FeedCity

The Rule of Law Is Dead in the US. “I did not write an ‘end of term’ Supreme Court review piece this year because… what’s the point? [Critiquing individual cases] feels like a guy on the Titanic complaining about the song selection from the band.”

Qwen just released their sixth model(!) of this July called Qwen3-Coder-30B-A3B-Instruct - listed as Qwen3-Coder-Flash in their chat.qwen.ai interface. It's 30.5B total parameters with 3.3B active at any one time. This means it will fit on a 64GB Mac - and even a 32GB Mac if...

Entertaining YouTuber Benn Jordan built a setup to record and analyze bird sounds, songs, and calls. He used it to record a starling who has mastered mimicking all sorts of manmade and artificial sounds in its environment, including things like the default iPhone camera sh...

Motherfucking windfarms. In Europe, they’re called Royale with Breeze. (I stole that joke from Bluesky.)

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In 2009, novelist Haruki Murakami controversially accepted the Jerusalem prize for the Freedom of the Individual in Society in the aftermath of Israeli military action in Gaza. In his acceptance speech, he related a story about something he keeps in mind while writing: “Be...

Forthcoming book from Bill McKibben: Here Comes the Sun. “Energy from the sun and wind is suddenly the cheapest power on the planet and growing faster than any energy source in history — if we can keep accelerating the pace, we have a chance.”

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Bill McKibben: Rooftop Solar Is a Miracle. Why Are We Killing It With Red Tape? In many countries, getting rooftop solar or “balcony solar” can be as easy going to the store, buying some panels, and plugging them in. In the US, it’s not so easy.

Rebecca Solnit: The renewable energy revolution is a feat of technology. “It is nothing less than astonishing and unbelievable that we have achieved so much progress in so little time.”

Escape newsletter inbox chaos and algorithmic surveillance by building your own enshittification-proof newspaper from the writers you already read

Ross Anderson writes about how scientific empires, from the ancient Sumerians to the Nazis to the Soviet Union in the 1950s, have crumbled (or been willfully dismantled by ideologues) and the clear signs that the same thing is happening here in the United States under the co...

Mark Zuckerberg, concluding a 600-word essay ostentatiously typeset in the style of web pages circa 1994^*:

Meta believes strongly in building personal superintelligence that empowers everyone. We have the resources and the expertise to build the massive infrastructure required, and the capability and will to deliver new technology to billions of people across our products. I’m excited to focus Meta’s efforts towards building this future.

What about the metaverse? Wasn’t that the thing? What Zuckerberg, and thus Meta, actually believe strongly in is jumping on whatever trend becomes a hype bubble. The company’s soul is empty.

* Actual web pages from 1994 didn’t include nearly a megabyte of JavaScript to display 3 kilobytes of text.

Link: meta.com/superintelligence/

Chance Miller, 9to5Mac: Apple has voiced its opposition to the case many times over the last year. Now, it has officially filed its answer to the DOJ’s antitrust complaint, pushing back forcefully against the allegations. As a refresher, the DOJ’s antitrust lawsuit focu...

Side effect of the Tour de France: pro riders gobbling up all the Strava top times (King of the Mountains) across France: “1,809 KOMs nabbed by the pros during the three weeks of racing”.

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How conspiracy theories about COVID’s origins are hampering our ability to prevent the next pandemic. “Evidence hasn’t emerged” to support that idea that SARS-CoV-2 originated in a laboratory. Here’s what the evidence says.

Ollama's new app

Ollama has been one of my favorite ways to run local models for a while - it makes it really easy to download models, and it's smart about keeping them resident in memory while they are being used and then cleaning them out after they stop receiving traffic.

The one missing feature to date has been an interface: Ollama has been exclusively command-line, which is fine for the CLI literate among us and not much use for everyone else.

They've finally fixed that! The new app's interface is accessible from the existing system tray menu and lets you chat with any of your installed models. Vision models can accept images through the new interface as well.

Via Hacker News

Tags: ai, generative-ai, local-llms, llms, ollama

The Wirecutter’s list of the best canned cocktails. Very interested to hear people’s thoughts on this. None of these are available at my local liquor store, but we do have Barr Hill’s canned G&T, which is the best canned cocktail I’ve ever tasted.

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How to Leave Substack. “Unfortunately, Substack willingly platforms, and allows bad actors to monetize, hate speech and misinformation. You should probably leave Substack.”

“Israel has deliberately starved the people of Gaza. It couldn’t have done it without the west’s help. The current hand-wringing by Keir Starmer and other western politicians is empty bluster. They knew what was happening all along.”

Photos: Starvation and Chaos in Gaza. “Israel’s blockade of most food and aid, along with distribution difficulties inside the Gaza Strip, have driven many of Gaza’s 2 million Palestinians to the brink of starvation.”

When you vibe code, you are incurring tech debt as fast as the LLM can spit it out. Which is why vibe coding is perfect for prototypes and throwaway projects: It's only legacy code if you have to maintain it! [...]

The worst possible situation is to have a non-programmer vibe code a large project that they intend to maintain. This would be the equivalent of giving a credit card to a child without first explaining the concept of debt. [...]

If you don't understand the code, your only recourse is to ask AI to fix it for you, which is like paying off credit card debt with another credit card.

— Steve Krouse, Vibe code is legacy code

Tags: vibe-coding, ai-assisted-programming, generative-ai, steve-krouse, ai, llms