Anthropic: A postmortem of three recent issues Anthropic had a very bad month in terms of model reliability: Between August and early September, three infrastructure bugs intermittently degraded Claude's response quality. We've now resolved these issues and want to explain what happened. [...] To state it plainly: We never reduce model quality due to demand, time of day, or server load. The pr...

In July it was the International Math Olympiad (OpenAI, Gemini), today it's the International Collegiate Programming Contest (ICPC). Once again, both OpenAI and Gemini competed with models that achieved Gold medal performance. OpenAI's Mostafa Rohaninejad: We received the problems in the exact same PDF form, and the reasoning system selected which answers to submit with no bespoke test-time ha...

Will everyone please stop taking about #Omarchy. It's too tempting!

Ich habe bestimmt schon einmal darüber geschrieben, daß ich Flipboard hauptsächlich nutze, um mein Verlangen nach Klatsch & Tratsch zu stillen. In dem Zuge habe ich sicher auch bereits das eine oder andere Mal erwähnt, wie mir die bei Regenbogenpresse und sogenannten Frauenmagazinen herrschende Horoskoppest auf den Senkel geht. Es gibt leider immer wieder Artikel, […]

Sofa Time is Best Time. Happy Seventeenth of Bleptember.

An update on our St Jude fundraising efforts, some fun hardware things, and some interesting links

Announcing the 2025 PSF Board Election Results! I'm happy to share that I've been re-elected for second term on the board of directors of the Python Software Foundation. Jannis Leidel was also re-elected and Abigail Dogbe and Sheena O’Connell will be joining the board for the first time. Tags: python, psf

Green all over. Rijswijk, NL

The same reason you would bake a batch of cookies: because you enjoy it — the process itself, but also the result. And perhaps, if you like, you share the result with others. Who is out there asking, “Should I bake a batch of cookies? How well can that act be monetized? Should I do something else instead?” Do it for the fun of the thing itself. It doesn’t have to be anymore than that. It can b...

As you probably know by now, thanks to the infinite supply of news on the subject, today new OS versions came out for Apple gadgets. Yes, it’s the one with that idiot Liquid Glass. Yes, I hate it. No, I don’t hate it because it’s different from what I was used to before. And you know why? Because I was hating the previous one as well. «Why are you still using it then?» I hear you say. Because I...

I’ve been off social media for months. No plans to return, but I miss some people who microblog on Mastodon instead of their own blogs. RSS solves most of it, but I miss interacting with them. Still, not having a timeline is so, so nice.

Aaron Moles, Adam Ganzer, Alex Kavutskiy, Andy Signore, Ariel Gardner, and 54 more, 2014, ★★★★ One of the best random laughs I’ve had in the last few years was at a “Remember when RoboCop shot that dude in the dick” t-shirt, and this fever dream of a comedy collaboration is a kind of spiritual sibling of that shirt, especially since it really goes for broke in reimagining that particu...

Rob Reiner, 2025, ★½ I remember getting MGM’s This Is Spinal Tap DVD when it was released in 2000 and being giddy at all the special features. The deleted scenes were longer than the movie, revealing that a ton of great stuff was sacrificed in the service of making the final cut an essentially perfect comedy. But alas, while watching Spinal Tap II, I shuddered to think what was on the...

I thought I had an verbal agreement with them, that “Varnish Cache” was the FOSS project and “Varnish Software” was the commercial entitity, but the current position of Varnish Software’s IP-lawyers is that nobody can use “Varnish Cache” in any context, without their explicit permission. [...] We have tried to negotiatiate with Varnish Software for many months about this issue, but their IP-Law...

Code yellow for wind all day today. The trees are having a hard time keeping up.

GPT‑5-Codex and upgrades to Codex OpenAI half-released a new model today: GPT‑5-Codex, a fine-tuned GPT-5 variant explicitly designed for their various AI-assisted programming tools. Update: OpenAI call it a "version of GPT-5", they don't explicitly describe it as a fine-tuned model. Calling it a fine-tune was my mistake here. I say half-released because it's not yet available via their API, b...

Oh nice! iOS 18.7 is out!! 😉

Danish ass-clown, and Minister of Justice, Peter Hummelgarrd is quoted as saying: “We must break with the totally erroneous perception that it is everyone’s civil liberty to communicate on encrypted messaging services.” Which, is of course, comically absurd. If the constitutions and other laws and mechanisms around the world didn’t already explicitly guard personal priv...

Manchmal kommen Dinge einfach zusammen, zum Beispiel einen Kurzurlaub in der Rhön mit einem Bergtrail Marathon zu verbinden. Dazu gibts allerdings eine Vorgeschichte: Auf den BECK HochRhön-BergTrail aufmerksam geworden bin ich durch den guten Martin. Durch Zufall nach einer lustigen Kurzkommentardiskussion über coole und doofe Läufe. Der doofe Lauf muss hier nicht erwähnt werden, aber […]

In no particular order, following no particular schedule. Just a few things that I recently liked and disliked. Let’s go! Liked We shot a YouTube video about film formats on 35mm film. Incredible production, all shot on analogue film. This 22-minutes video must have been silly expensive! I remember buying films for my first cameras 25 years ago and it was so cheap. Nowadays, a single Ko...

Here's an interesting example of models incrementally improving over time: I am finding that today's leading models are competent at writing prompts for themselves and each other. A year ago I was quite skeptical of the pattern where models are used to help build prompts. Prompt engineering was still a young enough discipline that I did not expect the models to have enough training data to be a...

I suppose I’ll write about how the day went, while I wait for my Magdeburg-Halle train to depart. My good friend from Berlin and I decided to meet up today and wander around the Zitadel Spandau and its surroundings. The forecasters had promised so-so weather, but Spandau gave us a rather warm welcome: the sun even peeked out from time to time. The sky, though cloudy in places, wasn’t the least ...

Have you ever searched for “AI chat” in the Mac App Store? I have. It’s like strolling through one of those counterfeit, replica markets where all the goods look legit at first glance. But then when you look closer, you realize something is off. For the query “AI chat”, there are so many ChatGPT-like app icons the results are comical. Take a look at these: ...

Two minutes after, rain poured. Den Haag, NL

Added to the film diary:NashvilleRobert Altman, 1975, ★★★★ Tagged: September 2025 Reply via email

Matt Creed, 2024, ★★ A pretty surface-level look at abstract painter Mary Heilmann, generally more interested in how many cool artists she hung out with and galleries she worked with than in what motivated her actual work. Tagged: September 2025, film diary, art, film, review, Matt Creed Reply via email

gpt-5 and gpt-5-mini rate limit updates OpenAI have increased the rate limits for their two main GPT-5 models. These look significant: gpt-5 Tier 1: 30K → 500K TPM (1.5M batch) Tier 2: 450K → 1M (3M batch) Tier 3: 800K → 2M Tier 4: 2M → 4M gpt-5-mini Tier 1: 200K → 500K (5M batch) GPT-5 rate limits here show tier 5 stays at 40M tokens per minute. The GPT-5 mini rate limits for tiers 2 throug...

The trick with Claude Code is to give it large, but not too large, extremely well defined problems. (If the problems are too large then you are now vibe coding… which (a) frequently goes wrong, and (b) is a one-way street: once vibes enter your app, you end up with tangled, write-only code which functions perfectly but can no longer be edited by humans. Great for prototyping, bad for foundation...

Morning mist, last Saturday.

Writing code with Claude Code doesn’t feel the same as any other way of writing code. Quick background: it’s an AI tool that you install and run in your terminal in a code repository. It’s a little like a chat interface on the command line, but mainly you type what you want, and then Claude churns away for a few minutes, looking up docs on the web, checking through your files, making a to-do l...

Testing. 🪛🛠️

Had to turn the heating on M’s bedroom just now. This marks the beginning of the heating season. Last year it was in 11/09

Sometimes I post not because I have something to get out of my system, but because I have something I want to share. This is one of those occasions. First, Cody has a new pop-up newsletter going called “Trespassing Through Montana”. I’m a big fan of what he does, and I also enjoy helping people connect with each other online, so I’m not gonna pass on this opportunity to suggest you to sign up f...

Pedroblog is back to Micro.blog. I went elsewhere for a while. I tried other services, they are fine. But they don’t come close to what Micro.blog offer. Yes, I wanted better URL control. But I take what I can get here and I prefer that than breaking URLs. 😁 I’m back!

This is the 107th edition of People and Blogs, the series where I ask interesting people to talk about themselves and their blogs. Today we have Jack Baty and his blog, baty.net 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...

London Transport Museum Depot Open Days I just found out about this (thanks, ChatGPT) and I'm heart-broken to learn that I'm in London a week too early! If you are in London next week (Thursday 18th through Sunday 21st 2025) you should definitely know about it: The Museum Depot in Acton is our working museum store, and a treasure trove of over 320,000 objects. Three times a year, we throw open...

Claude Memory: A Different Philosophy Shlok Khemani has been doing excellent work reverse-engineering LLM systems and documenting his discoveries. Last week he wrote about ChatGPT memory. This week it's Claude. Claude's memory system has two fundamental characteristics. First, it starts every conversation with a blank slate, without any preloaded user profiles or conversation history. Memory o...

Qwen3-Next-80B-A3B Qwen announced two new models via their Twitter account (and here's their blog): Qwen3-Next-80B-A3B-Instruct and Qwen3-Next-80B-A3B-Thinking. They make some big claims on performance: Qwen3-Next-80B-A3B-Instruct approaches our 235B flagship. Qwen3-Next-80B-A3B-Thinking outperforms Gemini-2.5-Flash-Thinking. The name "80B-A3B" indicates 80 billion parameters of which only ...

I’m a huge fan of ZSA. Their Voyager keyboard changed the way how I work and massively increased my typing speed, accuracy and comfort. I published my thoughts about it in the “A month with the ZSA Voyager split keyboard” some time ago. ZSA is a bunch of hard-working folks who genuinely care, which is a rare thing nowadays. The moment they dropped the news about the Navigator,...

Sigh. What should happen if I click this link? A picture of a marking email campaign unsubscribe page that says 'Your unsubscribe tag is working' and 'Your unsubscribe tag will be converted to a real unsubscribe link when you send out your campaign.' @layer post { .gallery { align-content: space-evenly; background-color: var(--theme-color-alt-b...

Like any other decent German on the nationwide warning systems test day, I’m filling out the survey on the official website about what I thought of the performance and what could be improved. It contains the question: “Wovon waren Sie in der Vergangenheit schon einmal unmittelbar selbst betroffen?”, which you could translate as “what from this list have you personally experienced?” And for me, ...

Defeating Nondeterminism in LLM Inference A very common question I see about LLMs concerns why they can't be made to deliver the same response to the same prompt by setting a fixed random number seed. Like many others I had been lead to believe this was due to the non-associative nature of floating point arithmetic, where (a + b) + c ≠ a + (b + c), combining with unpredictable calculation order...

In Python 3.14, I have implemented several changes to fix thread safety of asyncio and enable it to scale effectively on the free-threaded build of CPython. It is now implemented using lock-free data structures and per-thread state, allowing for highly efficient task management and execution across multiple threads. In the general case of multiple event loops running in parallel, there is no lo...

Reflection on Dave Winer's recent post "It's Really Simple"

Claude API: Web fetch tool New in the Claude API: if you pass the web-fetch-2025-09-10 beta header you can add {"type": "web_fetch_20250910", "name": "web_fetch", "max_uses": 5} to your "tools" list and Claude will gain the ability to fetch content from URLs as part of responding to your prompt. It extracts the "full text content" from the URL, and extracts text content from PDFs as well. What...

Stumbled on this post a moment ago—on a lovely colourful blog, I might add—and I have thoughts on the subject: I'm low-key mad about this! So we just can't use em dashes anymore? We let the machines take them from us?? And we didn't even put up a fight or anything??? Although I'm frustrated, I promise from now on to no longer use em dashes and keep my heavy italics usage to a minimum as well....

I Replaced Animal Crossing's Dialogue with a Live LLM by Hacking GameCube Memory Brilliant retro-gaming project by Josh Fonseca, who figured out how to run 2002 Game Cube Animal Crossing in the Dolphin Emulator such that dialog with the characters was instead generated by an LLM. The key trick was running Python code that scanned the Game Cube memory every 10th of a second looking for inst...

Expanded site, new design, same me I started redesigning this site in January of 2020. Remember January of 2020? We didn’t know we were living in the Before Times. There were still a few people in the White House who weren’t Fox News hosts or meme coin shills or raw milk evangelists. Our tech bro billionaires hadn’t yet entered the endgame of their persistent campaign to annihilate what...

Two online articles discussing application and challenges in using large language models for generative work (e.g. generating software source code). They are written in clear non technical language.

There has never been a successful, widespread malware attack against iPhone. The only system-level iOS attacks we observe in the wild come from mercenary spyware, which is vastly more complex than regular cybercriminal activity and consumer malware. Mercenary spyware is historically associated with state actors and uses exploit chains that cost millions of dollars to target a very small number ...

Today on the Anthropic blog: Claude can now create and edit files: Claude can now create and edit Excel spreadsheets, documents, PowerPoint slide decks, and PDFs directly in Claude.ai and the desktop app. [...] File creation is now available as a preview for Max, Team, and Enterprise plan users. Pro users will get access in the coming weeks. Then right at the very end of their post: This fea...

The 2025 PSF Board Election is Open! The Python Software Foundation's annual board member election is taking place right now, with votes (from previously affirmed voting members) accepted from September 2nd, 2:00 pm UTC through Tuesday, September 16th, 2:00 pm UTC. I've served on the board since 2022 and I'm running for a second term. Here's the opening section of my nomination statement. Hi, ...

I ran Claude in a loop for three months, and it created a genz programming language called cursed Geoffrey Huntley vibe-coded an entirely new programming language using Claude: The programming language is called "cursed". It's cursed in its lexical structure, it's cursed in how it was built, it's cursed that this is possible, it's cursed in how cheap this was, and it's cursed through how many ...

Apollo Global Management's "Chief Economist" Dr. Torsten Sløk released this interesting chart which appears to show a slowdown in AI adoption rates among large (>250 employees) companies: Here's the full description that accompanied the chart: The US Census Bureau conducts a biweekly survey of 1.2 million firms, and one question is whether a business has used AI tools such as machine learn...

Anthropic status: Model output quality Anthropic previously reported model serving bugs that affected Claude Opus 4 and 4.1 for 56.5 hours. They've now fixed additional bugs affecting "a small percentage" of Sonnet 4 requests for almost a month, plus a less long-lived Haiku 3.5 issue: Resolved issue 1 - A small percentage of Claude Sonnet 4 requests experienced degraded output quality due to a...

Having worked inside AWS I can tell you one big reason [that they don't describe their internals] is the attitude/fear that anything we put in out public docs may end up getting relied on by customers. If customers rely on the implementation to work in a specific way, then changing that detail requires a LOT more work to prevent breaking customer's workloads. If it is even possible at that poin...

Load Llama-3.2 WebGPU in your browser from a local folder Inspired by a comment on Hacker News I decided to see if it was possible to modify the transformers.js-examples/tree/main/llama-3.2-webgpu Llama 3.2 chat demo (online here, I wrote about it last November) to add an option to open a local model file directly from a folder on disk, rather than waiting for it to download over the network. I...

I really enjoyed watching Python: The Documentary (from CultRepo, formerly Honeypot, same makers as the TypeScript documentary). Personally, I don’t write much Python and am not involved in the broader Python community. That said, I love how this documentary covers a lot of the human problems in tech and not just the technical history of Python as language. For example: How do you handle succe...

I recently spoke with the CTO of a popular AI note-taking app who told me something surprising: they spend twice as much on vector search as they do on OpenAI API calls. Think about that for a second. Running the retrieval layer costs them more than paying for the LLM itself. — James Luan, Engineering architect of Milvus Tags: vector-search, embeddings

A little while ago, I was trying to animate an element’s background color, so that it cycled through the rainbow. Seems easy, but it turns out, browsers have a surprisingly big limitation when it comes to color processing! In this tutorial, we’ll dig into the issue, and I’ll share a couple of strategies you can use to work around this limitation.

with Flag of Democracy /> Unwound A quick reminder to myself that in the future I really should swap out my 15dB earplug filters for the 25dB ones (or maybe even the solid ones) if I’m going to be right next to the speakers. My left ear was not the same after this show, and I hope it’s not permanent. That said, of all the dozens of shows I’ve attended in this room over the year...

Is the LLM response wrong, or have you just failed to iterate it? More from Mike Caulfield (see also the SIFT method). He starts with a fantastic example of Google's AI mode usually correctly handling a common piece of misinformation but occasionally falling for it (the curse of non-deterministic systems), then shows an example if what he calls a "sorting prompt" as a follow-up: What is the ev...

I agree with the intellectual substance of virtually every common critique of AI. And it's very clear that turning those critiques into a competition about who can frame them in the most scathing way online has done zero to slow down adoption, even if much of that is due to default bundling. At what point are folks going to try literally any other tactic than condescending rants? Does it matter...

The SIFT method The SIFT method is "an evaluation strategy developed by digital literacy expert, Mike Caulfield, to help determine whether online content can be trusted for credible or reliable sources of information." This looks extremely useful as a framework for helping people more effectively consume information online (increasingly gathered with the help of LLMs). Stop. "Be aware of your ...

When I wrote about how good ChatGPT with GPT-5 is at search yesterday I nearly added a note about how comparatively disappointing Google's efforts around this are. I'm glad I left that out, because it turns out Google's new "AI mode" is genuinely really good! It feels very similar to GPT-5 search but returns results much faster. www.google.com/ai (not available in the EU, as I found out this m...

Added to the music library:Traces of the WindPetre Inspirescu, 2025 Tagged: September 2025 Reply via email

with Ghoul, No Mas, and Spiter /> Crypta First time in a long time I’ve come home from a show covered in fake blood! I knew Ghoul’s schtick borrowed liberally from Gwar’s, but I didn’t realize just how far they took it until one of their elaborately costumed characters came out with hoses attached to himself. Sure enough, his face was soon ripped off to get the fluids flowing. ...

Ever wished your AI agent would slow down and think things through? This MCP server does exactly that

"Don't use chatbots as search engines" was great advice for several years... until it wasn't. I wrote about how good OpenAI's o3 was at using its Bing-backed search tool back in April. GPT-5 feels even better. I've started calling it my Research Goblin. I can assign a task to it, no matter how trivial or complex, and it will do an often unreasonable amount of work to search the internet and fig...

I am once again shocked at how much better image retrieval performance you can get if you embed highly opinionated summaries of an image, a summary that came out of a visual language model, than using CLIP embeddings themselves. If you tell the LLM that the summary is going to be embedded and used to do search downstream. I had one system go from 28% recall at 5 using CLIP to 75% recall at 5 us...

While clicking through my RSS feeds, I found my way to Jay’s post titled “Do blogs need to be so lonely?”. It’s an interesting post, especially interesting for me since I love blogs. Betteridge's law of headlines tells us that the answer to the question Jay is posing is “no”, but I think it’s worth expanding on why I think that’s not the case. Do blogs, like this one I’m writing in now, need t...

Back in March 2024, The Browser Company—a name I still find hilarious, all these years later—published a website called “We Might Not Make It”. They described it as: A limited series that breaks down the top 5 reasons our company might not make it to next year. (And why we think we can.) The plan was to release a 5-part video series. Quite ironically, considering the name, they stopped at vid...

This is the 106th edition of People and Blogs, the series where I ask interesting people to talk about themselves and their blogs. Today we have Louie Mantia and his blog, lmnt.me 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 R...

Antenna is a feed orient content management tool. It can use to build a and run a blog. What follows are the steps needed to create a simple blog using only Antenna application, Markdown and the Antenna YAML configuration files. The first thing we need is a directory to hold our website. That can be done from a terminal on Linux, macOS or Windows using the following command. ~~~shell mkdir my...

I’m the tube a bunch right now (cooking something new and borrowing desks, thanks!) and one of the frustrating bits of the commute is going street level to underground. Escalators are slooooow. (Whereas being static on trains is fine as I can tap blog posts with my thumbs while standing/sitting. Evidence A: you’re reading it.) So I wonder if there’s a radically quicker way to descend. Falling ...

(I present to you my stream of consciousness on the topic of casing as it applies to the web platform.) I’m reading about the new command and commandfor attributes — which I’m super excited about, declarative behavior invocation in HTML? YES PLEASE!! — and one thing that strikes me is the casing in these APIs. For example, the command attribute has a variety of values in HTML which correspond t...

A better Action Text.

Setting the box-sizing model to border-box is one of the few remaining CSS ‘resets’ used across most projects. But there are two common approaches, and the more popular choice will cause more problems than it solves. At the most basic, a modern CSS ‘reset’ will often start with one of the following: /* set it everywhere (good!) */ * { box-sizing: border-box; } /* set on root, then inherit (bad...

Contrary to what I had planned, I didn’t post weekly updates on my challenge throughout August. No particular reason why, I was just busy doing various other things and posting updates on the hikes was low on my list of priorities. But, I am happy to report that I have successfully ended the month at 5033 meters of elevation gained, which is easily over my target goal of 4810! Congratulations ...

Even if you’ve been doing JavaScript for a while, you might be surprised to learn that setTimeout(0) is not really setTimeout(0). Instead, it could run 4 milliseconds later: Nearly a decade ago when I was on the Microsoft Edge team, it was explained to me that browsers did this to avoid “abuse.” I.e. there are […]