Autoresearching Apple's "LLM in a Flash" to run Qwen 397B locally Here's a fascinating piece of research by Dan Woods, who managed to get a custom version of Qwen3.5-397B-A17B running at 5.5+ tokens/second on a 48GB MacBook Pro M3 Max despite that model taking up 209GB (120G...

Release: datasette 1.0a26

Datasette now has a mechanism for assigning semantic column types. Built-in column types include url, email, and json, and plugins can register additional types using the new register_column_types() plugin hook.

Snowflake Cortex AI Escapes Sandbox and Executes Malware PromptArmor report on a prompt injection attack chain in Snowflake's Cortex Agent, now fixed. The attack started when a Cortex user asked the agent to review a GitHub repository that had a prompt injection attack hidde...

Great news—we’ve hit our (very modest) performance goals for the CPython JIT over a year early for macOS AArch64, and a few months early for x86_64 Linux. The 3.15 alpha JIT is about 11-12% faster on macOS AArch64 than the tail calling interpreter, and 5-6%faster than the standard interpreter on x86_64 Linux.

— Ken Jin, Python 3.15’s JIT is now back on track

Tags: python

OpenAI today: Introducing GPT‑5.4 mini and nano. These models join GPT-5.4 which was released two weeks ago. OpenAI's self-reported benchmarks show the new 5.4-nano out-performing their previous GPT-5 mini model when run at maximum reasoning effort. The new mini is also 2x f...

Release: llm 0.29

Adds support for OpenAI's new models gpt-5.4, gpt-5.4-mini, and gpt-5.4-nano.

If you do not understand the ticket, if you do not understand the solution, or if you do not understand the feedback on your PR, then your use of LLM is hurting Django as a whole. [...]

For a reviewer, it’s demoralizing to communicate with a facade of a human.

This is because contributing to open source, especially Django, is a communal endeavor. Removing your humanity from that experience makes that endeavor more difficult. If you use an LLM to contribute to Django, it needs to be as a complementary tool, not as your vehicle.

— Tim Schilling, Give Django your time and money, not your tokens

Tags: ai-ethics, open-source, generative-ai, ai, django, llms

Agentic Engineering Patterns > LLMs are restricted by their context limit - how many tokens they can fit in their working memory at any given time. These values have not increased much over the past two years even as the LLMs themselves have seen dramatic improvements...

Introducing Mistral Small 4 Big new release from Mistral today (despite the name) - a new Apache 2 licensed 119B parameter (Mixture-of-Experts, 6B active) model which they describe like this: Mistral Small 4 is the first Mistral model to unify the capabilities of our flagsh...

Use subagents and custom agents in Codex Subagents were announced in general availability today for OpenAI Codex, after several weeks of preview behind a feature flag. They're very similar to the Claude Code implementation, with default subagents for "explorer", "worker" and...

The point of the blackmail exercise was to have something to describe to policymakers—results that are visceral enough to land with people, and make misalignment risk actually salient in practice for people who had never thought about it before.

— A member of Anthropic’s alignment-science team, as told to Gideon Lewis-Kraus

Tags: ai-ethics, anthropic, claude, generative-ai, ai, llms

Tidbit: the software-based camera indicator light in the MacBook Neo runs in the secure exclave¹ part of the chip, so it is almost as secure as the hardware indicator light. What that means in practice is that even a kernel-level exploit would not be able to turn on the camera without the light appearing on screen. It runs in a privileged environment separate from the kernel and blits the light directly onto the screen hardware.

— Guilherme Rambo, in a text message to John Gruber

Tags: hardware, apple, privacy, john-gruber

Coding agents for data analysis Here's the handout I prepared for my NICAR 2026 workshop "Coding agents for data analysis" - a three hour session aimed at data journalists demonstrating ways that tools like Claude Code and OpenAI Codex can be used to explore, analyze and cle...

Agentic Engineering Patterns > As with any tool, understanding how coding agents work under the hood can help you make better decisions about how to apply them. A coding agent is a piece of software that acts as a harness for an LLM, extending that LLM with additional...

Museum: John M. Mossman Lock Collection

The General Society of Mechanics and Tradesmen of the City of New York is home to the John M. Mossman Lock Collection, likely the world's largest collection of antique bank locks.

Tags: museums

Agentic Engineering Patterns > I use the term agentic engineering to describe the practice of developing software with the assistance of coding agents. What are coding agents? They're agents that can both write and execute code. Popular examples include Claude Code, O...

GitHub’s slopocalypse – the flood of AI-generated spam PRs and issues – has made Jazzband’s model of open membership and shared push access untenable.

Jazzband was designed for a world where the worst case was someone accidentally merging the wrong PR. In a world where only 1 in 10 AI-generated PRs meets project standards, where curl had to shut down its bug bounty because confirmation rates dropped below 5%, and where GitHub’s own response was a kill switch to disable pull requests entirely – an organization that gives push access to everyone who joins simply can’t operate safely anymore.

— Jannis Leidel, Sunsetting Jazzband

Tags: ai-ethics, open-source, python, ai, github

I was a speaker last month at the Pragmatic Summit in San Francisco, where I participated in a fireside chat session about agentic engineering hosted by Eric Lui from Statsig. The video is available on YouTube. Here are my highlights from the conversation. Stages of AI a...

1M context is now generally available for Opus 4.6 and Sonnet 4.6

Here's what surprised me:

Standard pricing now applies across the full 1M window for both models, with no long-context premium.

OpenAI and Gemini both charge more for prompts where the token count goes above a certain point - 200,000 for Gemini 3.1 Pro and 272,000 for GPT-5.4.

Tags: ai, generative-ai, llms, anthropic, claude, llm-pricing, long-context

Simply put: It’s a big mess, and no off-the-shelf accounting software does what I need. So after years of pain, I finally sat down last week and started to build my own. It took me about five days. I am now using the best piece of accounting software I’ve ever used. It’s bla...

Shopify/liquid: Performance: 53% faster parse+render, 61% fewer allocations PR from Shopify CEO Tobias Lütke against Liquid, Shopify's open source Ruby template engine that was somewhat inspired by Django when Tobi first created it back in 2005. Tobi found dozens of new perf...

MALUS - Clean Room as a Service

Brutal satire on the whole vibe-porting license washing thing (previously):

Finally, liberation from open source license obligations.

Our proprietary AI robots independently recreate any open source project from scratch. The result? Legally distinct code with corporate-friendly licensing. No attribution. No copyleft. No problems..

I admit it took me a moment to confirm that this was a joke. Just too on-the-nose.

Via Hacker News

Tags: open-source, ai, generative-ai, llms, ai-ethics

Coding After Coders: The End of Computer Programming as We Know It Epic piece on AI-assisted development by Clive Thompson for the New York Times Magazine, who spoke to more than 70 software developers from companies like Google, Amazon, Microsoft, Apple, plus other individu...

Here's what I think is happening: AI-assisted coding is exposing a divide among developers that was always there but maybe less visible. Before AI, both camps were doing the same thing every day. Writing code by hand. Using the same editors, the same languages, the same pul...

Sorting algorithms Today in animated explanations built using Claude: I've always been a fan of animated demonstrations of sorting algorithms so I decided to spin some up on my phone using Claude Artifacts, then added Python's timsort algorithm, then a feature to run them al...

It is hard for less experienced developers to appreciate how rarely architecting for future requirements / applications turns out net-positive.

— John Carmack, a tweet in June 2021

Tags: john-carmack, software-engineering, yagni

Agentic Engineering Patterns > Many developers worry that outsourcing their code to AI tools will result in a drop in quality, producing bad code that's churned out fast enough that decision makers are willing to overlook its flaws. If adopting coding agents demonstra...

Production query plans without production data Radim Marek describes the new pg_restore_relation_stats() and pg_restore_attribute_stats() functions that were introduced in PostgreSQL 18 in September 2025. The PostgreSQL query planner makes use of internal statistics to help ...

A recurring concern I've seen regarding LLMs for programming is that they will push our technology choices towards the tools that are best represented in their training data, making it harder for new, better tools to break through the noise. This was certainly the case a cou...

What I had not realized is that extremely short exposures to a relatively simple computer program could induce powerful delusional thinking in quite normal people.

— Joseph Weizenbaum, creator of ELIZA, in 1976 (via)

Tags: ai-ethics, ai, computer-history, internet-archive