🎮 Linux Gamers on Steam Break the 3% Barrier
A symbolic yet significant step for Linux gaming—showing how Valve’s investments in Proton and Steam Deck are transforming Linux from a niche into a mainstream gaming platform.
In the October 2025 Steam Hardware & Software Survey, Linux users surpassed 3% of the total Steam player base. SteamOS, Arch, and Mint lead adoption, driven by the continued success of Valve’s Steam Deck and rising interest in Linux gaming as Windows 10 support winds down.
🔗 Read more 🔗
🎉 The Art and Psychology of Throwing Great Parties
An elegant blend of behavioral insight and practical logistics—this article reimagines party hosting as a human-centered system for fostering connection, not just entertainment.
This piece distills 21 practical insights on hosting gatherings that feel natural and enjoyable. It explores how timing, guest composition, and social balance affect atmosphere, stressing that a calm, welcoming host transforms a party into a true act of community building.
🔗 Read more 🔗
🧠 Backpropagation: Why You Really Need to Understand It
A timeless reminder that deep learning expertise depends on conceptual understanding, not just tool familiarity—essential reading for anyone building neural networks beyond templates.
Andrej Karpathy explains why deep learning practitioners must grasp how backpropagation works instead of treating it as a black box. He highlights pitfalls like vanishing gradients and dead ReLUs, showing how intuition about gradient flow leads to more reliable and efficient models.
🔗 Read more 🔗
🤖 Tongyi DeepResearch: Alibaba’s Open-Source Challenger to OpenAI
A landmark in open-source AI—Tongyi’s release shows how rapidly open ecosystems are catching up to proprietary agents, emphasizing the power of synthetic data and full-stack RL pipelines.
Alibaba’s Tongyi DeepResearch project unveils a 30B MoE open-source AI framework capable of advanced reasoning and planning. Combining synthetic data, continual training, and reinforcement learning, it supports scalable long-horizon tasks like navigation and legal analysis through ReAct and IterResearch modes.
🔗 Read more 🔗
📰 How Cybercrime Laws Are Silencing Journalists
A powerful exposé of how cybersecurity rhetoric can become a weapon against free speech—highlighting the fragile boundary between regulation and repression.
The Columbia Journalism Review details how governments in Nigeria, Pakistan, and Jordan use cybercrime legislation to target journalists instead of cybercriminals. Loosely worded laws and ‘fake news’ provisions enable censorship under the guise of online safety, reflecting a global trend toward digital authoritarianism.
🔗 Read more 🔗
🛡️ You Don’t Need Anubis: Rethinking Bot Protection
A thoughtful critique of overengineered web defenses—reminding developers that simplicity and usability often beat brute-force anti-bot gimmicks.
This article critiques Anubis, a proof-of-work-based anti-bot system, arguing it’s excessive for most sites and ineffective against future intelligent bots. A simpler Caddy-based setup can offer comparable protection without harming user experience, while Cloudflare remains the most reliable option for serious DDoS defense.
🔗 Read more 🔗
⚙️ djb’s Notes on Fil-C: Safer C for Real Systems
A hands-on report from one of the field’s most rigorous engineers—showcasing how memory safety can evolve from theory to practical, system-level adoption.
Daniel J. Bernstein presents in-depth notes on Fil-C, a memory-safe compiler compatible with C/C++. He outlines benchmarks, installation procedures, and Debian integration via a new ABI, demonstrating Fil-C’s performance parity with Clang and practical paths toward safer low-level programming.
🔗 Read more 🔗
🧩 The Tradeoffs That Shape Modern Build Systems
A rare synthesis of compiler design and DevOps pragmatism—offering deep insight into how modern build tools shape developer velocity and reliability.
A Rust compiler team engineer unpacks the design tensions in contemporary build systems, comparing Make, Bazel, Nix, and others. It explores dependency tracking, reproducibility, and performance, arguing that hybrid tracing–hermetic models best balance speed, correctness, and maintainability.
🔗 Read more 🔗
💥 Why Software Science Feels Broken (and Why It Still Matters)
An impassioned yet balanced take that resonates with engineers who crave rigor without academia’s red tape—a manifesto for a more credible, accessible software science.
Hillel Wayne critiques the state of empirical software engineering—calling out paywalls, weak methodology, and irreproducible studies. Despite its flaws, he argues that evidence-based research remains vital, pointing to well-supported practices like code review and fast feedback loops.
🔗 Read more 🔗