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Rebecca Solnit: “The United States is being murdered, and it’s an inside job. Every department, every branch, every bureau and function of the federal government is being fatally corrupted or altogether dismantled or disabled.”

Hungarian Opposition Ousts Viktor Orbán After 16 Years in Power. “Magyar…pledged to repair Hungary’s strained relationship with the EU, crack down on corruption and funnel funds towards long-neglected public services.”

Interviews with five novelists (Jesmyn Ward, Joyce Carol Oates, Jhumpa Lahiri, Ottessa Moshfegh, Margaret Atwood) on writing something true with fiction. Oates: “If you could read Toni Morrison, why would you read AI?”

Caffeine tricks your brain into staying awake by blocking fatigue signals. It boosts focus,... until it doesn’t. Here’s how it works, what happens in your brain and why more isn’t always better. #kurzgesagt #inanutshell #kurzgesagt_inanutshell #learnwithshorts #science #bio...

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The problem is that LLMs inherently lack the virtue of laziness. Work costs nothing to an LLM. LLMs do not feel a need to optimize for their own (or anyone's) future time, and will happily dump more and more onto a layercake of garbage. Left unchecked, LLMs will make systems larger, not better — appealing to perverse vanity metrics, perhaps, but at the cost of everything that matters.

As such, LLMs highlight how essential our human laziness is: our finite time forces us to develop crisp abstractions in part because we don't want to waste our (human!) time on the consequences of clunky ones.

— Bryan Cantrill, The peril of laziness lost

Tags: bryan-cantrill, ai, llms, ai-assisted-programming, generative-ai

Thanks to a tip from Rahim Nathwani, here's a uv run recipe for transcribing an audio file on macOS using the 10.28 GB Gemma 4 E2B model with MLX and mlx-vlm: uv run --python 3.13 --with mlx_vlm --with torchvision --with gradio \ mlx_vlm.generate \ --model google/gemma-4...

As a foreign correspondent, Kelly McEvers has found herself detained by the KGB, held up at ISIS checkpoints, and on the front line in Syria. But it was a much more mundane experience that left her feeling in over her head years later. 

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The New York Times: In a surprisingly early and gracious concession speech in Budapest, Mr. Orban congratulated the opposition saying, “The responsibility and opportunity to govern were not given to us.” But, he also made a vow: “We are not giving up. Never, never, never...

This review may contain spoilers. Tap or click to view.

This was an entertaining film! Performances are great. It's funny and absurd. How it's made reminded me of Ari Aster movies. And it seemed to me like they made a whole movie out of that dialogue Nic Cage has with the fine dining chef in Pig. Anyway. What makes it miss a recommendation, is maybe that I found it too serious at times and the lack of fleshing out all those guest characters more. And the arguments with which she escapes are kind of a cliché. But man, that burger looked tasty! And how she enjoys it on the boat when all the others explode was actually a good ending IMHO.

My thanks to Typotheque for sponsoring last week at DF to promote Zed, their incredible new font superfamily. Zed is a type system that was developed with one question in mind: what do readers actually need? Not what looks good in a type specimen, but what works for the wide...

Lot's of snow. Shooting digitally again. Bouldering. Band rehearsals. (40 photos)

More vintage graphic-design weekend fun — this time, a collection of Milwaukee bus tickets from the late 1940s to early 1950s, collected on the Present & Correct blog. So much variety in the colors and typography, but yet they all feel branded together. Think about the care and thought here. Whoever was making these was designing one for each week, every week — and it’s so clear they loved making them. Even something as mundane as weekly bus passes can be exuberant expressions of fun.

(Via Ian K. Rogers, who particularly notes the tickets’ integration of hand-lettering with typefaces.)

Link: presentandcorrect.com/blogs/blog/golden-tickets

SQLite 3.53.0

SQLite 3.52.0 was withdrawn so this is a pretty big release with a whole lot of accumulated user-facing and internal improvements. Some that stood out to me:

• ALTER TABLE can now add and remove NOT NULL and CHECK constraints - I've previously used my own sqlite-utils transform() method for this.
• New json_array_insert() function and its jsonb equivalent.
• Significant improvements to CLI mode, including result formatting.

The result formatting improvements come from a new library, the Query Results Formatter. I had Claude Code (on my phone) compile that to WebAssembly and build this playground interface for trying that out.

Via Lobste.rs

Tags: sql, sqlite

Tool: SQLite Query Result Formatter Demo

See my notes on SQLite 3.53.0. This playground provides a UI for trying out the various rendering options for SQL result tables from the new Query Result Formatter library, compiled to WebAssembly.

Tags: tools, sqlite