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NPR Tiny Desk Concert by the cast of Buena Vista Social Club, a hit Broadway musical about the Cuban musical ensemble.

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I think that a lot of resistance to AI coding tools comes from the same place: fear of losing something that has defined you for so long. People are reacting against overblown hype, and there is overblown hype. I get that, but I also think there’s something deeper going on here. When you’ve worked hard to build your skills, when coding is part of your identity and where you get your worth, the idea of a tool that might replace some of that is very threatening.

— Adam Gordon Bell, When AI Codes, What’s Left for me?

Tags: llms, careers, ai, generative-ai, ai-assisted-programming

An original technicolor print of Star Wars (before all of Lucas’s tinkering) was recently shown in Britain. “It was very clear — without a doubt — that Han shot first.”

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TIL: Rate limiting by IP using Cloudflare's rate limiting rules

My blog started timing out on some requests a few days ago, and it turned out there were misbehaving crawlers that were spidering my /search/ page even though it's restricted by robots.txt.

I run this site behind Cloudflare and it turns out Cloudflare's WAF (Web Application Firewall) has a rate limiting tool that I could use to restrict requests to /search/* by a specific IP to a maximum of 5 every 10 seconds.

Tags: rate-limiting, security, cloudflare, til

Frequently Asked Questions (And Answers) About AI Evals Hamel Husain and Shreya Shankar have been running a paid, cohort-based course on AI Evals For Engineers & PMs over the past few months. Here Hamel collects answers to the most common questions asked during the cours...

Trial Court Decides Case Based On AI-Hallucinated Caselaw

Joe Patrice writing for Above the Law:

[...] it was always only a matter of time before a poor litigant representing themselves fails to know enough to sniff out and flag Beavis v. Butthead and a busy or apathetic judge rubberstamps one side’s proposed order without probing the cites for verification. [...]

It finally happened with a trial judge issuing an order based off fake cases (flagged by Rob Freund). While the appellate court put a stop to the matter, the fact that it got this far should terrify everyone.

It's already listed in the AI Hallucination Cases database (now listing 168 cases, it was 116 when I first wrote about it on 25th May) which lists a $2,500 monetary penalty.

Tags: law, ai, generative-ai, llms, ai-ethics, hallucinations

Hued is a daily game in the vein of Wordle/Spelling Bee where you have three guesses to match a target color.

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I built something that changed my friend group's social fabric

I absolutely love this as an illustration of the thing where the tiniest design decisions in software can have an outsized effect on the world.

Dan Petrolito noticed that his friend group weren't chatting to each other using voice chat on their Discord server because they usually weren't online at the same time. He wired up a ~20 lines of Python Discord bot to turn people joining the voice channel into a message that could be received as a notification and had a huge uptick in conversations between the group, lasting several years.

Via Hacker News

Tags: social-software, discord

French artist Mantra paints photo-realistic murals that look like massive butterfly specimen display frames. Fantastic.

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Tressie McMillan Cottom, one of America’s leading public intellectuals, posted this to Bluesky yesterday: I’m going to be very honest and clear. I am fully preparing myself to die under this new American regime. That’s not to say that it’s the end of the world. It isn’t. ...

CBS News:

Paramount will settle President Trump’s lawsuit over a “60 Minutes” interview with Kamala Harris for $16 million, the company announced late Tuesday.

CBS News’ parent company worked with a mediator to resolve the lawsuit. Under the agreement, $16 million will be allocated to Mr. Trump’s future presidential library and the plaintiffs’ fees and costs. Neither Mr. Trump nor his co-plantiff, Texas Rep. Ronny Jackson, will be directly paid as part of the settlement.

The settlement did not include an apology.

It could have been a lot worse, but this is, ultimately, bribery.

Link: cbsnews.com/news/paramount-trump-60-minutes-lawsuit…

Something I've realized about LLM tool use is that it means that if you can reduce a problem to something that can be solved by an LLM in a sandbox using tools in a loop, you can brute force that problem.

The challenge then becomes identifying those problems and figuring out how to configure a sandbox for them, what tools to provide and how to define the success criteria for the model.

That still takes significant skill and experience, but it's at a higher level than chewing through that problem using trial and error by hand.

My x86 assembly experiment with Claude Code was the thing that made this click for me.

Tags: llm-tool-use, ai-assisted-programming, claude-code, sandboxing, generative-ai, ai, llms

I Will Do Anything to End Homelessness Except Build More Homes. “Look, if you give people homes, the next thing you know, they’re going to start to get their lives together and then get jobs and start organizing.”

Diogo Jota, Liverpool and Portugal footballer, dies aged 28 in car crash. This is sad news. Jota was a favorite player of mine; he brought a positive energy to the pitch.

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Quitting programming as a career right now because of LLMs would be like quitting carpentry as a career thanks to the invention of the table saw.

Tags: careers, ai-assisted-programming, generative-ai, ai, llms

Kilmar Ábrego García says he was tortured in El Salvadorian prison. Hundreds of people are still there, sent there from the US by the Trump administration to be tortured, all sanctioned by the Supreme Court and Congress.

If you want to sit in this chair, you have to be able to solve a Rubik’s Cube because the chair is a Rubik’s Cube. (Ok, technically it looks like you only need to place the four leg corners of the chair correctly, but we’re not going to pick nits on this because it is fun and loooorrrrrrrd do we all need some fun right now.) Oh and I like how the unsolved chair in the last photo looks like it’s striking a break dancing pose. Fresh! (via moss & fog) Tags: design · furniture · games · Rubik’s Cube 💬 Join the discussion on kottke.org →

American science to soon face its largest brain drain in history. “Over the first half of 2025, the US has cut science as never before. This disaster for American science may be a gift to the rest of the world.”

Architect David Romero has built several digital models of Frank Lloyd Wright’s unrealized buildings, including a mile-high Chicago skyscraper with 528 floors.

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