llm-gguf 0.2, now with embeddings This new release of my llm-gguf plugin - which provides support for locally hosted GGUF LLMs - adds a new feature: it now supports embedding models distributed as GGUFs as well. This means you can use models like the bafflingly small (30.8MB in its smallest quantization) mxbai-embed-xsmall-v1 with LLM like this: llm install llm-gguf llm gguf download-embed-mode...

A warning about tiktoken, BPE, and OpenAI models Tom MacWright warns that OpenAI's tiktoken Python library has a surprising performance profile: it's superlinear with the length of input, meaning someone could potentially denial-of-service you by sending you a 100,000 character string if you're passing that directly to tiktoken.encode(). There's an open issue about this (now over a year old), s...

How some of the world's most brilliant computer scientists got password policies so wrong Stuart Schechter blames Robert Morris and Ken Thompson for the dire state of passwords today: The story of why password rules were recommended and enforced without scientific evidence since their invention in 1979 is a story of brilliant people, at the very top of their field, whose well-intentioned ...

TextSynth Server I'd missed this: Fabrice Bellard (yes, that Fabrice Bellard) has a project called TextSynth Server which he describes like this: ts_server is a web server proposing a REST API to large language models. They can be used for example for text completion, question answering, classification, chat, translation, image generation, ... It has the following characteristics: All is incl...

When we started working on what became NotebookLM in the summer of 2022, we could fit about 1,500 words in the context window. Now we can fit up to 1.5 million words. (And using various other tricks, effectively fit 25 million words.) The emergence of long context models is, I believe, the single most unappreciated AI development of the past two years, at least among the general public. It radi...

The world is crumbling in real time—I’m not here to argue that point. We’ve got rising seas swallowing cities, political chaos run by arsonist clowns with their pants on fire trying to set everything else alight, inequality so vast it feels cosmic, wars driven

When I first saw this headline from Streetsblog — I Tried to Hate-Ride a Waymo. Turns Out, I Loved It — I was prepared to hate-read it. Normally I wouldn’t bother hate-reading something, but despite my initial reaction to the headline, I do trust Streetsblog, so I thought I’d try to set aside my preconceptions and see what this was about. Then I checked the byline and I saw it was written by An...

I'm sure there are truly pathological cases of ADHD out there, and maybe taking amphetamines really is a magic pill for some folks. But there clearly is also an entire cottage industry cropping up around convincing perfectly normal people that they suffer from ADHD, and that this explains many unwanted aspects of the human condition.Take this thread I stumbled across on X today by an &qu...

Small update for gradient.style, the provided CSS for your creation is now custom properties and not classes. Check it out‽

When my site analytics reported a large number of inbound traffic from Hacker News clones, I got curious and started clicking links.[1] I like to visit links. I am connoisseur of it. I love the feeling of landing on something you didn’t expect — which is precisely what happened. I landed on a site that had one of those Cloudflare-esque “prove you're human” captchas. That didn’t seem partic...

Foursquare Open Source Places: A new foundational dataset for the geospatial community I did not expect this! [...] we are announcing today the general availability of a foundational open data set, Foursquare Open Source Places ("FSQ OS Places"). This base layer of 100mm+ global places of interest ("POI") includes 22 core attributes (see schema here) that will be updated monthly and available ...

Bluesky WebSocket Firehose Very quick (10 seconds of Claude hacking) prototype of a web page that attaches to the public Bluesky WebSocket firehose and displays the results directly in your browser. Here's the code - there's very little to it, it's basically opening a connection to wss://jetstream2.us-east.bsky.network/subscribe?wantedCollections=app.bsky.feed.post and logging out the results t...

When I shared my “Observation: Inherited Visibility Transition” post, I mentioned that there was a CSS bug I encountered that I wanted to research and maybe fill later. Well. I thought it would be a quick thing, making into a quick post. Apparently, not!

OpenStreetMap vector tiles demo Long-time OpenStreetMap developer Paul Norman has been working on adding vector tile support to OpenStreetMap for quite a while. Paul recently announced that vector.openstreetmap.org is now serving vector tiles (in Mapbox Vector Tiles (MVT) format) - here's his interactive demo for seeing what they look like. Via Mark Litwintschik Tags: gis, openstreet...

Using uv with PyTorch PyTorch is a notoriously tricky piece of Python software to install, due to the need to provide separate wheels for different combinations of Python version and GPU accelerator (e.g. different CUDA versions). uv now has dedicated documentation for PyTorch which I'm finding really useful - it clearly explains the challenge and then shows exactly how to configure a pyproject...

Understanding the BM25 full text search algorithm Evan Schwartz provides a deep dive explanation of how the classic BM25 search relevance scoring function works, including a very useful breakdown of the mathematics it uses. Via lobste.rs Tags: search, algorithms

I participated in an Ars Live conversation with Benj Edwards of Ars Technica today, talking about that wild period of LLM history last year when Microsoft launched Bing Chat and it instantly started misbehaving, gaslighting and defaming people. Here's the video of our conversation. I ran the video through MacWhisper, extracted a transcript and used Claude to identify relevant articles I shoul...

The moment we started numbering world wars like entries in a blockbuster movie franchise, we set ourselves up for failure. The war of 1914 was called The Great War at the time. But when we renamed it “World War I,” it was both a historical label and an

Preview: Gemini API Additional Terms of Service Google sent out an email last week linking to this preview of upcoming changes to the Gemini API terms. Key paragraph from that email: To maintain a safe and responsible environment for all users, we're enhancing our abuse monitoring practices for Google AI Studio and Gemini API. Starting December 13, 2024, Gemini API will log prompts and respons...

I've known Tobi for over twenty years now. Right from the earliest days of Ruby on Rails, when he was building Snowdevil, which eventually became Shopify, to sell snowboards online. Here's his first commit to Rails from 2004, which improved the ergonomics of controller testing. Just one out of the 131 commits he made to the framework from 2004-2010 -- a record still good enough to be...

Security means securing people where they are William Woodruff is an Engineering Director at Trail of Bits who worked on the recent PyPI digital attestations project. That feature is based around open standards but launched with an implementation against GitHub, which resulted in push back (and even some conspiracy theories) that PyPI were deliberately favoring GitHub over other platforms. Will...

Six years ago the thought of standing on a stage to give a talk made me physically ill. Six years later and 30 times on stage giving a talk, it still actually does make me physically ill but not to such a severe degree that it did then. One of my friends is back in school and had to give a presentation to her professors, so she asked me for some tips. Also, in case anyone needs proof that you c...

Writing one post a day is hard! I had an idea for an observation but did not have an opportunity to write it up properly. Come on, me, these should not take that long! That means I am falling back to the idea I reserved for cases like this one: where I cannot quickly come up with a post on the spot. That is: share just a few recent bookmarks!

Manage yarn and pnpm versions consistently across your team

In 1763, a revolutionary paper on human thinking was published in the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society. The author, Thomas Bayes, had died two years earlier, never knowing his work would fundamentally change how we reason about uncertainty. The paper, edited and submitted by his friend Richard Price, contained

I think it’s endearing when people name their blog. I’m not talking about branding, like people do with professional blogs or newsletters. I’m talking about personal blogs that people name out of care and idiosyncrasy. It’s endearing, because you brand things you own, you name things you cherish. We didn’t brand our family cat. And we don’t call him “The Nielsen’s cat” (though that’s probably w...

Pixtral Large New today from Mistral: Today we announce Pixtral Large, a 124B open-weights multimodal model built on top of Mistral Large 2. Pixtral Large is the second model in our multimodal family and demonstrates frontier-level image understanding. The weights are out on Hugging Face (over 200GB to download, and you'll need a hefty GPU rig to run them). The license is free for academic re...

Qwen: Extending the Context Length to 1M Tokens The new Qwen2.5-Turbo boasts a million token context window (up from 128,000 for Qwen 2.5) and faster performance: Using sparse attention mechanisms, we successfully reduced the time to first token for processing a context of 1M tokens from 4.9 minutes to 68 seconds, achieving a 4.3x speedup. The benchmarks they've published look impressive, inc...

The main innovation here is just using more data. Specifically, Qwen2.5 Coder is a continuation of an earlier Qwen 2.5 model. The original Qwen 2.5 model was trained on 18 trillion tokens spread across a variety of languages and tasks (e.g, writing, programming, question answering). Qwen 2.5-Coder sees them train this model on an additional 5.5 trillion tokens of data. This means Qwen has been ...

Today, we’re talking about Gebhard Leberecht von Blücher—the Prussian general who helped take down Napoleon.

llm-gemini 0.4 New release of my llm-gemini plugin, adding support for asynchronous models (see LLM 0.18), plus the new gemini-exp-1114 model (currently at the top of the Chatbot Arena) and a -o json_object 1 option to force JSON output. I also released llm-claude-3 0.9 which adds asynchronous support for the Claude family of models. Tags: llm, plugins, ai, llms, async, python, generative...

I often see complaints about people hyping up new web platform features while they’re not yet ready for wide use. I also was on the receiving end of similar complaints. When I publish my articles, I always have plenty of things in mind, not necessarily a set of rules, but rather guidelines and directions that I follow. In this post, I cover some of them.

The more I play with it, the more convinced I am that anchor positioning is going to unlock some surprising new layouts. Many of the initial examples and use cases for anchor positioning are simplifying existing possibilities, and – don’t misunderstand me – anchor positioning will simplify how dropdown menus are implemented significantly. But that’s just the start. I first got a glimpse at the ...

Weekly summary of new Baseline items in BCD data

The act of watching changes what’s being observed. In physics, this is known as the Observer Effect. Electrons, photons—they behave differently when under our gaze, as if they’re aware of the scrutiny. It's a principle that applies pretty consistently across the board.

LLM 0.18 New release of LLM. The big new feature is asynchronous model support - you can now use supported models in async Python code like this: import llm model = llm.get_async_model("gpt-4o") async for chunk in model.prompt( "Five surprising names for a pet pelican" ): print(chunk, end="", flush=True) Also new in this release: support for sending audio attachments to OpenAI's gpt-4...

Slides + recording of the talk “Supercharge Web UX with View Transitions” I gave at React Brussels 2024

Super exciting set of games here! Been really fun going through each with the fam. Windblown may be a bit violent, but we've been playing Dead Cells, Hades II and Cult of the Lamb… so we're ok with it when it's in good taste. Oddada # Get this game and get a bunch of cool instruments and effects that you use in a 6 part level to...

Today, I want to talk about two things, in the context of writing articles and sharing knowledge in general. One of them we don’t need to be afraid of, and another we need to do as often as possible. The first one is repetition. The second one — attribution. It could seem like an odd pair, but I’ll try to explain how they are connected.

How to handle unique values and key-value pairs properly without type coercion and performance issues

The Open Source Pledge aims to address open source sustainability challenges by encouraging companies to pay $2,000 per developer per year

I interviewed Philip James about Civic Band, his "slowly growing collection of databases of the minutes from civic governments". Philip demonstrated the site and talked through his pipeline for scraping and indexing meeting minutes from many different local government authorities around the USA. We recorded this conversation as part of yesterday's Datasette Public Office Hours session. ...

Social media timelines are designed to be an endless stream of, well, mostly garbage these days. Platforms are doing their absolute best (worst?) to exploit every single one of our psychological weaknesses to keep us hooked on their stupid platforms. And that’s precisely why I love, LOVE, RSS. RSS was and still is an incredible invention, one that I strongly believe is gonna be the antidote to ...

Sure is Tech Stuff What I Wish Someone Told Me About Postgres If you’re just starting with Postgres, make sure to not repeat past mistakes. No GPS required: our app can now locate underground trains Yes! “Our offline motion detection shows where you are between stations, and

NuExtract 1.5 Structured extraction - where an LLM helps turn unstructured text (or image content) into structured data - remains one of the most directly useful applications of LLMs. NuExtract is a family of small models directly trained for this purpose (though text only at the moment) and released under the MIT license. It comes in a variety of shapes and sizes: NuExtract-v1.5 is a 3.8B par...

When I created this blog, I implemented the same thing I did on my main site: a custom element that links to the Mastodon post where I shared the link to the post, and which also shows the number of replies, favorites, and boosts. I saw others implement this as well. Now, people are also adding the same for reactions on bluesky as well. I won’t do it.

How to handle exact decimal calculations in JavaScript when floating-point precision isn't good enough

Two related headlines caught my attention the other day: “Bluesky crosses the 15 million user mark” and “Threads grew by a Bluesky this month”. This was obviously a fun way to emphasise the fact that Bluesky has got to 15 million users—congrats to them, that would place them just above Rwanda and behind South Sudan if they were a country—and also to show that they’re still very small compared t...

Why do we write? We write, in part, because our own reading was given as a gift to us and we want to extend that same magic we received to others. Here’s Mandy Brown (and my notes) in a recent article: The more compelling and interesting reason that most writers seek out readers is, I think, less utilitarian: we receive our writing as a gift, and so it must be given in turn. We write because s...

Voting opens for Oxford Word of the Year 2024 One of the options is slop! slop (n.): Art, writing, or other content generated using artificial intelligence, shared and distributed online in an indiscriminate or intrusive way, and characterized as being of low quality, inauthentic, or inaccurate. Via @dloss Tags: slop, ethics, generative-ai, ai, llms

Deep dive into JavaScript Symbols - what they are, why they matter, and how to use them effectively

This is the 64th edition of People and Blogs, the series where I ask interesting people to talk about themselves and their blogs. Today we have Sara Jakša and her blog, sarajaksa.eu 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...

Recraft V3 Recraft are a generative AI design tool startup based out of London who released their v3 model a few weeks ago. It's currently sat at the top of the Artificial Analysis Image Arena Leaderboard, beating Midjourney and Flux 1.1 pro. The thing that impressed me is that it can generate both raster and vector graphics... and the vector graphics can be exported as SVG! Here's what I got f...

We have witnessed a multi-generational decline in reading comprehension. We read less, retain less of what we read, and struggle to engage in critical analysis. And if this trend continues, we risk undermining the very foundations of our society.

Stoicism has pulled off the comeback of the ages, appearing everywhere from Silicon Valley boardrooms to self-help bestsellers.Modern interpretations are cherry-picking Stoic practices, presenting them as tools for productivity, emotional control, and personal achievement - a kind of ancient life hack for the ambitious modern man.But the populist

After I published my “My Mastodon Starter Pack” post, it got boosted a bunch in Mastodon. This led to more people trying to read it, and some — not successfully. All because in this not very polished blog I used a lot of a bit too-modern CSS, for example, native CSS nesting. And — this resulted in the layout breaking quite substantially.

How fake job postings became a systemic problem in tech recruiting

OpenAI Public Bug Bounty Reading this investigation of the security boundaries of OpenAI's Code Interpreter environment helped me realize that the rules for OpenAI's public bug bounty inadvertently double as the missing details for a whole bunch of different aspects of their platform. This description of Code Interpreter is significantly more useful than their official documentation! Code exec...

Anthropic declined to comment, but referred Bloomberg News to a five-hour podcast featuring Chief Executive Officer Dario Amodei that was released Monday. "People call them scaling laws. That's a misnomer," he said on the podcast. "They're not laws of the universe. They're empirical regularities. I am going to bet in favor of them continuing, but I'm not certain of that." [...] An Anthropic spo...

PyPI now supports digital attestations Dustin Ingram: PyPI package maintainers can now publish signed digital attestations when publishing, in order to further increase trust in the supply-chain security of their projects. Additionally, a new API is available for consumers and installers to verify published attestations. This has been in the works for a while, and is another component of PyPI...

QuickTime video script to capture frames and bounding boxes An update to an older TIL. I'm working on the write-up for my DjangoCon US talk on plugins and I found myself wanting to capture individual frames from the video in two formats: a full frame capture, and another that captured just the portion of the screen shared from my laptop. I have a script for the former, so I got Claude to update...

Been a while since I posted one of these. 247 days to be precise. That’s an eternity. What was I even doing 247 days ago? I can’t say. Life’s been a messy blur in the past few months for a variety of reasons. I might write about them at some point. Anyway, I collected a bunch of stuff I wanted to share so let’s do that. Sharing is caring Here’s a completely wacky mix of links in no particular ...

Make it happen!You hear it a lot. And it's generally good advice, of course. At least the 'happen' part.You definitely want things to happen. But often times, it's the 'make' part that gets confused for progress.You can push a ball uphill, but should you? Not only does it take a ton of effort, you can't really see what's over the edge until you get to the top ...

We live in an era of instant gratification. We’re sold easy answers and five-step solutions to life’s problems. The idea of “hustle” is glorified, but when it comes down to the real work—the gritty, painful, often lonely path to growth—so

Releasing the largest multilingual open pretraining dataset Common Corpus is a new "open and permissible licensed text dataset, comprising over 2 trillion tokens (2,003,039,184,047 tokens)" released by French AI Lab PleIAs. This appears to be the largest available corpus of openly licensed training data: 926,541,096,243 tokens of public domain books, newspapers, and Wikisource content 387,965,...

import "https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/npm/[email protected]/baseline-status.min.js"; 3 free, semi-fancy, dialog examples for you and 1 dialog that can open and close without JS. They use CSS transitions for interruptible user experience and Open Props for the values. Push it real good # Scale back the page, dim the background ...

This is a very short post about a thing that I have wanted to share for quite a while. I am pretty certain that someone already wrote about this at some point, but hey. There is so much content everywhere that it might be useful to repeat stuff, making it more likely someone will stumble upon a solution to their problem.

Scrum is failing engineering teams and what it's actually costing us

How to Destroy a Generation? Make Them Think the World Runs on Their Feelings—and Then Use Those Feelings Against Them If you wanted to dismantle an entire generation from the inside out, it wouldn’t take much. Forget bombs or economic sabotage—too messy, too obvious.

UI Workshop Sprinkle scroll driven animations, view transitions, popovers and container queries onto an ecommerce home page with me! Video · Code

Jan Miksovsky has an absolutely tremendous article about how he cobbled together some disparate pieces of hardware and software in order to help improve the quality of life of his mother who has amnesia. Everything about this article illustrates what got me into making websites. Everything about this article is what fuels my curiosity and interest in continuing to make boring little websites. B...

I haven't felt any urge to tinker with my Linux setup in months. This after spending much of the spring and into summer furiously and obsessively trying every PC out there to find the perfect replacement for the Mac, diving deep with Ubuntu, and codifying my findings in the Omakub project. But now it's done, and I'm left enjoying the Apple-free spoils of a new, better place witho...

This tutorial exists because of a particular quirk of mine: I love to write tutorials about things as I learn them. This is the backstory of TRPL, of which an ancient draft was "Rust for Rubyists." You only get to look at a problem as a beginner once, and so I think writing this stuff down is interesting. It also helps me clarify what I'm learning to myself. — Steve Klabnik, Steve's Jujut...

Ollama: Llama 3.2 Vision Ollama released version 0.4 last week with support for Meta's first Llama vision model, Llama 3.2. If you have Ollama installed you can fetch the 11B model (7.9 GB) like this: ollama pull llama3.2-vision Or the larger 90B model (55GB download, likely needs ~88GB of RAM) like this: ollama pull llama3.2-vision:90b I was delighted to learn that Sukhbinder Singh had alrea...

I have a rule: I don’t start anything I’m not willing to commit five years of my life to. No projects I’m going to get bored with after six months, no half-hearted schemes for a quick cash grab. If I can’t see

django-plugin-django-debug-toolbar Tom Viner built a plugin for my DJP Django plugin system that configures the excellent django-debug-toolbar debugging tool. You can see everything it sets up for you in this Python code: it configures installed apps, URL patterns and middleware and sets the INTERNAL_IPS and DEBUG settings. Here are Tom's running notes as he created the plugin. Via @tomvin...

Do not use `transition: all` in CSS. Just don’t. I won’t go into all the details today about why it’s bad, but I will share one of the many issues it can cause. Let’s quickly focus on its interaction with the `visibility` property, specifically how transitions work with its inheritance.

With 400 votes, rebeccapurple is the community chosen logo color for CSS! This puts a bow on the concept we've been working on with the community 💜 article > p > img { border-radius: 0; } New repo # Checkout the shiny new repo that will hold the logo, alt formats, and eventually variants for CSS4, CSS5, and beyond. github.com/CSS-N...

We play a lot of Fortnite at our house. It's a great game for teaching kids cooperative discipline, and in a remarkably wholesome setting to boot (no blood, cartoon styling). I've had no qualms involving all three of our boys from an early age in the family squad, including our two youngest from around age four.Since we started playing, I've just had two primary house rules:Stay ...