Despite being rusty with coding (I don't code every day these days): since starting to use Windsurf / Cursor with the recent increasingly capable models: I am SO back to being as fast in coding as when I was coding every day "in the zone" [...] When you are driving with a firm grip on the steering wheel - because you know exactly where you are going, and when to steer hard or gently - it is ju...

An underestimated challenge in making productive use of LLMs is that it can feel like cheating. One trick I've found that helps is to make sure that I am putting in way more text than the LLM is spitting out . This goes for code: I'll pipe in a previous project for it to modify, or ask it to combine two, or paste in my research notes. It also goes for writing. I hardly ever publish material tha...

We keep mistaking the highlight reel for the work. We see the headline, the launch, the million views—and forget the months, sometimes years, of invisible scaffolding beneath it. We've been trained to look for the sparks: the moment of inspiration, the viral post, the Hail Mary

Oh goddamn it. I. No! I don’t have time for this, Todd! You’re supposed to be working on a new Elder Scrolls game, not making me buy Oblivion for $60. Again. Apparently they’re using the Unreal Engine so you get shit like this: We'll See About _That_Citation needed I mean, look at this shit: Fuck YouTODD! YOU WERE SUPPOSED TO B...

I was against using AI for programming for a LONG time. It never felt effective. But with the latest models + tools, it finally feels like a real performance boost If you’re still holding out, do yourself a favor: spend a few focused hours actually using it — Ellie Huxtable Tags: ai-assisted-programming, llms, ai, generative-ai

ClickHouse gets lazier (and faster): Introducing lazy materialization Tom Schreiber describe's the latest optimization in ClickHouse, and in the process explores a whole bunch of interesting characteristics of columnar datastores generally. As I understand it, the new "lazy materialization" feature means that if you run a query like this: select id, big_col1, big_col2 from big_table order by ra...

Abusing DuckDB-WASM by making SQL draw 3D graphics (Sort Of) Brilliant hack by Patrick Trainer who got an ASCII-art Doom clone running in the browser using convoluted SQL queries running against the WebAssembly build of DuckDB. Here’s the live demo, and the code on GitHub. The SQL is so much fun. Here’s a snippet that implements ray tracing as part of a SQL view: CREATE OR REPLACE VIEW rend...

A5 A5 is a new "global, equal-area, millimeter-accurate geospatial index" by Felix Palmer: It is the pentagonal equivalent of other DGGSs, like S2 or H3, but with higher accuracy and lower distortion. Effectively it's a way of dividing the entire world into pentagons where each one covers the same physical area (to within a 2% threshold) - like Uber's H3 but a bit weirder and more fun. An A5 ...

Working Through the Fear of Being Seen Heartfelt piece by Ashley Willis about the challenge of overcoming self-doubt in publishing online: Part of that is knowing who might read it. A lot of the folks who follow me are smart, opinionated, and not always generous. Some are friends. Some are people I’ve looked up to. And some are just really loud on the internet. I saw someone the other day drag...

While I don’t do a lot of image editing, I do more than I think most of the people I know do. For the longest time, now, I’ve used scripts and hacks to try and wrangle things like creating consistent thumbnails, featured image sizes and even just memes. Getting consistent results is somewhat flakey, and it seems like every time I turn around, my scripts break in new and interesting1...

OpenAI o3 and o4-mini System Card I'm surprised to see a combined System Card for o3 and o4-mini in the same document - I'd expect to see these covered separately. The opening paragraph calls out the most interesting new ability of these models (see also my notes here). Tool usage isn't new, but using tools in the chain of thought appears to result in some very significant improvements: The mo...

Decentralizing Schemes Tim Bray discusses the challenges faced by decentralized Mastodon in that shared URLs to posts don't take into account people accessing Mastodon via their own instances, which breaks replies/likes/shares etc unless you further copy and paste URLs around yourself. Tim proposes that the answer is URIs: a registered fedi://mastodon.cloud/@timbray/109508984818551909 scheme co...

Excuse me while I publish these weeks notes a little later than usual this time around. I've been busy gushing over Sam our new Corgi puppy. He's been an absolute joy to have around – he listens very well, is playful, and has a ton of personality. Some other things that happened this week: Last week on Sunday we went to see Frozen the musical. It was an amazing experience with a great cast, st...

For the past two and a half years the feature I've most wanted from LLMs is the ability to take on search-based research tasks on my behalf. We saw the first glimpses of this back in early 2023, with Perplexity (first launched December 2022, first prompt leak in January 2023) and then the GPT-4 powered Microsoft Bing (which launched/cratered spectacularly in February 2023). Since then a whole b...

How to work with attributes and properties in custom elements.

I didn’t leave the attention economy because I hated it. I left because I understood it, because once you see the system for what it is—a parasitic loop that rewards noise over nuance, metrics over meaning, reaction over reflection—you have two choices. Keep optimizing

In some tasks, AI is unreliable. In others, it is superhuman. You could, of course, say the same thing about calculators, but it is also clear that AI is different. It is already demonstrating general capabilities and performing a wide range of intellectual tasks, including those that it is not specifically trained on. Does that mean that o3 and Gemini 2.5 are AGI? Given the definitional proble...

Now that Llama has very real competition in open weight models (Gemma 3, latest Mistrals, DeepSeek, Qwen) I think their janky license is becoming much more of a liability for them. It's just limiting enough that it could be the deciding factor for using something else. Tags: meta, open-source, generative-ai, llama, ai, llms, qwen

I’ve been a paying Kagi user for nearly two years, now. September 13^th^ will be my official start date. I have to say, I’ve been extremely pleased with the service. Not only is the search functionality surfacing stuff I actually want, but I also get to filter out the noise and promote what I generally like to see regardless of the underlying results. That means I pin things like Wi...

llm-fragments-github 0.2 I upgraded my llm-fragments-github plugin to add a new fragment type called issue. It lets you pull the entire content of a GitHub issue thread into your prompt as a concatenated Markdown file. (If you haven't seen fragments before I introduced them in Long context support in LLM 0.24 using fragments and template plugins.) I used it just now to have Gemini 2.5 Pro prov...

I encountered a theory a while ago that one of the reasons Meta insist on using the term “open source” for their Llama models despite the Llama license not actually conforming to the terms of the Open Source Definition is that the EU’s AI act includes special rules for open source models without requiring OSI compliance. Since the EU AI act (12 July 2024) is available online I decided to take a...

Claude Code: Best practices for agentic coding Extensive new documentation from Anthropic on how to get the best results out of their Claude Code CLI coding agent tool, which includes this fascinating tip: We recommend using the word "think" to trigger extended thinking mode, which gives Claude additional computation time to evaluate alternatives more thoroughly. These specific phrases are map...

@layer post { .gallery { align-content: space-evenly; background-color: var(--theme-color-alt-background); border: 3px solid var(--theme-color-border); border-radiu...

Gemma 3 QAT Models Interesting release from Google, as a follow-up to Gemma 3 from last month: To make Gemma 3 even more accessible, we are announcing new versions optimized with Quantization-Aware Training (QAT) that dramatically reduces memory requirements while maintaining high quality. This enables you to run powerful models like Gemma 3 27B locally on consumer-grade GPUs like the NVIDIA R...

Porto Alegre, BR #shotoniphone #processzero #dailyphoto #photoblog

It frustrates me when support sites for online services fail to link to the things they are talking about. Cloudflare's Find zone and account IDs page for example provides a four step process for finding my account ID that starts at the root of their dashboard, including a screenshot of where I should click. In Cloudflare's case it's harder to link to the correct dashboard page because the URL...

Voldomort at Least had Smooth SkinPlease, feel free to light your own hair on fire instead of the next cigar you witch.

To me, a successful eval meets the following criteria. Say, we currently have system A, and we might tweak it to get a system B: If A works significantly better than B according to a skilled human judge, the eval should give A a significantly higher score than B. If A and B have similar performance, their eval scores should be similar. Whenever a pair of systems A and B contradicts these crit...

I took a crack at making a new Hammerspoon Lua script. When I have posts that contain images (like this one) or other files, in Hugo you’d create them in a folder like content/posts/2025-04-18_simple-title/index.md. That would then allow you to drop things like associated images, videos and other files with the post itself, keeping it as a self-contained unit. The problem is: Any time I w...

I stopped associating with sycophants

Back in the wild-west of computing, in the enlightened age of Lisp-machines, a legendary keyboard that had an outsized influence on the computing world around it arose. The Space Cadet Keyboard. Itself an expansion upon the older Knight Keyboard. Their legends harken back to a day when keyboards had to have buttons for functions that would be otherwise unseen in a terminal environment. To that ...

Max Woolf pointed out this new feature of the Gemini 2.5 series (here's my coverage of 2.5 Pro and 2.5 Flash) in a comment on Hacker News: One hidden note from Gemini 2.5 Flash when diving deep into the documentation: for image inputs, not only can the model be instructed to generated 2D bounding boxes of relevant subjects, but it can also create segmentation masks! At this price point with th...

This is the 86th edition of People and Blogs, the series where I ask interesting people to talk about themselves and their blogs. Today we have Jeremy Keith and his blog, adactio.com To follow this series subscribe to the newsletter. A new interview will land in your inbox every Friday. Not a fan of newsletters? No problem! You can read the interviews here on the blog or you can subscribe to th...

MCP Run Python Pydantic AI's MCP server for running LLM-generated Python code in a sandbox. They ended up using a trick I explored two years ago: using a Deno process to run Pyodide in a WebAssembly sandbox. Here's a bit of a wild trick: since Deno loads code on-demand from JSR, and uv run can install Python dependencies on demand via the --with option... here's a one-liner you can paste into a...

I’m learning all sorts of crappy things today: My therapist is leaving the practice she worked at, so now I’m on my 4th therapist in ~5 years. Now, I have to pay out of pocket to see them again, or pick a new one. The creator and owner of Gumroad is a DOGE-er. Please feel free to set your own hair on fire you jackass. I purchased stuff from your store, you absolute bell-end. Big Da...

Start building with Gemini 2.5 Flash Google Gemini's latest model is Gemini 2.5 Flash, available in (paid) preview as gemini-2.5-flash-preview-04-17. Building upon the popular foundation of 2.0 Flash, this new version delivers a major upgrade in reasoning capabilities, while still prioritizing speed and cost. Gemini 2.5 Flash is our first fully hybrid reasoning model, giving developers the ab...

We (Jon and Zach) teamed up with the Harris Poll to confirm this finding and extend it. We conducted a nationally representative survey of 1,006 Gen Z young adults (ages 18-27). We asked respondents to tell us, for various platforms and products, if they wished that it “was never invented.” For Netflix, Youtube, and the internet itself, relatively few said yes to that question (always under 20%...

For when you want to pray away the gay, but still want that sweet, sweet money lender income. Or you’re trying to avoid “woke” companies. What is “woke?” “Woke” is an adjective that originated in African-American English, and it has been used since the 1930s to denote an awareness of racial prejudice and discrimination (source) Oh. So it’s being ...

We're addicted to genius. We obsess over the wunderkind solving quantum equations at nine, the dropout who IPOs from his garage, the hedge fund oracle who posts a return so obscene it looks like a typo. Brilliance is seductive. But it's also unreliable. And more often

Our hypothesis is that o4-mini is a much better model, but we'll wait to hear feedback from developers. Evals only tell part of the story, and we wouldn't want to prematurely deprecate a model that developers continue to find value in. Model behavior is extremely high dimensional, and it's impossible to prevent regression on 100% use cases/prompts, especially if those prompts were originally tu...

I work for OpenAI. [...] o4-mini is actually a considerably better vision model than o3, despite the benchmarks. Similar to how o3-mini-high was a much better coding model than o1. I would recommend using o4-mini-high over o3 for any task involving vision. — James Betker, OpenAI Tags: vision-llms, generative-ai, openai, ai, llms

Though, I don’t think he took the right message from that episode…

Introducing OpenAI o3 and o4-mini OpenAI are really emphasizing tool use with these: For the first time, our reasoning models can agentically use and combine every tool within ChatGPT—this includes searching the web, analyzing uploaded files and other data with Python, reasoning deeply about visual inputs, and even generating images. Critically, these models are trained to reason about when an...

openai/codex Just released by OpenAI, a "lightweight coding agent that runs in your terminal". Looks like their version of Claude Code, though unlike Claude Code Codex is released under an open source (Apache 2) license. Here's the main prompt that runs in a loop, which starts like this: You are operating as and within the Codex CLI, a terminal-based agentic coding assistant built by OpenAI. I...

The gentle sound of the surf fills the soul. No frequency left untouched. But never colouring outside the lines; never too loud. It occupies the senses and allows detachment without dissociation. It lifts the mind just a fraction, a gliding ballroom aquaplane through thoughts – an environmentally stimulated free association. The cricket ground in north London, Lord’s, the home of cricket, is ...

Just leaving this here so I remember and don’t make a mistake in the future: Lufthansa 🤯

Popularity kills good ideas. The moment a thought gets traction, it gets watered down. The rough edges get sanded off. The disclaimers creep in. The speculative becomes declarative, the subversive becomes palatable, and the brilliant becomes content. Consensus isn't a signal of truth. It's usually just

The single most impactful investment I’ve seen AI teams make isn’t a fancy evaluation dashboard—it’s building a customized interface that lets anyone examine what their AI is actually doing. I emphasize customized because every domain has unique needs that off-the-shelf tools rarely address. When reviewing apartment leasing conversations, you need to see the full chat history and scheduling con...

I have no self control

Tomorrow we are leaving for a two weeks trip to Brazil. We will be heading to my home town and then a few days at the coast. I am looking forward to the photo opportunities, specially since when I last lived there, my view of photography was very different. A lot of rules, guidelines to take photos, edit photos, etc. Nowadays I just point the camera and press a button (or touch a screen). The f...

“Google is Winning on Every AI Front”. Let me preface this by saying that I’m sure the Gemini team is very proud of their very real success, and I’m glad for them. It’s something to be lauded — especially when the stakes around these sorts of things are so high. What Does “Winning” Even Mean? However, I don’t actually care. And by that I mean, &ld...

OpenAI introduced three new models this morning: GPT-4.1, GPT-4.1 mini and GPT-4.1 nano. These are API-only models right now, not available through the ChatGPT interface (though you can try them out in OpenAI's API playground). All three models can handle 1,047,576 tokens of input and 32,768 tokens of output, and all three have a May 31, 2024 cut-off date (their previous models were mostly Sept...

Believing AI vendors who promise you that they won't train on your data is a huge competitive advantage these days. Tags: llms, ai, generative-ai

SQLite File Format Viewer Neat browser-based visual interface for exploring the structure of a SQLite database file, built by Visal In using React and a custom parser implemented in TypeScript. Via @invisal89 Tags: typescript, react, sqlite

When OpenAI released GPT-4 back in March 2023, they kickstarted the AI revolution. The consensus online was that front-end development jobs would be totally eliminated within a year or two.Well, it’s been more than two years since then, and I thought it was worth revisiting some of those early predictions, and seeing if we can glean any insights about where things are headed.

On the morning of June 6th, 1944, Hitler was sound asleep.The Allies were landing. Tens of thousands of soldiers were pouring onto the beaches. The tide was turning, the war accelerating toward its violent, inevitable end. And the man leading the Reich was in bed, untouched.His generals knew

Understanding the new 16-bit floating point array in JavaScript

An exploration of Google's new open protocol that enables different AI systems to exchange information and collaborate

I didn’t plan to start working on a new side project and yet, here we are. Back in the summer of 2023 when I had the idea for People and Blogs and I purchased the peopleandblogs.com domain name I said to myself “This is the last domain I’m gonna buy for a side project”. Fast forward roughly a year and a half and I get an email from the always lovely Ray asking me if I was interested in becoming...

Another week has passed and it's time to share some notes. We went to see our Corgi puppy again this week. He's growing really quickly and he seems to really like cuddling. We're going to pick him up next week. We had people come to install a new garage door. Quite an expensive and big project but they really delivered. We now have a normal door to use to get in and out of the garage. The goal...

This is the 85th edition of People and Blogs, the series where I ask interesting people to talk about themselves and their blogs. Today we have Jedda and her blog, jeddacp.com To follow this series subscribe to the newsletter. A new interview will land in your inbox every Friday. Not a fan of newsletters? No problem! You can read the interviews here on the blog or you can subscribe to the RSS f...

This one’s for paid subscribers—a huge thanks to everyone making this work possible.If you’d like to join, you can sign up here! ...

Smart people love new ideas. They collect them like rare coins. They turn them over in their minds, admire their shine, categorize them, and rank them. They build entire identities on the scaffolding of intellectual frameworks. They seek the elegant theory, the model that explains the world. And

So I ran a marathon at the weekend. I was going to say “my first marathon” - which it was, my first I mean - but that makes it sound like there are going to be many, which uh I don’t intend so much. Let’s see. I expected a marathon to be hard. It was harder than I expected in a super interesting way. Goals: (a) get round and (b) hit a target time of 3:45 if poss. My time was 3 hours 40 minutes...

caffeine = hs.menubar.new() function setCaffeineDisplay(state) if state then caffeine:setTitle("☕️") caffeine:setTooltip("Device is being kept awake") else caffeine:setTitle("😴") caffeine:setTooltip("Device is allowed to sleep") end end function caffeineClicked(modifiers) if modifiers.ctrl then -- quit on ctrl-click caffeine:delete() else setC...

A day dreaming in response to a Simon Willison post on using language models to convert queries into fielded searches. In this post I extrapolate how this could result in a more private search experience and allow for an enhanced search experience for static websites.

Today, I’d like to talk about Windows. Wait, before you go, just hear me out: “What if Windows was an immutable OS?” This idea might seem familiar to you. We actually had this, for some values of ’this’, back in the aughts. We called it DeepFreeze. Of course, it was more about freezing the whole partition, and less of making the OS itself immutable, but it was on t...

I’ve spent the past year with thirty tabs open in my brain. Some of them are essays. Some are plans. Some are wounds. All of them humming. I used to think this meant I was broken — lazy, disorganized, allergic to follow-through. That’s the

I’ve been reading the crap out of the BBEdit manual. All 450 flippin' pages of it. While it’s not quite as comprehensive as the Emacs manual, it does cover all of the surface features and menus that you can encounter in BBEdit, which is a lot. There are whole sections on the different support folders that you can customize BBEdit with, and there are even references to the different ...

I open a text editor to write, but nothing comes out of it. I open my notebook to write and it’s the same. If I force myself, it will always boils down to being me writing about my life: how the day went by, what I want to do that day, etc… And while I think my life is pretty interesting, I also know that it is not to others. In that regard I am pretty average. And I am fine with that, I am not...

This past Sunday, we went to the Naturalis Biodiversity Center. It’s along the Leiden University campus. Another very nice area, right next to the train station. Super easy to get to. Here’s some photos: We basically cycled to the train station, took a train and then walked there. I love that is easy to do those things around here. Short reminder, you can always reply to any pos...

Morning rush

Even when you're just working a 9-to-5, you will find yourself in a negotiation sometimes. Not with a vendor, a client or a customer, but rather one with your manager about a promotion or a salary increase. These kinds of talks are often difficult and stressful and it's easy to get caught up in your anxiety and say things you don't want to. One of the things that kept me back in my career progr...

How scheduled developer freedom weeks can revolutionize your codebase and team morale

Verrückte Welt, ich blogge hier seit 10 Jahren und hab völlig verpennt im Januar mein Jubiläum zu feiern! Aber es gibt wirklich Wichtigeres, zumal am 1. Januar 2015 eigentlich nur der Start dieses WordPress-Blogs war. Vorher gabs hin uns wieder Beiträge auf diversen Fediverse Kanälen, das war allerdings mehr so ein sich entwickelndes Ding und […]

You know the type. MIT-trained, Substack-fluent, AI-curious. They can quote Hume, dabble in Bayesianism, and confidently wield phrases like "regression discontinuity" and "effective optimization landscape" in casual conversation. They’re very concerned about the future. Superintelligence. Existential risk. Civilizational stability. The longtermist dream: guiding the

So, I went and watched the “A Minecraft Movie”. It was… a movie. About Minecraft, sure. It was competently acted and had nice visuals and references to the game. There were cameos and in-game-references that most of the adults probably didn’t get. That’s okay, though, they weren’t critical to the story. Other than that, it was just… okay. Highly predi...

Although incredibly annoying because it hits me directly in the face while I'm working at my desk, the sun produces amazing shadows late in the evening this time of the year. If you're wondering that's a Suunto Race S Thank you for keeping RSS alive. You're awesome. Email me :: Sign my guestbook :: Support for 1$/m...

The vulnerability skips Next.js middleware security checks by adding a single HTTP header