Recent content on Jake Gold
US residential proxies are the bane of the internet. They’re the major source of social media manipulation and spam. A residential proxy runs someone else’s traffic through a real home internet connection, so it looks like a normal person on Comcast or AT&T. Almost no one intentionally runs one on behalf of bad actors, they’ve been tricked or hacked. Usually it’s one of a…
For over 20 years, the meditative focus of programming has been one of the best parts of my job. 
 Every week I’d spend countless hours in a flow state , which quiets the default mode network . The DMN is responsible for daydreaming/reflection but also rumination/worrying, so quieting it settles your mind. If I didn’t manage to write code for a week, I’d start to notice it.…
The best coding model in the world is about to leave the Claude subscription, which rightly makes people nervous about affordable access to frontier models. 
 Anthropic redeployed Claude Fable 5 on July 1, 2026. It stays in the flat Pro and Max subscription through July 7, included for up to half your weekly usage limit. After that, the only way to use it is metered usage credits, billed at…
There is a common Silicon Valley saying that “being early is the same as being wrong”, which can be true but is usually misleading. For most products that invent a new category, “too early” is just a polite way to say users don’t want the new category and never will. 
 Almost every successful product is a better version of something that already existed. Google…
Qwen 3.6 27B (currently a popular model to run locally) ships on Hugging Face as 15 safetensors files totaling 56GB of BF16 floating point numbers, or as smaller quantized GGUF conversions. You download the weights, load them into an inference engine like Ollama or LM Studio, and point your coding agent at them. 
 Safetensors (the format these weights ship in) exists so that loading a model…
With all the obvious caveats about historical accuracy, one of my favorite uses for AI image generation is recreating historical scenes I’ve read about and imagined in my head again and again. Here are two, generated with Google’s Nano Banana Pro ( gemini-3-pro-image-preview ), each with the exact prompt. 
 Caesar rides to save Antony at Alesia, 52 BC 
 
 
 
 Gritty…
Coding agents work by sending your prompt and files to a model’s API over HTTP and receiving generated code and tool calls in return, including Bash scripts that execute on your machine. 
 Coding agents give the model and API provider arbitrary code execution on your computer. 
 A model can be designed to emit backdoored code when a trigger appears in its input. A model’s API…
The Claude and Codex TUI coding agents both render a status line at the bottom of the interface. Configuring Claude’s status line works like configuring a shell prompt. The status line for Codex can only be configured to use a fixed set of built-in fields. 
 Claude 
 Claude executes a configured command on each render, pipes its session state as JSON on stdin (model, cwd, and more),…
The default assumption should be that foreign state actors have already exfiltrated the weights of Claude Fable 5 and GPT 5.6 Sol , the latest frontier models from Anthropic and OpenAI . 
 Here’s the question I wish a journalist would put to Sam Altman and Dario Amodei on the record: 
 
 “Can you guarantee that no foreign state actor has exfiltrated, or will exfiltrate,…
You add a DNS record. The app says it’s wrong. You check it, fix a typo, try again. Still wrong. You wait. You try again. Still wrong. You triple check it. It looks correct. 
 
 
 The app is checking DNS records in a half-assed way. 
 If you’re building a product that asks users to add DNS records, please take the time to verify DNS records properly.
SQLite is amazing 
 Most developers already know SQLite is great. If you have not tried it, you are missing out. 
 SQLite is extremely fast, featureful, reliable, and easy to use. When your use case fits, you should probably pick it. 
 It enables very low latency applications and lets you do things that would be impractical with other databases. 
 For example it is often fine to…
In my previous post Serving 200 million requests per day with a cgi-bin , I did some quick performance testing of CGI using a program written in Go. 
 Go works excellently for CGI programs, for many of the same reasons it works so well for CLI programs and system daemons. 
 But, out of curiosity, I decided to do a bit more CGI testing with other languages. 
 CGI is good technology,…
In the early 2000s, we used to write a lot of CGI programs. 
 This was the primary way to make websites dynamic at the time. These CGI programs were usually written in Perl, but sometimes in C to increase performance. 
 The CGI mechanism is conceptually simple but powerful. When the web server receives an incoming request handled by a CGI script (e.g. GET /~jakegold/cgi-bin/guestbook.cgi…
What is atproto? 
 atproto is two things: 
 
 A protocol for creating open social networks 
 An open social network 
 
 atproto, the open social network 
 Today the atproto network has 36+ million users and powers Bluesky and a handful of other apps. 
 Almost all atproto data is public. Content like posts, likes, follows, and photos/videos are publicly accessible to…
What is Bluesky? 
 Bluesky is three things. 
 Bluesky the social app 
 Available on Apple’s App Store , Google Play , and the web 
 Bluesky the atproto app 
 Operating within the app.bsky.* atproto namespace 
 Bluesky Social, PBC 
 The startup company originally funded by Twitter (later by investors) that created and supports atproto.