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“The fundamental dilemma [of media like NYT]: journalism is, by its nature, supposed to be on the side of accuracy, against lies & liars, but the GOP is lies & liars top to bottom. And for reasons of power & access, journalism can not say so.”

Here’s what Tom Holland’s lip-sync of Umbrella can teach us about stormwater management. “So set designers must have accounted for the flow to go somewhere, but not all residential or commercial properties are so well drained.”

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Adding a feature because ChatGPT incorrectly thinks it exists

Adrian Holovaty describes how his SoundSlice service saw an uptick in users attempting to use their sheet music scanner to import ASCII-art guitar tab... because it turned out ChatGPT had hallucinated that as a feature SoundSlice supported and was telling users to go there!

So they built that feature. Easier than convincing OpenAI to somehow patch ChatGPT to stop it from hallucinating a feature that doesn't exist.

Adrian:

To my knowledge, this is the first case of a company developing a feature because ChatGPT is incorrectly telling people it exists. (Yay?)

Via Hacker News

Tags: adrian-holovaty, ai, openai, generative-ai, chatgpt, llms, ai-ethics

Science writer Jennifer Ouellette reflects on the 30th anniversary of Apollo 13, including the movie’s realism “The actors, once locked in, breathed air pumped into the suits just like the original Apollo astronauts.” I love Apollo 13.

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Pre-Show: John’s almost an empty-nester 😱 Reconcilable Differences Follow-up: FireWire now with Thunderbolt! (via Timo Hetzel) Tahoe without Xcode beta: Device Support for macOS 26 Beta Developer downloads ↳ Direct link Putting older OSes on newer hardware (via G...

Ah, this is awesome: Great Art Explained is one of my favorite YouTube channels and there’s a book version coming out in the fall.

Art can be thrilling, and resonate on a deep personal level. It is how you view the work, place it in context and understand its history that makes an artwork truly come alive.

A fresh approach to a classic subject, James Payne’s no-nonsense analysis sheds new light on 30 masterpieces from around the globe and reveals what makes them truly timeless works of art.

Each chapter delves into not only the art itself but also the artist’s life, as well as the work’s place in their wider oeuvre; in other words, what makes it “great.”

You can preorder Great Art Explained from Bookshop or Amazon.

Tags: art · art school · books · Great Art Explained · James Payne

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The detention center in Florida easily fits the definition of concentration camp. “This facility’s purpose fits the classic model, and its existence points to serious dangers ahead for the country.” Alligator Auschwitz.

Conscientious SUV Shopper Just Wants Something That Will Kill Family In Other Car In Case Of Accident. “The last thing I want is a flimsy sedan that takes out Mommy and Daddy in the front seat but leaves behind a couple of orphans in the back…”

I Shipped a macOS App Built Entirely by Claude Code Indragie Karunaratne has "been building software for the Mac since 2008", but recently decided to try Claude Code to build a side project: Context, a native Mac app for debugging MCP servers: There is still skill and itera...

My thanks to Fly.io for sponsoring last week at DF to promote Phoenix.new, their new AI app-builder. Just describe your idea, and Phoenix.new quickly generates a working real-time Phoenix app: clustering, pubsub, and presence included. Ideal for multiplayer games, collaborative tools, or quick weekend experiments. Built by Fly.io, deploy wherever you want. Give it a try today.

Link: phoenix.new/?utm_source=df

There was a whole chain of separate departments dealing with proletarian literature, music, drama, and entertainment generally. Here were produced rubbishy newspapers containing almost nothing except sport, crime and astrology, sensational five-cent novelettes, films oozing with sex, and sentimental songs which were composed entirely by mechanical means on a special kind of kaleidoscope known as a versificator. [...]

It was one of countless similar songs published for the benefit of the proles by a sub-section of the Music Department. The words of these songs were composed without any human intervention whatever on an instrument known as a versificator.

— Nineteen Eighty-Four, George Orwell predicts generative AI, published 1949

Tags: ai-ethics, ai, generative-ai

Supabase MCP can leak your entire SQL database Here's yet another example of a lethal trifecta attack, where an LLM system combines access to private data, exposure to potentially malicious instructions and a mechanism to communicate data back out to an attacker. In this cas...

Serving 200 million requests per day with a cgi-bin Jake Gold tests how well 90s-era CGI works today, using a Go + SQLIte CGI program running on a 16-thread AMD 3700X. Using CGI on modest hardware, it’s possible to serve 2400+ requests per second or 200M+ requests per day. ...

A surgeon who left his wedding to save a life says it's inspired him to help more people. Also: one man's adventures with a pet goose; a police officer reunited with a baby he rescued; and why we should eat more custard.

Cursor: Clarifying Our Pricing Cursor changed their pricing plan on June 16th, introducing a new $200/month Ultra plan with "20x more usage than Pro" and switching their $20/month Pro plan from "request limits to compute limits". This confused a lot of people. Here's Cursor'...

The more time I spend using LLMs for code, the less I worry for my career - even as their coding capabilities continue to improve. Using LLMs as part of my process helps me understand how much of my job isn't just bashing out code. My job is to identify problems that can be ...

awwaiid/gremllm Delightfully cursed Python library by Brock Wilcox, built on top of LLM: from gremllm import Gremllm counter = Gremllm("counter") counter.value = 5 counter.increment() print(counter.value) # 6? print(counter.to_roman_numerals()) # VI? You tell your Gremllm...

Have you heard On the Media’s Peabody-winning series The Divided Dial? It’s awesome and you should, and now you will. In this episode they tell the story of shortwave radio: the way-less-listened to but way-farther-reaching cousin of AM and FM radio. The medium was once...

Fixed an issue with links in post: if they are relative URLs, they no get converted to absolute ones, so you can actually navigate to them.