Unicode? Character Sets? UTF-what?
I was inspired to add this note after recent frustrations about the complete ignorance of character sets in both Commercial & Open software. I seriously recommend everyone reads the following, less ISO-blahblahblah and more UTF-8, no excuses!
The Absolute Minimum Every Software Developer Absolutely, Positively Must Know About Unicode and Character Sets (No Excuses!)
The Cutler.sg Newsletter
Weekly notes on AI, engineering leadership, and building in Singapore. No fluff.
Charset Detection for Fun and Non-Profit
Building a tool to detect and convert character encodings in the FreeDB database, processing 1.8 million entries with surprising results
Loop Engineering: The Loop Was Never the Hard Part
Stop prompting, start looping — but the loop is the easy 20%. After a year shipping agentic loops (and a $500 runaway), here's the part the hype keeps getting backwards: the done-check and the verifier.
Two Papers That Puncture the Hype
One paper shows frontier models degrade as context grows — even on trivial tasks. The other shows reasoning models hit a wall and think less as problems get harder. Read carefully, both point at the same engineering response.