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Every day someone becomes a programmer because they figured out how to make ChatGPT build something. Lucky for us: in many of those cases the AI picks Python. We should treat this as an opportunity and anticipate an expansion in the kinds of people who might want to attend a Python conference. Yet many of these new programmers are not even aware that programming communities and conferences exist. It’s in the Python community’s interest to find ways to pull them in.

— Armin Ronacher

Tags: pycon, ai, llms, vibe-coding, ai-assisted-programming, python, generative-ai, armin-ronacher

There’s a bigger opportunity in computer science and programming (academically conveyed or self-taught) now than ever before, by far, in my opinion. The move to AI is like replacing shovels with bulldozers. Every business will benefit from this and they’ll need people to do it.

— Tim Sweeney, Epic Games

Tags: ai-assisted-programming, careers, ai

Matthew Belloni, writing at Puck (paywall-busting gift link) regarding the claim from anonymous CBS sources that The Late Show lost $40 million last year: Nobody can know for sure. All I can tell you is what I’m hearing. Several sources at both CBS and Skydance insist th...

Myke Hurley:

For this episode, I took a slightly different approach for the main section, following step-by-step how John writes and publishes an article. I think this is a template I want to follow with future guests, taking a detailed look at what they do from beginning to end.

I’m so pleased with how this interview turned out — I actually think it may be one of the best of my career. I’ve never had the chance to have a one-on-one podcast with John before, and I’m happy we waited until now to make it happen.

We spoke for a long time, and at some point like halfway through, it really hit me that Hurley was asking really good questions. If you’re interested in how I work and the tools I use, you should enjoy listening to this interview as much as I enjoyed participating in it.

Link: theenthusiast.net/john-gruber-state-of-the-workflow/

OpenAI's gold medal performance on the International Math Olympiad OpenAI research scientist Alexander Wei: I’m excited to share that our latest @OpenAI experimental reasoning LLM has achieved a longstanding grand challenge in AI: gold medal-level performance on the world’s...

We meet some of the swimmers participating in this year's swim across the Arctic Circle. Also, the groundbreaking science behind three parent babies, and the grandchildren available for hire in Bulgaria.

A few months I added a tool to my blog for bulk-applying tags to old content. It works as an extension to my existing search interface, letting me run searches and then quickly apply a tag to relevant results.

Since adding this I've been much more aggressive in categorizing my older content, including adding new tags when I spot an interesting trend that warrants its own page.

Today I added system-prompts and applied it to 41 existing posts that talk about system prompts for LLM systems, including a bunch that directly quote system prompts that have been deliberately published or leaked.

Other tags I've added recently include press-quotes for times I've been quoted in the press, agent-definitions for my ongoing collection of different ways people define "agents" and paper-review for posts where I review an academic paper.

Tags: blogging, tagging

OpenAI: You can now ask ChatGPT to handle requests like “look at my calendar and brief me on upcoming client meetings based on recent news,” “plan and buy ingredients to make Japanese breakfast for four,” and “analyze three competitors and create a slide deck.” ChatGPT w...

So one of my favorite things to do is give my coding agents more and more permissions and freedom, just to see how far I can push their productivity without going too far off the rails. It's a delicate balance. I haven't given them direct access to my bank account yet. But I did give one access to my Google Cloud production instances and systems. And it promptly wiped a production database password and locked my network. [...]

The thing is, autonomous coding agents are extremely powerful tools that can easily go down very wrong paths. Running them with permission checks disabled is dangerous and stupid, and you should only do it if you are willing to take dangerous and stupid risks with your code and/or production systems.

— Steve Yegge

Tags: vibe-coding, steve-yegge, generative-ai, ai-agents, ai, llms

One analyst recently speculated (via Ed Conard) that, based on Nvidia's latest datacenter sales figures, AI capex may be ~2% of US GDP in 2025, given a standard multiplier. [...]

Capital expenditures on AI data centers is likely around 20% of the peak spending on railroads, as a percentage of GDP, and it is still rising quickly. [...]

Regardless of what one thinks about the merits of AI or explosive datacenter expansion, the scale and pace of capital deployment into a rapidly depreciating technology is remarkable. These are not railroads—we aren’t building century-long infrastructure. AI datacenters are short-lived, asset-intensive facilities riding declining-cost technology curves, requiring frequent hardware replacement to preserve margins.

— Paul Kedrosky, Honey, AI Capex is Eating the Economy

Tags: ai-ethics, economics, ai, paul-kedrosky

Real athletes get 30 For 30 documentaries; fake athletes get fake ones. Not sure which are more enjoyable.

Link: youtube.com/shorts/L7NqTpnSQWo

Why CBS’s Cancellation of “The Late Show With Stephen Colbert” Stinks to High Hell Even back in the now-comparatively-sane Trump 1.0 administration, it seemed palpably true to me that the best check against Trump’s authoritarian instincts wasn’t legal or Constitutional, but...

Eric Slivka, reporting last night for MacRumors: While the Camera app redesign didn’t exactly match what Apple unveiled for iOS 26, the general idea was correct and much of what else Prosser showed was pretty close to spot on, and Apple clearly took notice as the company...

CBS cancelled the Late Show with Stephen Colbert just days after he criticized the $16 bribe the network paid to Trump. Here’s why “Colbert’s cancellation is a dark warning”.

Fascism For First Time Founders. “Let’s have a little chat about why embracing fascism is probably the worst possible business strategy for anyone actually trying to build something innovative.” 💯

How to run an LLM on your laptop I talked to Grace Huckins for this piece from MIT Technology Review on running local models. Apparently she enjoyed my dystopian backup plan! Simon Willison has a plan for the end of the world. It’s a USB stick, onto which he has loaded a co...

“The extreme sports pioneer Felix Baumgartner, famed for a record-breaking 2012 skydive from the edge of space, has died in a paragliding accident.”

💬 Join the discussion on kottke.org →

Next year, “the average person who buys Affordable Care Act insurance will be paying 75% more for their premium” because of “the expiration of enhanced premium tax credits in the ACA markets”.

Back in 2017 our colleagues at More Perfect gathered a room full of people together to debate a straight forward question: Can free speech go too far? Today, eight years have passed and plenty has changed, but this question feels alive as ever.  And so we’re re-airing M...