Octallium

Industry14 Aug 2026

SpaceX buys Cursor, and the developer-tool endgame arrives early

A launch company acquiring an AI code editor sounds like a category error. Read it as vertical integration of the thing that actually gates aerospace software, and it stops being strange.

Editorial9 min readacquisitions · developer tools · ai

Latest

The latency was in the serialiser (it usually is)

A tail-latency investigation that went through the network stack, the scheduler, and the garbage collector before finding the answer in the least interesting layer in the system.

Editorial8 min read

Systems29 Jul 2026

Cache invalidation is a naming problem

The joke says there are two hard problems. There is really only one, and the second is the first wearing a different hat.

Editorial6 min read

Programming25 Jul 2026

The monorepo question is settled, and both sides won

Ten years of argument resolved into an unglamorous consensus that nobody claimed as a victory.

Editorial7 min read

Industry21 Jul 2026

Funding rounds are a lagging indicator of everything

By the time a round is announced the interesting decisions are eighteen months old. Reading the announcement as news is reading the wrong document.

Editorial5 min read

Mathematics12 Jul 2026

Induction is recursion, read backwards

Every recursive function you have written is a proof by induction you did not know you were writing. Seeing the correspondence makes both halves easier.

Editorial8 min read

Long reads

Programming11 Aug 2026

Type systems you can argue with

Refinement types have spent twenty years as a research curiosity. The tooling finally caught up, and the argument for them changed from elegance to economics.

Editorial12 min read

Mathematics8 Aug 2026

What makes a proof explanatory

Two proofs of the same theorem can differ enormously in how much they tell you. Mathematicians have argued about why for a century, and the answer turns out to matter for how we teach machines.

Editorial11 min read

Frontier2 Aug 2026

Small models, large context, and the return of retrieval

The scaling story quietly forked. One branch kept getting bigger; the other got better at knowing what to read, and it is the second one showing up in production.

Editorial10 min read

Mathematics18 Jul 2026

Counting without listing

Combinatorics is the art of knowing how many things there are without producing them. Four rules do almost all of the work, and the fourth is the one people get wrong.

Editorial9 min read

Mathematics6 Jul 2026

Graphs are the default shape of everything

Trees, orders, dependencies, state machines and schedules are all graphs wearing different vocabularies. Learning the general object once beats learning five special cases.

Editorial10 min read