Calls, puts & mise en place

Appel & Mise

Vol. IFriday, October 16, 2026 · 61° & light rain on the UWSThe daily, for Jeremy Ettlinger

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The lede

Resolution 5 of the 28th CGPM: on the technical actions needed to ensure the continuity of UTC

BIPM

The General Conference on Weights and Measures has put a date on the end of the leap second: continuous UTC becomes effective on 20 May 2027, and the permitted gap between atomic time and the Earth's actual rotation goes from 0.9 seconds to a full hour, which buys the scheme several centuries. The reasoning is the interesting part, and it is an engineering argument rather than an astronomical one — the Earth has been speeding up, a *negative* leap second was heading for roughly 30% probability by 2035, no one has ever applied one, and the CCTF's own estimate is that preparing critical infrastructure for a second that gets deleted rather than inserted would cost something on the order of the Y2K remediation. So instead of making every timekeeping system on earth handle a case none of them have been tested against, the committees are retiring the case. Worth knowing the date now if you own anything that stores timestamps: the ITU has a transition window running to 2035 and possibly 2040 for radio dissemination of UT1−UTC, so the clocks and the libraries will disagree about this for years.

AI & Agents

Goodfire · made the Sunday

Neural Networks Are Already Clean

Nick Cammarata — who co-wrote the original circuits work at Distill and started the automated-interpretability project at OpenAI — argues that the evidence which sent the whole field toward sparse autoencoders was misread. The canonical polysemantic neurons in InceptionV1 weren't concepts folded together to save space; they were an ordinary training failure in deep layers, and when you apply the architectural fixes that have landed since, 99-100% of neurons in that final layer become legible with no change to model size or data. The claim that matters for anyone building on these things is the second half: in preliminary audits of Qwen3-32B he puts roughly 90% of neuron poles at one main job and only 2-4% not yet understood, which would mean you can study the network you actually shipped instead of training a second model to approximate it. He is careful to call it a working hypothesis, and the 65-minute read earns the length.

Christian F.K. Schaller

Using artificial intelligence to reverse engineer hardware

Schaller wanted to scan his late mother's negatives, found the Plustek 8200i had quietly switched to an unsupported chipset, gave up for months, then came back with a setup worth stealing: run the vendor's Windows driver in a KVM guest with the device passed through, capture the bus from the Linux host with usbmon so the guest can't see the instrument, do the same operation against your own driver, and diff the two traces. He had a recognizable scan in hours and a near-perfect driver with infrared dust removal days later, then pointed the same harness at his laptop's MIPI camera and had kernel and libcamera patches by evening. He's published the harness as hw-harness; the honest epilogue is that upstream SANE had already shipped support while he was away.

Engineering & Leadership

The Pragmatic Engineer

The Pulse: the new trend of building "internal vibe-coding apps" at tech companies

Orosz went to Ramp's New York office and met the four-person team behind Glass, an internal Lovable that non-engineers use to build their own tools — onboarding to it is now part of new-hire onboarding — and Stripe has the same thing in Harbor, built by one engineer in about six weeks. The build-versus-buy case he collects is sharper than the usual one: you can expose internal data sources to something you own, you get your own design system for free, you skip the vendor compliance review, and the engineers who build it come out with in-house AI-infra expertise you otherwise have to hire for. For anyone running a product-engineering org the uncomfortable follow-on is the handover question — the people building these are the ones who already maintain the team's load-bearing spreadsheet.

Web & Product Craft

Cloudflare

Rewinding the exponential: how we keep hardware usage down

Cloudflare's data team moves about two billion events per second against linear hardware growth, and this is five years of the specific moves they made to buy time — roughly two and a half years of deferred hardware expansion, itemized. Breaking the one monolithic schema into per-product messages cut backbone bandwidth 35-40% even though it duplicated fields; swapping LZ4 for zstd took another 40% off compressed throughput with no measurable CPU cost; and the 2026 work is the clever one, decoupling pipeline transit from database redundancy so each event crosses the wide-area network once to whichever receiver is up and the second regional copy gets made late, from the buffering layer, instead of at the source.

orlp.net

Two-stack sliding-window aggregation

Worth the archive trip, and short: if your aggregation has an inverse you keep a running total and subtract on the way out, but minimum, quantile, HyperLogLog cardinality and — the one that bites people — floating-point sum do not, which is why a single NaN poisons a rolling average forever. Orson Peters lays out the folklore two-stack algorithm that handles any associative aggregation in amortized O(1) with about fifteen lines, and the useful framing is the signature split: Value, Agg and Out are three different types, obvious once you're aggregating strings into a sketch and reading out a count. He notes he'd published a worse special-case algorithm for min/max six years ago and now considers it pointless, which is a good way to recommend something.

New York & the Table

West Side Rag

Imposing Upper West Side sidewalk shed comes down after 12 years

The 522-foot heavy-duty shed at The Astor — the whole west side of Broadway between 75th and 76th, wrapping both corners toward West End, up in some form since June 2014 — got loaded onto a truck on Wednesday, and Gus Saltonstall has the before-and-after sidewalk photos to prove the block exists. Three of the four storefronts underneath are still vacant, no permit is on file for a replacement, and a commenter notes another full-block shed just went up three streets north, which is the city in one paragraph.

Eater NY

Nothing goes to waste at this Brazilian tasting menu in the West Village

Sherry Cardoso came back from a Top Chef finals run to open Cynthia on Jones Street, where the $165 six-course menu is New American by way of Brazil and the sustainability angle shows up as technique rather than signage — ends, peels and trimmings turned into a chunky XO sauce that gets dolloped over roasted squash and corn. Nadia Chaudhury's report flags the corn course as the one doing real work, three ways in one setting, and the martini made with tomato eau de vie and green-tomato vermouth as the thing to start with.

Diversions

Aftermath

Sega pulling that dogshit Total War remake is just so embarrassing, man

Sega shipped an "enhanced" Shogun 2 that deleted the 2011 original from sale, broke mod support and used AI-generated portraits, and four days of reviews later is pulling it and restoring the old build while it investigates. Luke Plunkett's question is the right one for anyone who ships software: how did this clear every QA gate and milestone sign-off when paying customers clocked it in half a second, on a fifteen-year-old strategy game that had no deadline pressure on it at all. He also notes the apology is signed by Sega and Creative Assembly but not by the third studio on the credits.

Loose Change

Literary Hub

On the unlikely beauty (and hidden danger) of a bogland

Merritt Turetsky has driven the same road southwest out of Fairbanks once a year for twenty-five years to stand on a bluff above the Tanana River, because a bog is one of the few landscapes you cannot read from the ground — the colors shift by inches and one kind of wetland blends into the next without an edge, so the only way to see the pattern is from above. What the pattern shows is that the peat is not sitting in the water, it is directing it: thickness and a few centimeters of elevation decide whether meltwater off the Alaska Range spreads, pools, or disappears into storage. Step off the bluff onto a quaking bog and the ground, which looked solid, behaves like a waterbed.

The Back Page

The Guardian / Opta Analyst

Do Premier League teams really need to run more to win matches?

Ryan Benson takes the pundit reflex — United drop points, someone puts the distance-covered graphic up — and runs it against a season of Opta data, and the correlation mostly isn't there: top-10 teams averaged 4,363km against the bottom 10's 4,332km, and the sides in the bottom half for distance actually beat their expected points while the top half fell nearly two points short. Two things survive. Distance covered *in possession* tracks the table, which is probably just a proxy for having the ball and better players; and at the single-match level, teams that ran 5km less than their opponents won 11.6% of the time, a number that climbs to a thunderous 12.1% once you strip out the games with a red card.

Posting and Toasting

Knicks 122, Raptors 120: scenes from Towns toppling Toronto

The preseason ends with one win, got by sending the starters back out in the fourth of a game that didn't matter, and Karl-Anthony Towns missing a triple-double by a single assist against a Toronto side that had put 148 on the reserves two nights earlier. The notes that carry into opening night: Mikal Bridges looked ready, Andre Drummond is a real bench rebounder, OG Anunoby has made one of eleven from three across five games, and Mike Brown's team still cannot string four quarters together.

Around town

Wed Oct 21 · 9:00am

Squarespace Circle Day

Squarespace HQ, 8 Clarkson St, West Village

A free day at Squarespace's own building for the people who build sites on it for a living — the Circle program's annual gathering, with whatever is next from the platform shown to the designers who'll have to live with it. Worth the subway ride for the hallway conversations about what clients actually ask for now.

professional

Wed Oct 21 · 6:30pm

Future Forum: Science for Society

New York Academy of Sciences, 115 Broadway, Financial District

A free evening on how trust in science gets built and kept, with museum people, journalists and policymakers on the panel rather than only researchers, run jointly with German institutions. The director of the Alan Alda Center for Communicating Science is in the room, which is the tell that this is about explaining things to strangers rather than to peers.

professional

Thu Oct 22 · 9:30am

VaultSpeed Next: Data Foundations for the Age of AI Agents

Flanders House, 620 Eighth Ave, Midtown

Free, and split so you can take either half: a hands-on morning where you bring your own data and your own laptop, then an afternoon with Snowflake and Thomson Reuters people on what data modeling looks like when agents are the consumers. Closes with Belgian beer, which is more than most free conferences manage.

professional

Sun Oct 25 · 2:30pm

Silent Clowns Film Series: The Cat and the Canary

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

The 1927 old-dark-house whodunnit that taught Universal how to light a horror film, with Makia Matsumura playing it live and a 1921 Billy Franey short to open. Nine to twelve dollars, forty blocks from the front door, and the piano is the entire reason to see it in a room instead of at home.

casual

Fri Oct 30 · 8:45pm

News From Home

Metrograph, 7 Ludlow St, Lower East Side

Chantal Akerman at 26, filming subway platforms and street corners in 1976 New York while reading her mother's worried letters from Belgium over the top of them. It is one of the great films about this city precisely because it refuses to narrate it, and it's screening as part of a series about trains.

casual

Quote of the day

“It can write the test to confirm it, and it doesn't get bored.”

— Christian F.K. Schaller, on handing an agent a box of USB captures

On this day

October 16 is a day for things that only work if everyone agrees to stop feeling them. In 1846 William Morton put a patient under with ether in the surgical amphitheater at Massachusetts General, the demonstration that turned anesthesia from a parlor trick into a profession. In 1968, after the 200m final in Mexico City, Tommie Smith and John Carlos went up on the podium and raised their fists, which is the opposite trick: making a thing impossible to not feel.

The puzzle corner

The Mini · Wordle · Connections

Three items today about reading an instrument instead of a dashboard, and one about a committee deciding the cheapest fix is to retire the edge case entirely.