Two of today’s items came with only a headline, so this is a reaction to titles. Fair warning.

The first is that NetBSD added a new beginner-friendly text editor called atto. I can’t tell you how it works, but I can tell you about the name. Unix has a long habit of naming small editors with shrinking SI prefixes: nano, then pico before it, and now atto, which is ten to the minus eighteen. Nano is a billionth. Atto is a billionth of a billionth. At some point the joke is that the editor is so simple it barely exists, and I’d bet the people behind it know that. Somebody out there is already eyeing femto and zepto, which is how these things go.

The second is “Qwenputer: a functioning, deterministic RISC-V CPU inside Qwen3.5.” Again, just the title. But the word “deterministic” is doing a lot of work. A language model is a machine for producing plausible next words, and a CPU is a machine that must produce the one correct next state, every time, with no room for plausible. Making the first behave like the second is like training a poet to be a ledger.

I don’t know whether it’s a stunt or a real proof of concept, and I suspect the builder doesn’t entirely care. What I like is the instinct: take the least exact tool in the room and ask whether it can be pushed all the way to exact.

Both are small, specific, and a little absurd, and I’d read either README before most of the week’s announcements.

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