Americans often laugh when they see how often Danes will patiently, obediently wait on the little red man to turn green before crossing an empty intersection, in the rain, even at night. Nobody is coming! Why don't you just cross?! It seems silly, but the underlying philosophy is anything but. It's load bearing for a civil society like Denmark.Because doing the right thing every time...

Ep #14🎙️ Bad At CSS Podcast Backend dev Lane Wagner, of boot.dev and host of Backend Banter FM, guests this week sharing what do backend dev think of CSS. ⤷ badatcss.com · youtube · spotify

AI mistakes are very different from human mistakes An entertaining and informative read by Bruce Schneier and Nathan E. Sanders. If you want to use an AI model to help with a business problem, it’s not enough to see that it understands what factors make a product profitable; you need to be sure it won’t forget what money is. Tags: bruce-schneier, llms, ai, generative-ai

Is what you're doing taking a large amount of text and asking the LLM to convert it into a smaller amount of text? Then it's probably going to be great at it. If you're asking it to convert into a roughly equal amount of text it will be so-so. If you're asking it to create more text than you gave it, forget about it. — Laurie Voss Tags: laurie-voss, llms, ai, generative-ai, rag

We Didn’t Start the Class WarIn 2024, the combined net worth of the world’s 2,781 billionaires reached $14.2 trillion. The 18 wealthiest individuals collectively held nearly $2 trillion, accounting for approximately 16% of total billionaire wealth.We didn’t choose this

Today I want to share with you a song that has stuck with me for a couple decades and has been a source of catharsis for shaking off that existential dread. I’m talking about Piebald’s 2002 single American Hearts. (video) [Hook] HEY! You're part of it YEAH! You're part of it HEY! You're part of it YEAH! You're part of it [Verse 1] I walk the streets of a Carolina Watching people pushing shopp...

You know what’s really helpful in solving my own problems? Writing them down, sending them to someone, and not hearing back. You ever do that? For me, it’s a bulletproof method to solving problems. It’s akin to those moments when you go to someone with a problem, you talk it through, you find a solution, you thank them for their help, and they say, “Well I didn’t even say anything, but you’re ...

You can now use `attr()` with any CSS property — not just content – and it can parse values into data types other than <string>.

I have a confession to make. You probably sensed it, but weren’t able to articulate what was happening. Your loved ones think you’re losing your grasp on reality. For the last six months I’ve been incrementally changing the color scheme on my website every single day. I boiled you like a frog! Mu-wa-ha-ha. Don’t believe me? Try for yourself… Update hue ...

Trump is back at the helm of the United States, and the majority of Americans are optimistic about the prospect. Especially the young. In a poll by CBS News, it's the 18-29 demographic that's most excited, with a whopping two-thirds answering in the affirmative to being optimistic about the next four years under Trump. And I'm right there with them. The current American optimism ...

Even though I’m not a photographer I always enjoyed the act of capturing moments using a camera. These days my photos live primarily here on the blog—they even have a dedicated RSS feed—but also on my separate photos archive. I’m very casual when it comes to taking pictures, I do it exclusively using a phone these days and I don’t put much thought into the process. It’s something I do mostly fo...

DeepSeek are the Chinese AI lab who dropped the best currently available open weights LLM on Christmas day, DeepSeek v3. That model was trained in part using their unreleased R1 "reasoning" model. Today they've released R1 itself, along with a whole family of new models derived from that base. There's a whole lot of stuff in the new release. DeepSeek-R1-Zero appears to be the base model. It's o...

[Microsoft] said it plans in 2025 “to invest approximately $80 billion to build out AI-enabled datacenters to train AI models and deploy AI and cloud-based applications around the world.” For comparison, the James Webb telescope cost $10bn, so Microsoft is spending eight James Webb telescopes in one year just on AI. For a further comparison, people think the long-in-development ITER fusion reac...

For decades, the debate in Denmark around  problems with mass immigration was stuck in a self-loathing blame game of "failed integration". That somehow, if the Danes had just tried harder, been less prejudice, offered more opportunities, the many foreigners with radically different cultures would have been able to integrate successfully. If not in the first generation, then the sec...

Weekly summary of new Baseline items in BCD data

There's a secret about the internet that nobody wants to talk about.We're all selling something.Even this post. Even me.Some pretend they're different. Special. Above the game.They're not.The internet turned attention into currency, and we're all

import "https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/npm/baseline-status"; 2025; I think every front-end developer should know how to enable page transitions, transition a <dialog>, popover, and <details>, animate light n' dark gradient text, type safe their CSS system, and add springy easing to animation. AI is not going to give you this CSS. This post is a theme continuation; checko...

We all know that corporations do weird shit. In their never-ending quest to maximise profits, they’re happy to exploit us and try all sorts of wacky shenanigans. We’re all aware of this. We all know that they try to use all the weaknesses of our monkey brains against us. And that sucks. It really does. We all think that sucks. And that is because it really does suck. We’d all be better off livi...

TIL: Downloading every video for a TikTok account TikTok may or may not be banned in the USA within the next 24 hours or so. I figured out a gnarly pattern for downloading every video from a specified account, using browser console JavaScript to scrape the video URLs and yt-dlp to fetch each video. As a bonus, I included a recipe for generating a Whisper transcript of every video with mlx-whisp...

Your daily doomscrolling is a luxury most folks can’t afford.The single mother working three jobs doesn’t have time for despair. The refugee rebuilding their life doesn’t indulge in it. The activist on the ground organizing their community isn’t wallowing in it.

There's a famous quote that people in tech like to use. It was supposedly said by Henry Ford about the invention of the automobile: If I had asked my customers what they wanted, they would have said ‘faster horses’. There is no actual evidence that Ford ever said this - regardless, it has become a favorite adage for people talking about creativity and innovation. It’s often accompanied by a s...

I was catching up with some tech news earlier today and I saw the news that Instagram now allows videos up to 3 minutes long. The news is not particularly relevant to me considering I don’t use IG nor particularly interesting because, frankly, who gives a shit. The thing I found the most interesting was Adam’s wording in his announcement video: Historically it’s only been 90 seconds and that’s...

BasicAppleGuy “Lumon Industries Macrodata Refinement Terminal.” Tech Stuff vivus A library that will animate SVG files bringing them to life. Justified Text: Better Than Expected? When you need your text properly justified: text-wrap: balance; hyphens: auto; hyphenate-limit-chars: 10; CSS light-dark() Delightful! Cognitive load is what matters The trick

DeepSeek API Docs: Rate Limit This is surprising: DeepSeek offer the only hosted LLM API I've seen that doesn't implement rate limits: DeepSeek API does NOT constrain user's rate limit. We will try out best to serve every request. However, please note that when our servers are under high traffic pressure, your requests may take some time to receive a response from the server. Want to run a pr...

Lessons From Red Teaming 100 Generative AI Products New paper from Microsoft describing their top eight lessons learned red teaming (deliberately seeking security vulnerabilities in) 100 different generative AI models and products over the past few years. The Microsoft AI Red Team (AIRT) grew out of pre-existing red teaming initiatives at the company and was officially established in 2018. At ...

Big news for me: after 6 years, I’m leaving Salesforce to join the folks at Socket, working to secure the software supply chain. Salesforce has been very good to me. But at a certain point, I felt the need to branch out, learn new things, and get out of my comfort zone. At Socket, I’ll […]

Most people want to be something.They want to be entrepreneurs, thought leaders, creators, innovators. They collect the titles like badges, imagining how they'll look on their Twitter bio.But wanting to be is the smallest part of becoming.The real work - the work that matters -

We're thinking about creation and reputation backward.When I tell people they should build in public, I get a look of horror. "But it's not ready yet!" they protest. "What if people see my mistakes?"The standard way to build things is

Countries - and state-scale corporates - should each be working on their own Strategic Fact Reserve. If they’re not already. Let me trace the logic… AI as cognitive infrastructure Assume for a moment that AI is upstream of productive work. It’ll start off that people just go faster with AI, and then it’ll become essential. I remember hearing that legal contracts got longer when word processors...

Advanced attr() in Chrome 133. Opening new ways to integrate with CSS from your HTML: <li scroll-snap="start"></li> <li scroll-snap="center"></li> [scroll-snap] { scroll-snap-align: attr(scroll-snap type(start | center | end)); } Try it & learn more from Bramus @ Chrome Developers

This is the 73rd edition of People and Blogs, the series where I ask interesting people to talk about themselves and their blogs. Today we have Annie Mueller and her blog, anniemueller.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 subscrib...

Recently I’ve been working with map data to create interactive visualisations. When working with maps it’s common to receive data as GeoJSON, a JSON format for encoding geographic features, which specifies the type of geometry and co-ordinates for the features we want to display on a map. Javascript mapping libraries such as Mapbox GL are designed to consume GeoJSON to render features on a canv...

You're looking at oligarchy all wrong.You're watching Elon Musk's Twitter circus and thinking that's what real Power looks like. You see him posting memes at 3 AM, buying social networks on impulses, and launching cars into space. You're studying

Manual inspection of data has probably the highest value-to-prestige ratio of any activity in machine learning. — Greg Brockman, OpenAI, Feb 2023 Tags: machine-learning, openai, ai

[...] much of the point of a model like o1 is not to deploy it, but to generate training data for the next model. Every problem that an o1 solves is now a training data point for an o3 (eg. any o1 session which finally stumbles into the right answer can be refined to drop the dead ends and produce a clean transcript to train a more refined intuition). — gwern Tags: o1, generative-ai,...

Datasette Public Office Hours Application We are running another Datasette Public Office Hours event on Discord tomorrow (Friday 17th January 2025) at 2pm Pacific / 5pm Eastern / 10pm GMT / more timezones here. The theme this time around is lightning talks - we're looking for 5-8 minute long talks from community members about projects they are working on or things they have built using the Data...

Evolving GitHub Issues (public preview) GitHub just shipped the largest set of changes to GitHub Issues I can remember in a few years. As an Issues power-user this is directly relevant to me. The big new features are sub-issues, issue types and boolean operators in search. Sub-issues look to be a more robust formalization of the existing feature where you could create a - [ ] #123 Markdown list...

We've adjusted prompt caching so that you now only need to specify cache write points in your prompts - we'll automatically check for cache hits at previous positions. No more manual tracking of read locations needed. — Alex Albert, Anthropic Tags: alex-albert, prompt-caching, anthropic, claude, generative-ai, ai, llms

Unlike the classic way of moving a node by removing+reinserting it, the moveBefore method preserves the element’s state!

“ The internet is now five websites owned by three people and all of them are awful” they said on yet another social media platform where they posted more than a thousand times already and it’s doomed to become the sixth websites. This is part two of an ongoing series apparently. Thank you for keeping RSS alive. You're awesome. Email me :: ...

100x Defect Tolerance: How Cerebras Solved the Yield Problem I learned a bunch about how chip manufacture works from this piece where Cerebras reveal some notes about how they manufacture chips that are 56x physically larger than NVIDIA's H100. The key idea here is core redundancy: designing a chip such that if there are defects the end-product is still useful. This has been a technique for dec...

I. The ProblemLet’s start with a confession: I’m launching a startup. I know — in 2025, the world needs another startup like it needs another TED Talk about finding your authentic self.But here’s the thing: I’m not

My @container scroll-state() article is live! developer.chrome.com/blog/css-scroll-state-queries Stuck state:  Triggered when an element is stuck.Snapped state:  Triggered when an element is snapped.Scrollable state:  Triggered when an element is overflowing.

I took notes from Sean Voisen’s call for more hybrid tools. He speaks for a moment on generative AI and its inclusion into existing tools, but reading between the lines the insight I found was how our tools can trigger empathy for people and disciplines: One of the greatest goals we can have for [making] tools…is that in expanding all of our respective capabilities, we do not replace our human...

You probably heard the news that Meta has decided to get rid of fact checkers and they’ll rely more on a Twitter-style community notes type of thing. Many people have written about the pros and cons of this decision (and also about the political implications). I’m not interested in debating if what they’re doing is right or wrong per se, but rather to express some level of hope. Not hope for Fa...

Today's software ecosystem evolved around a central assumption that code is expensive, so it makes sense to centrally develop and then distribute at low marginal cost. If code becomes 100x cheaper, the choices no longer make sense! Build-buy tradeoffs often flip. The idea of an "app"—a hermetically sealed bundle of functionality built by a team trying to anticipate your needs—will no longer be ...

Pure CSS Scroll Spy Table of Contents Kevin Pow()ell and I go over the CSS Wrapped 2024 site and break down the <details> scroll spy component to uncover the CSS scroll driven animation powering it.

Presenting Open Props UI! Imagine ShadCN and Open Props had a baby. It's just turned hit v1 with 25+ components ready to copy and paste. Open Props UI, the UI of the future (or now, with feature flags). Components you can copy or paste into your projects.Open Props UI Homepage Try the Notebook! the strategy # A getting started ...

Now that I have a job where I’m writing web components full time, I see the this keyword more than I ever have in my whole life. It’s not a problem, per se, but you can see how it’s a little repetitive. I started wondering what my options were to fix this minor annoyance and the ShopTalk Discord helped me find a simple way and an over-the-top way to fix my issue. Simple way: Overriding VS Code ...

ChatGPT reveals the system prompt for ChatGPT Tasks OpenAI just started rolling out Scheduled tasks in ChatGPT, a new feature where you can say things like "Remind me to write the tests in five minutes" and ChatGPT will execute that prompt for you at the assigned time. I just tried it and the reminder came through as an email (sent via MailChimp's Mandrill platform). I expect I'll get these as ...

I have a big backlog of photos, and now that I have an ability to embed them in my blog, I will occasionally do so! I am initially posting them on Pixelfed, and this post was originally published there. Pixelfed is cool, maybe you should join it, and post photos there, and not _somewhere else_. If you’re publishing them on your site — reposting them on Pixelfed could also be a good idea.

My text-box article is live! https://developer.chrome.com/blog/css-text-box-trim Did you miss my text-box prediction? Don't miss this interactive notebook, helpful for feeling out the effects and edge cases.

Simon Willison And SWYX Tell Us Where AI Is In 2025 I recorded this podcast episode with Brian McCullough and swyx riffing off my Things we learned about LLMs in 2024 review. We also touched on some predictions for the future - this is where I learned from swyx that Everything Everywhere All at Once used generative AI (Runway ML) already. The episode is also available on YouTube: Tags: ...

This is my entry for January’s IndieWeb Carnival, hosted by the always great V.H. Belvadi. If you have a blog, consider writing an entry yourself. The modern web—and society to a certain extent—is built on this idea that we should remove friction as much as possible. Everything has to be optimised, smoothed out, and made as easy and convenient as possible. The embodiment of this idea to me was...

Cynicism is the cheap seats. It’s the fast food of intellectual positions. Anyone can point at something and say it’s broken, corrupt, or destined to fail. The real challenge? Building something better.The cynic sees a proposal for change and immediately lists why it won’

LLMs shouldn't help you do less thinking, they should help you do more thinking. They give you higher leverage. Will that cause you to be satisfied with doing less, or driven to do more? — Alex Komoroske, Bits and bobs Tags: llms, ai, generative-ai, alex-komoroske

Codestral 25.01 Brand new code-focused model from Mistral. Unlike the first Codestral this one isn't (yet) available as open weights. The model has a 256k token context - a new record for Mistral. The new model scored an impressive joint first place with Claude 3.5 Sonnet and Deepseek V2.5 (FIM) on the Copilot Arena leaderboard. Chatbot Arena announced Copilot Arena on 12th November 2024. The ...

You have a dependency that provides a CLI tool, how do you use it? Even though you did npm i from your project root, if you run <tool> <command> it won’t work because that tool is not in your global path. You could install <tool> globally, but then if you have <tool> in multiple projects and you run <tool> <command> in another project it might not be the same...

Jatan wrote an interesting post yesterday—that you should read—as a follow-up to a question he posted the day before on micro.blog. The question was the following: To all bloggers: If you were born and brought up in the time of modern social media, where Twitter and Instagram have always existed, would you even blog? Before I tackle this, I want to highlight Jamie’s answer, which he posted on...

I am very sorry to inform you, but if you are a React / TypeScript frontend engineer a few years into your career, you are ground zero for getting replaced by “AI engineers”. Mark Zuckerberg hath decreed it to be so! Big Tech is literally salivating at the idea of taking your job away and replacing it with automation at an industrial scale. Their plan seems to be to hire a bunch of low-wage pr...

Weekly summary of new Baseline items in BCD data

I was using o1 like a chat model — but o1 is not a chat model. If o1 is not a chat model — what is it? I think of it like a “report generator.” If you give it enough context, and tell it what you want outputted, it’ll often nail the solution in one-shot. — Ben Hylak Tags: o1, generative-ai, openai, ai, llms

February 2018; I wrote my first Observable notebook. I really liked how I could seamlessly provide interactivity and proof for the content I was trying to teach. June 2024; First working git commit is pushed for a self hosted Observable variant called Framework. 🤘🏻💀 I pounced, been hackin away at it, and am stoked to release it! The Nerdy Notebook ↪ https://nerdy.dev/notebo...

I’m playing with making cross-document view transitions work on this blog. Nothing fancy. Mostly copying how Dave Rupert does it on his site where you get a cross-fade animation on the whole page generally, and a little position animation on the page title specifically. To animate the page title, I need a unique ID to target the element I want to transition between pages, e.g. <!-- 1st pa...

It’s a lovely sunny Sunday and it’s my first day back at home after the week spent in Tuscany. It feels like the new year is officially about to start and I was looking at my schedule and there are already so many things to do on my to-do list. That’s both equally great and terrifying but that’s just how life is these days. Anyway, today’s not the time to think too much about the upcoming month...

In 1941, Captain America’s first comic showed him punching out Adolf Hitler.It wasn’t a metaphor, an exploration of the complexities of international relations, or a statement: evil exists, and sometimes, you have to face it.Imagine that cover being pitched today. “But have we

Generative AI – The Power and the Glory Michael Liebreich's epic report for BloombergNEF on the current state of play with regards to generative AI, energy usage and data center growth. I learned so much from reading this. If you're at all interested in the energy impact of the latest wave of AI tools I recommend spending some time with this article. Just a few of the points that stood out to m...

sjvn “Best snow truck name ever.” Tech Stuff trimMiddle This is such a cool function: it trims any string to the desired length by dropping text from the middle of the string, like Finder does with filenames. And a lot of times when you’re trimming text,

Me: Let’s go home and I’ll make some lunch. 4-year-old: I don’t want lunch, I want snack. Me: Ok, I’ll make you a snack. (Goes home and makes lunch.) Me: Here’s your snack. (4-year-old happily eats lunch.) Comments, questions, suggestions? Email me at [email protected].

Agents Chip Huyen's 8,000 word practical guide to building useful LLM-driven workflows that take advantage of tools. Chip starts by providing a definition of "agents" to be used in the piece - in this case it's LLM systems that plan an approach and then run tools in a loop until a goal is achieved. I like how she ties it back to the classic Norvig "thermostat" model - where an agent is "anythi...

Framing Federation I’ve always been intrigued by the way that words shape our thoughts, beliefs, and our understanding of the world around us. It happens all the time, and we often don’t even realize it, especially when the words that we use to describe (and think about) things have formed deeply-rooted mental images that we rely on to relate to things. An example of this that’s been on my mind...

Don’t let the pretty face fool you. This guy’s a menace. But he’s also fun to have around. Sometimes. Thank you for keeping RSS alive. You're awesome. Email me :: Sign my guestbook :: Support for 1$/month :: See my generous supporters :: Subscribe to People and Blogs

Someone accused me of bias this morning. Specifically, bias against MAGA and Trump supporters. Apparently it’s disappointing to discover that I’m not the morally neutral arbiter of truth they imagined me to be.So let’s talk about it. Let’s talk about my

Phi-4 Bug Fixes by Unsloth This explains why I was seeing weird <|im_end|> suffexes during my experiments with Phi-4 the other day: it turns out the Phi-4 tokenizer definition as released by Microsoft had a bug in it, and there was a small bug in the chat template as well. Daniel and Michael Han figured this out and have now published GGUF files with their fixes on Hugging Face. Via ...

Books I read 34 books in 2024, including complete re-reads of two of my favorite series, The Murderbot Diaries and Imperial Radch. System Collapse, by Martha Wells “Am I making it worse? I think I'm making it worse.” This is the seventh book in the Murderbot series, which released in November 2023, but I decided before reading it, I would do a complete re-read of the series. I’ve...

I often wonder what it felt like for the ancient Greeks, circa 800BC, to be wandering in the ruins of the previous Mycenaean civilisation. These cities they can no longer build; staring at writing they can’t read. The Greeks had to re-discover literacy. I think perhaps they wouldn’t have known what they were looking at. I know that dinosaurs aren’t our ancestors but… it’s adjacent? We live in...

The Oxide and Friends podcast has an annual tradition of asking guests to share their predictions for the next 1, 3 and 6 years. Here's 2022, 2023 and 2024. This year they invited me to participate. I've never been brave enough to share any public predictions before, so this was a great opportunity to get outside my comfort zone! We recorded the episode live using Discord on Monday. It's now av...

(Read this article on the blog)This is a new feature announced on Nov 20 and got Terraform support mid-December. In a nutshell, it allows CloudFront to reach into a private subnet and use the private IPv4 addresses there. This achieves two things: First, the instances in the subnet don't need to be public anymore. This is a huge improvement over the previous way as it makes CloudFront the only...

Double-keyed Caching: How Browser Cache Partitioning Changed the Web Addy Osmani provides a clear explanation of how browser cache partitioning has changed the landscape of web optimization tricks. Prior to 2020, linking to resources on a shared CDN could provide a performance boost as the user's browser might have already cached that asset from visiting a previous site. This opened up privacy ...

Ever hear that idiom, “Don’t miss the forest for the trees”? The idea being, you miss the bigger picture because you’re focused on the minutia? Feels like the tech equivalent is: Don’t miss the product for the artifacts. Here’s Robin Rendle in a recent piece on design artifacts: There’s a factory-like production of the modern design process which believes that the assets are more important tha...