed AI at 400 years of historical archives. It found a forgotten meteorite, lost rhinos, and unrecorded volcanic eruptions.

This is the best-documented agentic pipeline you will read this week and it is doing history: 4.35 million pages of Dutch East India Company transcriptions turned into 5.7 million embedded passages on a home GPU rig overnight, a cheap screening model answering narrow yes/no questions at about $3 to sift 59,000 elephant mentions, Haiku reading and translating what survived, and Claude Code opening the original page scans to check the transcriptions against catalogues. The engineering discipline is the lesson rather than the finds — he made the pipeline recover the known events first (Laki, Tambora, a dozen others) before he trusted it, he reports that the model's volcano attributions were wrong often enough that every candidate had to be placed by hand, and he files the 1812 Maharashtra meteorite and the Javan rhinos as candidates awaiting specialists rather than discoveries.

Thomas Hales, guest post at What's new · made the Sunday

What mathematicians should know about the Lean Theorem Prover: questions of reliability and AI

The clearest account anywhere of what a verified proof actually buys you, and it is a trust-boundary document an engineer will recognise on sight: a several-thousand-line C++ kernel is the thing you are trusting, the human job that cannot be delegated is auditing that the formal statement says what you meant, and below the kernel sit a runtime, a compiler, an OS and silicon that all count. He is candid about the cracks — a summer of soundness bugs in 2026 produced an illicit disproof of Collatz, one out-of-date cross-checker accepted it because of an unrelated bug of its own, and unique typing in Lean's type theory is still unproven — and the sharp question he leaves open is how you would certify that an AI-generated kernel contains no deliberate backdoor when the verifier's own proofs were also machine-written.

Engineering & Leadership

Glyph Lefkowitz · made the Sunday

Programming Isn't Special

Glyph's route into the AI question is unusual and the better for it: he starts from the inconsistency of programmers accepting generated code while reporting that it makes the job miserable, then uses Berger on mystification to argue that the functional-not-expressive defence rests on a bad theory of art, with the commissioned group portrait as the example. The part worth taking into a staffing conversation is his defence of mundane work — skill is grown on the unremarkable projects, he puts the odds of any one of them turning into something that matters at roughly a thousand to one, and a pipeline that automates all of them multiplies that to nothing. His own Deferred is the receipt: an aesthetic response to callback tedium that ended up in the lineage running through Promises to async/await.

Web & Product Craft

Cloudflare · made the Sunday

On-demand CPU and memory profiling with flamegraphs for Workers and Durable Objects

You can now point the V8 profiler at a deployed Worker or a named Durable Object and get an interactive flamegraph back, sampled at 1 ms, and the mechanism is the reassuring part: the runtime takes the isolate lock only to start and stop, releases it for the capture window so requests keep serving, and observes isolates already running rather than spinning up new ones — which is also why a low-traffic version is hard to profile. Their own two examples are the argument for doing this in production rather than on your laptop: a recursive replacer re-walking nested data inside JSON.stringify, 2.7x faster once the duplicate work went, and a heap profile showing Prometheus instrumentation that was supposed to be off accounting for two-thirds of allocations and pushing P999 memory over the 128 MB limit. Enable source maps first or the function names come back obfuscated.

New York & the Table

Melissa McCart, Eater NY

The chef at Cafe Charmant is one to watch in the West Village

A useful review because the editor separates the room from the kitchen and tells you which one she is recommending: the crowd is more sport-coat than she would choose and the Rockwell interior is a hospitality-group brasserie, but Jake Tyler Brodsky cooked under James Kent at Eleven Madison Park and then seven years at Palm Heights in the Caymans, and the Caribbean notes that came back with him are what makes the menu worth the trip. The order she is emphatic about is the $19.95 Polynesian shrimp in a squash blossom; razor clam spaghetti at $29 and the Iberico Milanese at $35.95 are the share plates.

West Side Rag

One of the Upper West Side's largest empty storefronts gets a new tenant

The 28,000 square feet at 2182 Broadway and 78th, dark since Marshalls let its lease lapse in March 2023, has gone to Crunch Fitness — the third-largest commercial lease signed in Manhattan between July and September, per CBRE's quarterly report. No opening date yet, and Crunch already runs a branch six blocks north on West 83rd, which tells you something about what 28,000 square feet of Broadway frontage is worth to anyone who isn't a gym.

Diversions

Riley MacLeod, Aftermath

At last, a big budget Minesweeper

Mike Lacher — the man behind "I'm Comic Sans, Asshole" — has given the Windows time-waster the full blockbuster treatment in the browser: opening and closing credits of absurd length, yellow paint on the climbable surfaces, dialogue hinting at side quests and backstory, and a protagonist who keeps muttering that he needs to sweep these mines. It is a joke about how much modern games explain themselves to you, and it is short enough to be funny rather than a bit.

Loose Change

Mick O'Hare, The Guardian · made the Sunday

Ada Yonath obituary

Yonath, who has died at 87, decided in 1970 to map the three-dimensional structure of the ribosome, a thing 20 nanometres across with no symmetry and no protective membrane, which James Watson had already tried and failed to do; for most of two decades her field called her a fantasist and the village idiot to her face. The idea that cracked it came off a bicycle accident and some light reading about polar bears, who pack their ribosomes in orderly arrays before hibernating and keep them intact for months — so she went after a thermophile bacterium from desert sands and thermal vents on the theory that organisms from harsh places would survive crystallisation, got there after more than 25,000 attempts, froze the result at −185°C in a technique that became cryo bio-crystallography, and published the map in 2001 and 2002. The payoff was not the 2009 Nobel but the antibiotics: knowing where on a bacterial ribosome a drug binds, and where a human one differs, turned antibiotic design from guesswork into engineering. Asked in 2018 what makes a good scientist, she said curiosity, then curiosity, then curiosity.

The Back Page

David Pasztor, We Ain't Got No History

Chelsea vs. AFC Bournemouth: preview, team news, how to watch

Three weeks of international football end at 10am Eastern today, and Chelsea come back from a three-match winless run — Arsenal, a 2-2 at home to Hull, Brentford — with Xabi Alonso's honeymoon formally over and, for once, a clean team sheet: Caicedo, João Pedro, Palmer and Reece James all declared ready to go, and Marco Palestra back in full training and finally available at wing-back. Bournemouth arrive with Marco Rose still winless in five league games despite inheriting Iraola's sixth-placed squad and without Alex Scott, done for four to five weeks after playing through discomfort for England; Chelsea are unbeaten in nine against them, the last three all draws.

Around town

Tue Oct 13 · 6:00pm

Engineering x AI Leaders Happy Hour

Venue announced at registration

No talks and no agenda, which makes the room the whole product — and the room is people carrying the same question about how much of their org chart survives the next eighteen months. Free, and the useful version of this evening is going with one specific thing you got wrong and trading it.

professional

Wed Oct 21 · 6:00pm

Beyond the Checklist: a GRC engineering roundtable

330 W 34th St, Midtown

Governance and compliance treated as an engineering problem rather than a spreadsheet, which is the right framing for anyone shipping data that institutions put in front of their own auditors. Free, and a roundtable rather than a panel, so the interesting failures tend to actually come out.

professional

Sun Oct 11 · 4:20pm

The Promised Land, introduced by Annette Insdorf

Film Forum, 209 W Houston St, South Village

Wajda on the textile barons of nineteenth-century Łódź — three men building a factory and losing everything that made them worth knowing — with a Columbia film professor doing the introduction. Part of the Wajda centenary running at Film Forum through Oct 22.

casual

Tue Oct 13 · 7:00pm

Gloria, in the NYC in Transit series

Film Forum, 209 W Houston St, South Village

Gena Rowlands crossing the city with a mob ledger and someone else's kid, in a programme built around New York as something you move through rather than look at. The buses and subway platforms are half the cast, which is the whole premise of the series.

casual

Sat Oct 24 · 6:00pm

Artists in Exile: Dmitry Krymov's Peter Pan. Syndrome

Leonard Nimoy Thalia at Symphony Space, 2537 Broadway at 95th

A Latvian National Theatre production from a Russian director working in exile, taking Barrie's boy who would not grow up and turning him into a maker who cannot stop returning to the work even when he wants to quit. Ninety-five minutes in Latvian with Russian subtitles and no English, which is the deal and is less of an obstacle than it sounds: Krymov has always built from image and rhythm rather than from the line. $25, and it is a walk up Broadway.

say yes

Quote of the day

“I was called a dreamer, a fantasist, even the village idiot.”

— Ada Yonath, on setting out to map the ribosome

On this day

October 10, 1935 — Porgy and Bess has its Broadway premiere at the Alvin Theatre on West 52nd Street, billed as an American folk opera and closing in the red after a few months. Twenty-nine years later to the day, the Tokyo Olympics open, the first Games relayed live across the Pacific by satellite.

The puzzle corner

The Mini · Wordle · Connections

The week's two best pieces both turn out to be about audit. Hales wants to know who checks the checker; Waites spent his credibility making a pipeline rediscover Tambora before he let it tell him anything new.