Needy programs. I’ve seen at least two other bloggers linking to this post. I’d usually stop and not post about it, but it’s too good to miss. And I miss simple software. I should write more about it.

parakeet-mlx Neat MLX project by Senstella bringing NVIDIA's Parakeet ASR (Automatic Speech Recognition, like Whisper) model to to Apple's MLX framework. It's packaged as a Python CLI tool, so you can run it like this: uvx parakeet-mlx default_tc.mp3 The first time I ran this it downloaded a 2.5GB model file. Once that was fetched it took 53 seconds to transcribe a 65MB 1hr 1m 28s podcast epis...

I had a look to see when I first mentioned Samuel Arbesman here. It was 2011: the average size of scientific discoveries is getting smaller. Anyway I’ve been reading his new book, The Magic of Code (official site). There’s computing history, magic, the simulation hypothesis, and a friendly unpacking of everything from procedural generation to Unix. And through it all, an enthusiastic appeal t...

GPT-5.1 Instant and GPT-5.1 Thinking System Card Addendum I was confused about whether the new "adaptive thinking" feature of GPT-5.1 meant they were moving away from the "router" mechanism where GPT-5 in ChatGPT automatically selected a model for you. This page addresses that, emphasis mine: GPT‑5.1 Instant is more conversational than our earlier chat model, with improved instruction followin...

This week on the People and Blogs series we have an interview with Nic Chan, whose blog can be found at nicchan.me. Tired of RSS? Read this in your browser or sign up for the newsletter. The People and Blogs series is supported by Hrvoje Šimić and the other 125 members of my "One a Month" club. If you enjoy P&B, consider becoming one for as little as 1 dollar a month. ...

Always nice to get emails from people sharing their thoughts on this topic. Looks like I’m not the only one feeling this way, and a few weeks back Jeremy wrote a post touching a very similar topic. It also made me smile seeing him mention Henry David Thoreau in his post because I just finished reading one of Thoreau’s books, I’m currently reading a second one, and there’s a third one waiting fo...

Introducing GPT-5.1 for developers OpenAI announced GPT-5.1 yesterday, calling it a smarter, more conversational ChatGPT. Today they've added it to their API. We actually got four new models today: gpt-5.1 gpt-5.1-chat-latest gpt-5.1-codex gpt-5.1-codex-mini There are a lot of details to absorb here. GPT-5.1 introduces a new reasoning effort called "none" (previous were minimal, low, medium, ...

Datasette 1.0a22 New Datasette 1.0 alpha, adding some small features we needed to properly integrate the new permissions system with Datasette Cloud: datasette serve --default-deny option for running Datasette configured to deny all permissions by default. (#2592) datasette.is_client() method for detecting if code is executing inside a datasette.client request. (#2594) Plus a developer expe...

Nano Banana can be prompt engineered for extremely nuanced AI image generation Max Woolf provides an exceptional deep dive into Google's Nano Banana aka Gemini 2.5 Flash Image model, still the best available image manipulation LLM tool three months after its initial release. I confess I hadn't grasped that the key difference between Nano Banana and OpenAI's gpt-image-1 and the previous generat...

On Monday, this Court entered an order requiring OpenAI to hand over to the New York Times and its co-plaintiffs 20 million ChatGPT user conversations [...] OpenAI is unaware of any court ordering wholesale production of personal information at this scale. This sets a dangerous precedent: it suggests that anyone who files a lawsuit against an AI company can demand production of tens of millions...

Almost every time I share a new example of an SVG of a pelican riding a bicycle a variant of this question pops up: how do you know the labs aren't training for your benchmark? The strongest argument is that they would get caught. If a model finally comes out that produces an excellent SVG of a pelican riding a bicycle you can bet I'm going to test it on all manner of creatures riding all sorts...

I had a quick pair programming session with one of my colleagues. Can you imagine that Claude Code doesn’t need to be your only coding buddy? The validation rules needed a little tweak, so here is the piece of code I typed, and below is the version suggested by my friend. validation.Field(&r.ScheduledAt, validation.When(!(r.SendNow || r.DryRun), validation.Required)) validation.Field(...

The best leaders I've worked with were introverts. They listened more than they talked and built stronger teams because of it.

This post is a continuation of Paul Kafasis’ post “Tahoe’s Terrible Icons” where he contrasts the visual differences across a number of Apple’s updated icons in macOS Tahoe (a.k.a. the Liquid Glass update). While Paul’s post mostly covers icons for the apps you’ll find in the primary /Applications folder, there’s also a subset of possibly lesser-known icons in the /System/Library/CoreServices f...

The fact that MCP is a difference surface from your normal API allows you to ship MUCH faster to MCP. This has been unlocked by inference at runtime Normal APIs are promises to developers, because developer commit code that relies on those APIs, and then walk away. If you break the API, you break the promise, and you break that code. This means a developer gets woken up at 2am to fix the code B...

Fun-reliable side-channels for cross-container communication Here's a very clever hack for communicating between different processes running in different containers on the same machine. It's based on clever abuse of POSIX advisory locks which allow a process to create and detect locks across byte offset ranges: These properties combined are enough to provide a basic cross-container side-channe...

Two related pieces of writing are doing the loops in my head recently. The first is the editorial piece from Dense Discovery #361—thank you Mattia for sending it to me—where Kay wrote We’ve normalised giving our attention almost exclusively to people who already have obscene amounts of influence. And we amplify them by watching. The power law in action: a few rise to the top, and we keep them ...

Today in Brussels, a closed-door session of an EU working group will discuss Chatkontrolle 2.0. This legislative package would entirely strip EU citizens of their right to private communications. Rather amusing that only recently I wrote about EU parliamentarians proclaiming their victory over this idiotic bill, whilst in reality they’re now preparing to push through an even more aggressive ver...

Style connected UI elements with CSS pseudo-classes that respond to user interest. Interactive examples showing tooltips, forms, and navigation without JavaScript.

Scaling HNSWs Salvatore Sanfilippo spent much of this year working on vector sets for Redis, which first shipped in Redis 8 in May. A big part of that work involved implementing HNSW - Hierarchical Navigable Small World - an indexing technique first introduced in this 2016 paper by Yu. A. Malkov and D. A. Yashunin. Salvatore's detailed notes on the Redis implementation here offer an immersive t...

Agentic Pelican on a Bicycle Robert Glaser took my pelican riding a bicycle benchmark and applied an agentic loop to it, seeing if vision models could draw a better pelican if they got the chance to render their SVG to an image and then try again until they were happy with the end result. Here's what Claude Opus 4.1 got to after four iterations - I think the most interesting result of the model...

I've been upgrading a ton of Datasette plugins recently for compatibility with the Datasette 1.0a20 release from last week - 35 so far. A lot of the work is very repetitive so I've been outsourcing it to Codex CLI. Here's the recipe I've landed on: codex exec --dangerously-bypass-approvals-and-sandbox \ 'Run the command tadd and look at the errors and then read ~/dev/datasette/docs/upgrade-1.0a...

Yorgos Lanthimos, 2025, ★★★★ Among other things, I remain very appreciative of Lanthimos’s rare appetite for adventurous typography. Tagged: November 2025, film diary, film, review, Yorgos Lanthimos, PFS at the Bourse, Philadelphia, PA Reply via email

Create animated transitions between different states of your app without complex animation libraries.

The ::details-content pseudo-element lets you style the expandable content of details elements separately from the summary, no divs needed.

Netflix asks partners to consider the following guiding principles before leveraging GenAI in any creative workflow:  The outputs do not replicate or substantially recreate identifiable characteristics of unowned or copyrighted material, or infringe any copyright-protected works The generative tools used do not store, reuse, or train on production data inputs or outputs. Where possible, genera...

🔗 The Pivot by Charlie Stross - sent from a friend. Terrific reading.

Give your AI agent access to your running application. They can see errors, inspect the network tab, check the DOM, and debug issues while you work.

Whenever Apple does a visual refresh in their OS updates, a new wave of icon archiving starts for me. Now that “Liquid Glass” is out, I’ve begun nabbing the latest icons from Apple and other apps and adding them to my gallery. Since I’ve been collecting these icons for so long, one of the more interesting and emerging attributes of my collection is the visual differences in individual app icons...

Pelican on a Bike - Raytracer Edition beetle_b ran this prompt against a bunch of recent LLMs: Write a POV-Ray file that shows a pelican riding on a bicycle. This turns out to be a harder challenge than SVG, presumably because there are less examples of POV-Ray in the training data: Most produced a script that failed to parse. I would paste the error back into the chat and let it attempt a f...

Added to the film diary:Bones and AllLuca Guadagnino, 2022, ★★★TÁRTodd Field, 2022, ★★★★½The Blue GardeniaFritz Lang, 1953, ★★★Added to the music library:IconoclastsAnna von Hausswolff, 2025Wipers Box SetWipers, 2001Ringing FieldsDavid Bales, 2025Beacons in LimboCarnivorous Bells, 2025Thirst Walk / PlaybackShudder to Think, 2025 Tagged: November 2025 Reply via email

OpenAI partially released a new model yesterday called GPT-5-Codex-Mini, which they describe as "a more compact and cost-efficient version of GPT-5-Codex". It's currently only available via their Codex CLI tool and VS Code extension, with proper API access "coming soon". I decided to use Codex to reverse engineer the Codex CLI tool and give me the ability to prompt the new model directly. I mad...

See what's rising, what's dying, and where the jobs are actually going

The big advantage of MCP over OpenAPI is that it is very clear about auth. [...] Maybe an agent could read the docs and write code to auth. But we don't actually want that, because it implies the agent gets access to the API token! We want the agent's harness to handle that and never reveal the key to the agent. [...] OAuth has always assumed that the client knows what API it's talking to, and ...

What I'm doing now. November 2025 edition

Mastodon 4.5 This new release of Mastodon adds two of my most desired features! The first is support for quote posts. This had already become an unofficial feature in the client apps I was using (phanpy.social on the web and Ivory on iOS) but now it's officially part of Mastodon's core platform. Much more notably though: Fetch All Replies: Completing the Conversation Flow Users on servers runn...

Over the years, I’ve been chewing on media related to nuclear weapons. This is my high-level, non-exhaustive documentation of my consumption — with links! 📖 The Making of the Atomic Bomb by Richard Rhodes. This is one of those definitive histories (it’s close to 1,000 pages and won a Pulitzer Prize). It starts with the early discoveries in physics, like the splitting of the atom, and goes up ...

Ok spoilers ahead. But Oedipus Rex a.k.a. Oedipus Tyrannus by Sophocles is almost 2,500 years old at this point so it’s fair game imo. The Oedipus story in a nutshell: Oedipus, who was secretly adopted, receives a prophecy that he will kill his dad. So to thwart fate he leaves his dad and winds up in a city with a missing king (btw killing an argumentative guy on the way). Many years after bec...

I have AiDHD It has never been easier to build an MVP and in turn, it has never been harder to keep focus. When new features always feel like they're just a prompt away, feature creep feels like a never ending battle. Being disciplined is more important than ever. AI still doesn't change one very important thing: you still need to make something people want. I think that getting users (even fre...

My hunch is that existing LLMs make it easier to build a new programming language in a way that captures new developers. Most programming languages are similar enough to existing languages that you only need to know a small number of details to use them: what's the core syntax for variables, loops, conditionals and functions? How does memory management work? What's the concurrency model? For ma...

This week on the People and Blogs series we have an interview with Robb Knight, whose blog can be found at rknight.me. Tired of RSS? Read this in your browser or sign up for the newsletter. The People and Blogs series is supported by Matt Stein and the other 125 members of my "One a Month" club. If you enjoy P&B, consider becoming one for as little as 1 dollar a month. ...

Using Codex CLI with gpt-oss:120b on an NVIDIA DGX Spark via Tailscale Inspired by a YouTube comment I wrote up how I run OpenAI's Codex CLI coding agent against the gpt-oss:120b model running in Ollama on my NVIDIA DGX Spark via a Tailscale network. It takes a little bit of work to configure but the result is I can now use Codex CLI on my laptop anywhere in the world against a self-hosted mode...

Game design is simple, actually Game design legend Raph Koster (Ultima Online, Star Wars Galaxies and many more) provides a deeply informative and delightfully illustrated "twelve-step program for understanding game design." You know it's going to be good when the first section starts by defining "fun". Via Hacker News Tags: game-design

You should write an agent Thomas Ptacek on the Fly blog: Agents are the most surprising programming experience I’ve had in my career. Not because I’m awed by the magnitude of their powers — I like them, but I don’t like-like them. It’s because of how easy it was to get one up on its legs, and how much I learned doing that. I think he's right: hooking up a simple agentic loop that prompts an L...

My trepidation extends to complex literature searches. I use LLMs as secondary librarians when I’m doing research. They reliably find primary sources (articles, papers, etc.) that I miss in my initial searches. But these searches are dangerous. I distrust LLM librarians. There is so much data in the world: you can (in good faith!) find evidence to support almost any position or conclusion. Chat...

Kimi K2 Thinking Chinese AI lab Moonshot's Kimi K2 established itself as one of the largest open weight models - 1 trillion parameters - back in July. They've now released the Thinking version, also a trillion parameters (MoE, 32B active) and also under their custom modified (so not quite open source) MIT license. Starting with Kimi K2, we built it as a thinking agent that reasons step-by-step...

At the start of the year, most people loosely following AI probably knew of 0 [Chinese] AI labs. Now, and towards wrapping up 2025, I’d say all of DeepSeek, Qwen, and Kimi are becoming household names. They all have seasons of their best releases and different strengths. The important thing is this’ll be a growing list. A growing share of cutting edge mindshare is shifting to China. I expect so...

Some good updates, saucepan thoughts, and lots of excellent links

I'm upgrading various plugins for compatibility with the new Datasette 1.0a20 alpha release and I decided to record a video of the process. This post accompanies that video with detailed additional notes. The datasette-checkbox plugin I picked a very simple plugin to illustrate the upgrade process (possibly too simple). datasette-checkbox adds just one feature to Datasette: if you are viewi...

Also, late in October, this happened: Got rid of a chunky 16-inch MBP and got an iPad Pro. I’m really liking it, even though I haven’t fully used it.

Just realised that I haven’t posted in a while. Life is kinda of busy. I really like my new job and the fact that there is a lot to do. Never a dull moment. Completely the opposite of what I was having on the past few months at Atlassian.

Know Your RightsAs we slide toward authoritarianism, you should exercise what rights you have left while you can. Want to leave a comment?, or just Respond via email.

I've been experimenting with a pattern for LLM usage recently that's working out really well: asynchronous code research tasks. Pick a research question, spin up an asynchronous coding agent and let it go and run some experiments and report back when it's done. Code research Coding agents Asynchronous coding agents Give them a dedicated GitHub repository Let them rip with unlimited n...

How the cascade, the animation-fill-mode, and implicit keyframes make things a bit more complicated then you’d initially think …

Technical founders understand the product, ship faster, and make better decisions. Here's why engineering experience creates exceptional leaders.

Open redirect endpoint in Datasette prior to 0.65.2 and 1.0a21 This GitHub security advisory covers two new releases of Datasette that I shipped today, both addressing the same open redirect issue with a fix by James Jefferies. Datasette 0.65.2 fixes the bug and also adds Python 3.14 support and a datasette publish cloudrun fix. Datasette 1.0a21 also has that Cloud Run fix and two other small n...

Removing XSLT for a more secure browser Previously discussed back in August, it looks like it's now official: Chrome intends to deprecate and remove XSLT from the browser. [...] We intend to remove support from version 155 (November 17, 2026). The Firefox and WebKit projects have also indicated plans to remove XSLT from their browser engines. [...] The continued inclusion of XSLT 1.0 in web br...

What do you do with your email? Do you archive everything? Or are you a person who will delete everything not immediately useful? There are good arguments for both sides. Personally, I try to delete most email. Most of my email ends up being passive information that is point-in-time based, but not really long term. These are things like mailing list messages or notifications from services and s...

I'm worried that they put co-pilot in Excel because Excel is the beast that drives our entire economy and do you know who has tamed that beast? Brenda. Who is Brenda? She is a mid-level employee in every finance department, in every business across this stupid nation and the Excel goddess herself descended from the heavens, kissed Brenda on her forehead and the sweat from Brenda's brow is what ...

If you’re subscribed to my From the Summit newsletter, you might recognise this church. It’s the same one I wrote about in the most recent missive, only this time there was a lovely sunny day and the whole place was not engulfed in the fog. Thank you for keeping RSS alive. You're awesome. Email me :: Sign my guestbook :: Support for 1$/month :: ...

Superpowers is an MCP that enforces systematic workflows. I used it to upgrade skillcraft to Next.js 16 and didn't miss a single file.

Lighthouse CI fails your builds when performance drops. I run it on every pull request.

Authentication on the web is a complicated problem. If you’re going to do it yourself, there’s a lot you have to take into consideration. But odds are, you’re building an app whose core offering has nothing to do with auth. You don’t care about auth. It’s an implementation detail. So rather than spend your precious time solving the problem of auth, you pay someone else to solve it. That’s the v...

Added to the film diary:DahmerDavid Jacobson, 2002, ★★½RogueGreg McLean, 2007, ★★½ChristineJohn Carpenter, 1983, ★★★Added to the music library:Twice Upon a Time: The SinglesSiouxsie and the Banshees, 1992 Tagged: November 2025 Reply via email

The Next.js DevTools MCP connects Claude and Cursor to your running dev server. I use it every day.

Howdy y’all, I hope your October was not as hectic as mine. Mine was ridiculous! It’s been a super hardworking year overall, and I’m looking forward to a trip with my family at the end of the year. We are going to spend December in Sri Lanka, so if you have any tips and recommendations, ping me on Mastodon, Bluesky, LinkedIn or in the comments section below. I found some time ...

Stops LLMs from hallucinating APIs by pulling version-specific docs on demand. I use it every day.

A look at Inktober 2025, what I did, what I learnt, dinosaurs.

This week on the People and Blogs series we have an interview with Frank Chimero, whose blog can be found at frankchimero.com. Tired of RSS? Read this in your browser or sign up for the newsletter. The People and Blogs series is supported by Naz Hamid and the other 125 members of my "One a Month" club. If you enjoy P&B, consider becoming one for as little as 1 dollar a m...

If there is one thing that I’ve learned in my roughly 30 years of working with design tools, it is that they come and go and that you should always stay curious and be open and ready to learn something new. As a teenager, I made my first clip-arty design attempts in CorelDRAW. Right after finishing high school, I dabbled in QuarkXPress during an internship at BBDO. As a student, I fell in love ...

Brad asked me to fill in for Myke this week

1. When you sit with friends at a wobbly table, Simply rotate till it becomes stable. No need to find a wedge for one of its four feet. Math will ensure nothing spills while you eat. The Wobbly Table Theorem (Department of Mathematics, Harvard University). 2. David Ogilvy changed advertising in 1951. Shirts sold. Job done. He used a surprise black eyepatch in the magazine spot: “story appeal” ...

Samples and photos of the neon Pilot Juice space smash set

Just in time for this year’s Berlin edition, Beyond Tellerrand has launched a beautiful new site for its 15-plus years of events. A real web treasure both visually and structurally, it succeeds as both a marketing site and a deep archive of hundreds of inspiring talks from creative speakers in design, tech, and beyond. I’m honored to have done a few projects with Beyond Tellerrand but sad...

Back in September I needed a console tool that would take one of my high-entropy master passwords (the ones I keep in my head) plus some context, and deterministically generate a password from that. Same inputs, same output, every time. The use case: I have several critical things that need strong passwords (disk encryption, PGP keys, SSH keys, cryptocurrency wallet passphrases, Proxmox backups...

Humans love stories. Maybe that is because for thousands of years, stories were the way information was preserved and passed on to others, to the next generations. Maybe because they create community and collective culture. Maybe because they capture our imagination and speak to our fears and our dreams. Maybe that’s why you will find a lot of stories in the writing on this site. My reply to Je...

A random thought that came to me today: even if it seems like my actions back in Russia didn’t lead to any visible result (the war is still going on), that’s only how it appears. Every time I protested and people saw it (in person, online), it connected them through me.If someone couldn’t directly and openly express their disagreement with what was happening, they had an alternative: share a po...

The “linear()” timing function is a game-changer; it allows us to model physics-based motion right in vanilla CSS! That said, there are some limitations and quirks to be aware of. I’ve been experimenting with this API for a while now, and in this post, I’ll share all of the tips and tricks I’ve learned for using it effectively. ✨

Merz has a simple solution to every problem: deport migrants. It’s rather remarkable watching a chancellor whose rhetoric echoes Goebbels. The man literally said: “But we naturally still have this problem in the cityscape, and that’s why the Federal Minister of the Interior is now enabling and carrying out deportations on a very large scale.” In the context of migration, cityscape naturally ref...