The Economics of Software Teams: Why Most Engineering Organizations Are Flying Blind

A breakdown of what software development teams actually cost, what they need to generate to be financially viable, and why most organizations have no visibility into either number.

The AI Layoff Trap

If AI displaces human workers faster than the economy can reabsorb them, it risks eroding the very consumer demand firms depend on. We show that knowing this is not enough for firms to stop it. In a competitive task-based model, demand externalities trap rational firms in an automation arms race, displacing workers well beyond what is collectively optimal. The resulting loss harms both workers and firm owners. More competition and "better" AI amplify the excess; wage adjustments and free entry cannot eliminate it. Neither can capital income taxes, worker equity participation, universal basic income, upskilling, or Coasian bargaining. Only a Pigouvian automation tax can. The results suggest that policy should address not only the aftermath of AI labor displacement but also the competitive incentives that drive it.

State of Homelab 2026

Evolution of a self-hosting hobby: from clueless to amateur.

Play HAUNT, the irreverent 1970's text adventure game

All elementary functions from a single binary operator

A single two-input gate suffices for all of Boolean logic in digital hardware. No comparable primitive has been known for continuous mathematics: computing elementary functions such as sin, cos, sqrt, and log has always required multiple distinct operations. Here I show that a single binary operator, eml(x,y)=exp(x)-ln(y), together with the constant 1, generates the standard repertoire of a scientific calculator. This includes constants such as e, pi, and i; arithmetic operations including addition, subtraction, multiplication, division, and exponentiation as well as the usual transcendental and algebraic functions. For example, exp(x)=eml(x,1), ln(x)=eml(1,eml(eml(1,x),1)), and likewise for all other operations. That such an operator exists was not anticipated; I found it by systematic exhaustive search and established constructively that it suffices for the concrete scientific-calculator basis. In EML (Exp-Minus-Log) form, every such expression becomes a binary tree of identical nodes, yielding a grammar as simple as S -> 1 | eml(S,S). This uniform structure also enables gradient-based symbolic regression: using EML trees as trainable circuits with standard optimizers (Adam), I demonstrate the feasibility of exact recovery of closed-form elementary functions from numerical data at shallow tree depths up to 4. The same architecture can fit arbitrary data, but when the generating law is elementary, it may recover the exact formula.

Optimization of 32-bit Unsigned Division by Constants on 64-bit Targets

Granlund and Montgomery proposed an optimization method for unsigned integer division by constants [3]. Their method (called the GM method in this paper) was further improved in part by works such as [1] and [7], and is now adopted by major compilers including GCC, Clang, Microsoft Compiler, and Apple Clang. However, for example, for x/7, the generated code is designed for 32-bit CPUs and therefore does not fully exploit 64-bit capabilities. This paper proposes an optimization method for 32-bit unsigned division by constants targeting 64-bit CPUs. We implemented patches for LLVM/GCC and achieved speedups of 1.67x on Intel Xeon w9-3495X (Sapphire Rapids) and 1.98x on Apple M4 (Apple M-series SoC) in the microbenchmark described later. The LLVM patch has already been merged into llvm:main [6], demonstrating the practical applicability of the proposed method.

a perfectable programming language — Soter

Tech Valuations Back to Pre-AI Boom Levels | The Daily Spark

The chart below compares the forward P/E ratios for the S&P 500 and the S&P 500 Information Technology sector. Subscribe for daily updates.