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Author and engineering leader Will Larson describes his hands-on attempt to apply the 'software factory' pattern within his organization. The post outlines his motivations and early experiences testing this approach to structuring engineering work. Larson, known for books like Staff Engineer and An Elegant Puzzle, frames this as a practical exploration rather than a finished framework.
The US Environmental Protection Agency announced on September 14 that it is rescinding the 2024 Carbon Pollution Standards, which had required coal plants and new gas plants to capture 90 percent of their carbon emissions or close by 2039. The agency says the rollback will save industry $370 million in compliance costs, but has not disclosed the resulting public health toll.
Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent met with Chinese Vice Premier He Lifeng in New York to discuss economic and trade issues, including AI, tariffs and rare earths, ahead of a planned summit between President Trump and Chinese President Xi Jinping in Washington. U.S. Trade Representative Jamieson Greer also joined the discussions, which Bessent described as laying the groundwork for the leaders' meeting.
Hosts Carolina Hidalgo and Marcus Parks have relaunched their music history podcast No Dogs in Space with a fourth season called Punk 2.0, kicking off with a multi-part look at the New York Dolls. The hiatus stretched over two years, partly because the pair abandoned an earlier planned season on the Washington DC punk scene after research into Bad Brains and the scope of the project became untenable.
A developer launched Radius on Hacker News, a hyper-local app for organizing informal meetups around shared interests like coffee, running, or biking. Users post an activity with a time and place, and nearby people interested in the same thing can join, positioning it as a lighter-weight alternative to Meetup.com's group-based model.
An OpenAI leader shared an internal note describing a personal six-step method for tackling product problems: understand available information, gather missing information, define the problem, define a simple approach, set a goal, and act with urgency. The author stresses that new information often forces revisiting earlier steps, calling this iterative churn a healthy and necessary part of solving complex problems.
Joby Aviation says it completed the first fully autonomous cross-country flight in the US, sending a modified Cessna Caravan 3,199 miles from California's Buchanan Field Airport to Dare County Regional Airport in North Carolina without pilot control inputs. The aircraft handled taxiing, takeoff, cruising and landing on its own, while a human monitor rode along and Joby staff supervised remotely from California and Shaw Air Force Base in South Carolina. The plane will now fly back west with stops in Raleigh, Salt Lake City and Portland.
The Society of Motion Picture and Television Engineers has established viewing distance recommendations tied to screen size and field of view. Its standard 30-degree rule suggests sitting about 1.6 times a TV's diagonal size away for general viewing, while a 40-degree rule (1.2 times diagonal) offers a more immersive experience, and a 62-degree rule caters to those wanting an extreme, theater-like setup.
Governor Gavin Newsom has signed AB 1130, a law that adds real penalties—fines up to $5,000 per violation and possible misdemeanor referrals—for social media influencers who fail to disclose being paid to promote political content. California previously required such disclosures but had no enforcement mechanism when influencers ignored the rule. The bill follows reports that billionaire Tom Steyer paid numerous influencers during his failed gubernatorial bid, many of whom didn't initially reveal the payments.
A new adaptation of the 'Resident Evil' franchise directed by Zach Cregger has released, prompting an open discussion among viewers about its quality. Reactions appear divided, with some praising the take and others expressing disappointment.
A developer released lambda-microegg, an e-graph library extending Max's microegg with built-in variable binders, higher-order Miller pattern matching, and capture-avoiding substitution. The tool is available on GitHub along with a WebAssembly browser demo, and includes example benchmarks such as sum-rewrite rules and AC-10 saturation tests compared against the existing egg library.
Stanford Medicine researchers discovered that the human brain is actually built from two distinct developmental lineages: a hindbrain system controlling breathing and heartbeat, and a forebrain/midbrain system responsible for higher cognition. The team found these two regions arise from separate progenitor pathways rather than one branching from the other, and used this insight to finally grow functional hindbrain motor neurons from human stem cells in the lab. They also traced this dual-origin pattern back over 550 million years, finding it in chickens, zebrafish, and acorn worms.