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October 2025 sponsors-only newsletter
I just hit send on the October edition of my sponsors-only monthly newsletter. If you are a sponsor (or if you start a sponsorship now) you can access a copy here. In the newsletter this month:
- Coding agents and "vibe engineering"
- Claude Code for web
- NVIDIA DGX Spark
- Claude Skills
- OpenAI DevDay and GitHub Universe
- Python 3.14
- October in Chinese Al model releases
- Miscellaneous extras
- Tools I'm using at the moment
Here's a copy of the September newsletter as a preview of what you'll get. Pay $10/month to stay a month ahead of the free copy!
Tags: newsletter
Claude Code Can Debug Low-level Cryptography
Quoting Julian Andres Klode
I plan to introduce hard Rust dependencies and Rust code into APT, no earlier than May 2026. This extends at first to the Rust compiler and standard library, and the Sequoia ecosystem.
In particular, our code to parse .deb, .ar, .tar, and the HTTP signature verification code would strongly benefit from memory safe languages and a stronger approach to unit testing.
If you maintain a port without a working Rust toolchain, please ensure it has one within the next 6 months, or sunset the port.
— Julian Andres Klode, debian-devel mailing list
Tags: open-source, debian, rust, linux
CoreWeave adds Marimo to their 2025 acquisition spree
Curiosity-driven blogging
My piece this morning about the Marimo acquisition is an example of a variant of a TIL - I didn't know much about CoreWeave, the acquiring company, so I poked around to answer my own questions and then wrote up what I learned as a short post. Curiosity-driven blogging if you like.
Marimo is Joining CoreWeave
Quoting François Chollet
To really understand a concept, you have to "invent" it yourself in some capacity. Understanding doesn't come from passive content consumption. It is always self-built. It is an active, high-agency, self-directed process of creating and debugging your own mental models.
Tags: francois-chollet, teaching
Introducing SWE-1.5: Our Fast Agent Model
MiniMax M2 & Agent: Ingenious in Simplicity
Composer: Building a fast frontier model with RL
Hacking the WiFi-enabled color screen GitHub Universe conference badge
Quoting Aaron Boodman
Claude doesn't make me much faster on the work that I am an expert on. Maybe 15-20% depending on the day.
It's the work that I don't know how to do and would have to research. Or the grunge work I don't even want to do. On this it is hard to even put a number on. Many of the projects I do with Claude day to day I just wouldn't have done at all pre-Claude.
Infinity% improvement in productivity on those.
Tags: ai-assisted-programming, claude, generative-ai, ai, llms, aaron-boodman
The PSF has withdrawn a $1.5 million proposal to US government grant program
GenAI Image Editing Showdown
Sora might have a 'pervert' problem on its hands
Setting up a codebase for working with coding agents
Quoting Claude Docs
If you have an
AGENTS.mdfile, you can source it in yourCLAUDE.mdusing@AGENTS.mdto maintain a single source of truth.
— Claude Docs, with the official answer to standardizing on AGENTS.md
Tags: coding-agents, anthropic, claude, claude-code, generative-ai, ai, llms
Visual Features Across Modalities: SVG and ASCII Art Reveal Cross-Modal Understanding
claude_code_docs_map.md
Quoting Geoffrey Litt
OpenAI no longer has to preserve all of its ChatGPT data, with some exceptions
OpenAI no longer has to preserve all of its ChatGPT data, with some exceptions
This is a relief:Federal judge Ona T. Wang filed a new order on October 9 that frees OpenAI of an obligation to "preserve and segregate all output log data that would otherwise be deleted on a going forward basis."
I wrote about this in June. OpenAI were compelled by a court order to preserve all output, even from private chats, in case it became relevant to the ongoing New York Times lawsuit.
Here are those "some exception":
The judge in the case said that any chat logs already saved under the previous order would still be accessible and that OpenAI is required to hold on to any data related to ChatGPT accounts that have been flagged by the NYT.
Via Theo Browne
Tags: law, new-york-times, privacy, ai, openai, generative-ai, llms
Quoting AWS
Video: Building a tool to copy-paste share terminal sessions using Claude Code for web
Dane Stuckey (OpenAI CISO) on prompt injection risks for ChatGPT Atlas
Living dangerously with Claude
SLOCCount in WebAssembly
Don't let Claude Code delete your session logs
Claude Code stores full logs of your sessions as newline-delimited JSON in ~/.claude/projects/encoded-directory/*.jsonl on your machine. I currently have 379MB of these!
Here's an example jsonl file which I extracted from my Deepseek-OCR on NVIDIA Spark project. I have a little vibe-coded tool for converting those into Markdown which produces results like this.
Unfortunately Claude Code has a nasty default behavior of deleting these after 30 days! You can't disable this entirely, but you can at least delay it for 274 years by adding this to your ~/.claude/settings.json file:
{
"cleanupPeriodDays": 99999
}
Claude Code's settings are documented here.
Tags: coding-agents, anthropic, claude-code, generative-ai, ai, llms