A Disillusioned Urban Planning Glossary. “NIMBY – Stands for ‘Not in My Backyard.’ From the Old English nimm bæc yarde, meaning ‘no change shall occur within sightline of my bird feeder.’”
Born in 1790 just a few months after George Washington took office, John Tyler was America’s 10th president, serving from 1841-1845. Harrison Ruffin Tyler, Tyler’s last living grandson, died this past weekend at the age of 96.
As long as he lived, much of the great sweep of...
A recent study: “Ibn al-Shatir was the first astronomer to have successfully challenged the Ptolemaic cosmological system of planets revolving around Earth and corrected the theory’s inaccuracies about two centuries before Copernicus.”
In June 2024, I got to go to the Solid Sound Festival in North Adams, Massachusetts, which is organized by the band Wilco. I performed some of my new songs, and I got to interview Jeff Tweedy, the lead singer of Wilco, on stage as part of the festival. Jeff, in addition to b...
Codestral Embed
Brand new embedding model from Mistral, specifically trained for code. Mistral claim that:
Codestral Embed significantly outperforms leading code embedders in the market today: Voyage Code 3, Cohere Embed v4.0 and OpenAI’s large embedding model.
The model i...
Here's a quick demo of the kind of casual things I use LLMs for on a daily basis.
I just found out that Perplexity offer their Deep Research feature via their API, through a model called Sonar Deep Research.
Their documentation includes an example response, which included th...
Resourceful: “Shooting down a $100,000 Russian drone with an air-defense missile might cost hundreds of thousands or even millions of dollars. Shooting it down with a shotgun from a light plane might cost a few thousand dollars.”
Hank Green believes how grocery stores are organized is broken. (True.) His solution is to take inspiration from libraries and organize the shelves of every grocery store in the entire world according to the Chewy Decimal System.
TIL that maybe librarians don’t like the D...
AI Hallucination Cases
Damien Charlotin maintains this database of cases around the world where a legal decision has been made that confirms hallucinated content from generative AI was presented by a lawyer.
That's an important distinction: this isn't just cases where AI may...
GitHub issues is almost the best notebook in the world.
Free and unlimited, for both public and private notes.
Comprehensive Markdown support, including syntax highlighting for almost any language. Plus you can drag and drop images or videos directly onto a note.
It has fant...
GitHub Issues search now supports nested queries and boolean operators: Here’s how we (re)built it
GitHub Issues got a significant search upgrade back in January. Deborah Digges provides some behind the scene details about how it works and how they rolled it out.
The signatu...
Luis von Ahn on LinkedIn
Last month's Duolingo memo about becoming an "AI-first" company has seen significant backlash, particularly on TikTok. I've had trouble figuring out how much of this is a real threat to their business as opposed to protests from a loud minority, but ...
CSS Minecraft
Incredible project by Benjamin Aster:
There is no JavaScript on this page. All the logic is made 100% with pure HTML & CSS. For the best performance, please close other tabs and running programs.
The page implements a full Minecraft-style world editor: yo...
GitHub MCP Exploited: Accessing private repositories via MCP
GitHub's official MCP server grants LLMs a whole host of new abilities, including being able to read and issues in repositories the user has access to and submit new pull requests.
This is the lethal trifecta for p...
Build AI agents with the Mistral Agents API
Big upgrade to Mistral's API this morning: they've announced a new "Agents API". Mistral have been using the term "agents" for a while now. Here's how they describe them:
AI agents are autonomous systems powered by large language ...
LLM 0.26 is out with the biggest new feature since I started the project: support for tools. You can now use the LLM CLI tool - and Python library - to grant LLMs from OpenAI, Anthropic, Gemini and local models from Ollama with access to any tool that you can represent as a ...
