Calls, puts & mise en place

Appel & Mise

Vol. ITuesday, October 13, 2026 · 62° & clear on the UWSThe daily, for Jeremy Ettlinger

BTC$83,522+0.1%ETH$2,512-1.7%S&P 5007,807-0.1%

The lede

A Modern Web App in C

Jesse Prophitt · made the Sunday

He shipped a commercial web product — user accounts, a creator dashboard, folders, Stripe payments, Postmark email, progressive enhancement, no JavaScript required — as a C program dropped in a cgi-bin directory, the way you would have done it in 1994. The stack is BCHS: OpenBSD, C, httpd, SQLite, no framework, no templating language, no database server, no container, with libcurl and libsodium vendored and built in-tree; a clean build takes seconds and deploying is replacing one file, which means no restart and no downtime because each request forks a fresh process anyway. His argument is not that you should do this, it's that CGI's death in 2004 was justified by constraints that no longer hold, and the summary line is the one worth sitting with: one binary, a SQLite file, three dependencies, and the entire thing fits in your head. Read it as a measuring stick — not a migration plan, but an honest accounting of how much of a modern side-project stack is load-bearing and how much is habit.

AI & Agents

Simon Willison

web-edit 0.1a0

Willison wanted to edit a credentials file while working from his phone and did not want to round-trip the credentials through the model, so he had the agent build him a small Python web app that serves a file browser and a CodeMirror editor over his Tailscale network. The useful idea is smaller than the tool: the agent can stand up its own side channel for the things you specifically don't want it to see, which is a pattern rather than a project. His note that he chose CodeMirror 6 over Monaco purely for mobile is also the kind of detail you only get from someone who actually tried it on a phone.

taylor.town

Kevin Kelly's 2016 AI Predictions, 10 Years Later

A scorecard on The Inevitable, held up against the year it kept pointing at. Kelly called the oligarchy of two or three cloud-based general intelligences, called AI arriving as utility infrastructure rather than HAL — "cheap, reliable, industrial-grade digital smartness running behind everything, and almost invisible except when it blinks off" — and called the conversational answer machine, all before the transformer paper existed. What he got wrong is the instructive part: he expected the bulk of the work to be done by narrow special-purpose brains, which is precisely the bet the bitter lesson went on to settle. Useful calibration if you are trying to reason about where this goes next rather than where it is.

Engineering & Leadership

Peter Bryant

Were we blue-collar workers all along?

The claim is a reclassification: software developers make and fix things, just in bits rather than atoms, which puts the job closer to the skilled trades than to the knowledge work it has always been filed under. Bryant's point is not deflationary — he argues the trades framing gives the work more credit, since it is earned by years of practice rather than conferred by a degree — and it does real explanatory work on the current mood, because tradespeople have historically absorbed technological change by learning the new machine while white-collar roles took the disruption. The uncomfortable half is his read on the last thirty years as a honeymoon that is now over, and the line that will stick with you is "we are the seamstresses lamenting the introduction of the loom."

Upendra Jadon, LeadDev

Your tests can't catch a poisoned model

The structural argument is clean enough to be worth the seven minutes even if you never train anything: in an ML system the training data is the logic, so corrupting the examples changes behavior as completely as rewriting source would, except no reviewer sees a diff and no request log shows an attempt. Jadon walks the gap between this and the vulnerabilities teams already know how to catch — a poisoned dataset passes every functional test — and lands on treating training data as production infrastructure, with provenance and change control to match. Healthcare runs through it as the case study, which keeps it concrete rather than hypothetical.

Web & Product Craft

Cloudflare

Filter, reshape, and redact logs before export with Transformers

Cloudflare embedded a SQL engine inside Logpush's export pipeline, so a query now runs over each batch before delivery: the WHERE clause drops records you were previously paying to export, ingest and store before discarding, and the SELECT adds, renames, nests or redacts fields so each destination gets the shape it wants. The reason this is a mechanism post and not an announcement is the placement — it removes the separate processing service you would otherwise deploy, scale and monitor between the edge and your SIEM. Generally available on all plans now, with a preview UI, which makes it relevant well before you have a compliance team asking where the sensitive fields went.

New York & the Table

Riley MacLeod, Aftermath

Once Again I Did Not Win A Zohran Mamdani Scavenger Hunt

The mayor's office ran a citywide scavenger hunt on Sunday, lottery-entry teams of four, clues delivered through Goosechase, framed as a celebration of New York's radical history and clearly designed to make people walk around their own city looking at things. MacLeod lost, learned the city anyway, and is good on the logistics of the second attempt versus the chaotic 2025 campaign version — which is the interesting layer, because this is a municipal government treating civic curiosity as something you can schedule and run at scale.

Gus Saltonstall, West Side Rag

Upper West Side restaurant named among 100 best pasta spots in the United States

Arco Cafe, the Sardinian place at 886 Amsterdam between 103rd and 104th, lands at 39 on Yelp's first national pasta ranking. The list is crowdsourced and means roughly nothing, but the kitchen's own description is the part that earns the walk — malloreddus, fregula and ravioli rolled every morning, eleven pasta dishes, nothing pre-made or frozen — and it has been eleven blocks up Amsterdam the whole time.

Diversions

Luke Plunkett, Aftermath

Video Games Are Making Star Wars Fun Again

Plunkett, who had very nearly sworn off the whole galaxy, makes the case that Zero Company and now Galactic Racer have done in a month what the films and shows have not managed in years. The argument underneath the enthusiasm is about where a franchise's good stories actually get told — in the nineties it was the games, then a decade of exclusive mediocrity starved that channel — and Galactic Racer is the kind of release that works with other people in the room.

Loose Change

David Nield, Nautilus

This Is the Oldest Peace Treaty Ever Discovered

Around 1269 BCE, fifteen years after the Battle of Kadesh ended in a bloody draw both sides claimed as a win, Ramses II and the Hittite king Hattusilli III wrote down that the fighting would stop. Excavators at Büyükkale, in what is now Türkiye, have just turned up another fragment — articles twelve through twenty, the section on refugees, which specifies that their homes are not to be destroyed. The original was cut into silver tablets that are long gone; what survives are cuneiform clay copies written in Akkadian, a third language neither court spoke at home but which the Late Bronze Age had settled on as the language of diplomacy. A copper replica hangs at the UN on First Avenue, also incomplete.

The Back Page

The Guardian

Football regulator to recommend cost controls in landmark report with 94% of clubs making loss

The Independent Football Regulator publishes its State of the Game report today — 250 pages, eighteen months in the making, the most detailed study of the industry's finances ever done — and the headline number is that 94% of the top 116 English clubs lose money. It will recommend cost controls, opening an eight-week consultation before a final version in the spring, and the press conference in Manchester will inevitably be about whether the regulator could force a sale of Manchester City if last week's guilty verdicts survive appeal. The quieter stakes are the EFL's settlement talks with the Premier League, where £180m a year has been offered against £207m demanded, and where the report's detail on lower-division spending may not help the case it was supposed to strengthen.

Posting and Toasting

Timberwolves 122, Knicks 104: Scenes from another unimpressive dress rehearsal

The defending champions are 0-3 in the preseason after Minnesota came to the Garden with nearly everyone available and left with a comfortable eighteen, Brunson and Towns having opened by missing badly from deep. Two things in here are worth more than the score: LaMelo Ball's Timberwolves debut read as ten points, seven assists and five turnovers, and the league is enforcing flopping through a new "STEM" rubric — secondary, theatrical, exaggerated, movement — which Brunson tested in the first quarter by stumbling off a Gobert shove and getting called for it.

Around town

Wed Oct 14 · 9:30am

Agents In The AM: Enterprise-Ready Agents

Westin Times Square, 270 W 43rd St, Midtown

A morning of CIOs describing what it actually takes to run agents in production, followed by a hands-on lab with beginner and advanced tracks. Free, breakfast and lunch included, registrations reviewed — and the exec-briefing half is the part worth sitting through, because the people on stage have budgets and incident reports rather than demos.

professional

Oct 13 – Oct 31

A Cyberpunk Canon

Metrograph, 7 Ludlow St, Lower East Side

Three weeks of failed futures on film: Paprika and a 4K Ghost in the Shell today, then Minority Report, Tron in 4K, Tetsuo: The Iron Man, and Blade Runner: The Final Cut at eleven at night on four separate dates. The late Blade Runner slots are the correct way to see it and the series knows it.

casual

Thu Oct 15 · 6:00pm

Dessn: Creative Machines

Betaworks, 29 Little W 12th St, Meatpacking

A fireside on whether good work comes from freedom or from boundaries, now that the tools have removed most of the boundaries — with a designer from FLORA and the founder of Primitive. Free, at Betaworks, and the question is the one every generated-interface argument eventually collapses into.

professional

Opens Wed Oct 21

Hellraiser, new 4K restoration

IFC Center, 323 Sixth Ave, Greenwich Village

Clive Barker's 1987 adaptation of his own novella, ninety-three minutes of puzzle-box curiosity punished, cleaned up and back on a real screen for the right fortnight of the year. Showtimes to be announced, which on a restoration opening usually means midnights.

casual

Quote of the day

“Oh, we're really making an AI.”

— Larry Page to Kevin Kelly, c. 2002

On this day

October 13, 1884 — delegates from twenty-six nations, meeting in Washington at President Arthur's invitation, vote to run the world's prime meridian through Greenwich; the resolution is formally adopted nine days later, and the planet finally agrees where to start counting. Also the date, in 1903, that Boston closed out Pittsburgh in the eighth game of the first modern World Series.

The puzzle corner

The Mini · Wordle · Connections

A developer ships a real product in C over CGI and finds the whole thing fits in his head; an essay argues the job was a skilled trade all along, absorbing new machines the way trades always have. Both are asking how much of what we build around the work is load-bearing.