FeedCity

An application of algebraic extensions of the rationals: cheating (arguably) at elementary geometry puzzles.

This morning, working entirely on my phone, I scraped a conference website and vibe coded up an alternative UI for interacting with the schedule using a combination of OpenAI Codex and Claude Artifacts. This weekend is Open Sauce 2025, the third edition of the Bay Area confe...

Can optical illusions take you outside the human color gamut?

Here’s Jony Ive in his Stripe interview:

What we make stands testament to who we are. What we make describes our values. It describes our preoccupations. It describes beautiful succinctly our preoccupation.

I’d never really noticed the connection between these two words: occupation and preoccupation.

What comes before occupation? Pre-occupation.

What comes before what you do for a living? What you think about. What you’re preoccupied with.

What you think about will drive you towards what you work on.

So when you’re asking yourself, “What comes next? What should I work on?”

Another way of asking that question is, “What occupies my thinking right now?”

And if what you’re occupied with doesn’t align with what you’re preoccupied with, perhaps it's time for a change.

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The modern workforce shouldn't be flinging copies to each other. A copy is outdated the moment it is downloaded. A copy has no protection against illicit reading. A copy can never be revoked.

Data shouldn't live in a file on a laptop. It shouldn't be a single file on a network share. Data is a living beast. Data needs to live in a database - not an Excel file. Access should be granted for each according to their needs.

— Terence Eden, We've got to stop sending files to each other

Tags: terence-eden, files

Voxtral Mistral released their first audio-input models yesterday: Voxtral Small and Voxtral Mini. These state‑of‑the‑art speech understanding models are available in two sizes—a 24B variant for production-scale applications and a 3B variant for local and edge deployments....

One of the greatest fears we all have in the wake of a data breach is having our identity stolen. Nefarious parties gather our personal information exposed in the breach, approach financial institutions and then impersonate us to do stuff like this:

So I recently somewhat had my identity stolen,

Adding GPS and off-grid maps to my Meshtastic T-Deck Jeff Geerling July 16, 2025

Alright, friends, in honor of attending the (alleged) last-ever Wu-Tang show at Madison Square Garden, I thought it appropriate to tell the story of the time I got to see the greatest, most hype, most chaotic energy hip hop show that I've ever seen, or that I ever _will...

common-pile/caselaw_access_project

Enormous openly licensed (I believe this is almost all public domain) training dataset of US legal cases:

This dataset contains 6.7 million cases from the Caselaw Access Project and Court Listener. The Caselaw Access Project consists of nearly 40 million pages of U.S. federal and state court decisions and judges’ opinions from the last 365 years. In addition, Court Listener adds over 900 thousand cases scraped from 479 courts.

It's distributed as gzipped newline-delimited JSON.

This was gathered as part of the Common Pile and used as part of the training dataset for the Comma family of LLMs.

Via @enricoshippole

Tags: law, ai, generative-ai, llms, training-data

Fell in a hole, got out. This is an absolutely fascinating entrepreneurial war story by Medium CEO Tony Stubblebine, describing how they went from losing $2.6 million per month in 2022 to being monthly profitable since mid 2024. By the middle of 2022, the readers were compl...

Analysing Pixelmelt's Javascript Virtualisation Obfuscation - A Research Study

Today's links Ellen Ullman's "Close to the Machine": "Technophilia and Its Discontents." Hey look at this: Delights to delectate. Object permanence: Unethical ethicists; McKinsey covid profiteering; Homeschool-to-prison pipeline Upcoming appearances: Where to find me. Recent ...

Shipping WebGPU on Windows in Firefox 141

WebGPU is coming to Mac and Linux soon as well:

Although Firefox 141 enables WebGPU only on Windows, we plan to ship WebGPU on Mac and Linux in the coming months, and finally on Android.

From this article I learned that it's already available in Firefox Nightly:

Note that WebGPU has been available in Firefox Nightly on all platforms other than Android for quite some time.

I tried the most recent Nightly on my Mac and now the Github Issue Generator running locally w/ SmolLM2 & WebGPU demo (previously) works! Firefox stable gives me an error message saying "Error: WebGPU is not supported in your current environment, but it is necessary to run the WebLLM engine."

The Firefox implementation is based on wgpu, an open source Rust WebGPU library.

Via Hacker News

Tags: browsers, firefox, mozilla, rust, webgpu

Documenting what you're willing to support (and not)

Devious company culture hack from Rachel Kroll:

At some point, I realized that if I wrote a wiki page and documented the things that we were willing to support, I could wait about six months and then it would be like it had always been there. Enough people went through the revolving doors of that place such that six months' worth of employee turnover was sufficient to make it look like a whole other company. All I had to do was write it, wait a bit, then start citing it when needed.

You can have an unreasonable amount of influence by being the person who writes stuff down.

Via Hacker News

Tags: documentation, rachel-kroll

For software developers, there’s tremendous value in writing effective emails. Good emails save time, reduce misunderstandings, and earn you recognition within your company.

Alright, friends, in honor of attending the (alleged) last-ever Wu-Tang show at Madison Square Garden, I thought it appropriate to tell the story of the time I got to see the greatest, most hype, most chaotic energy hip hop show that I've ever seen, or that I ever will ...

Today's links When Google's slop meets webslop, search stops: Botshit, botshit everywhere. Hey look at this: Delights to delectate. Object permanence: White Wolf's pay-to-play; Penn on artistic satisfaction, California antitrust v Google; Project 2025's true meaning Upcoming ...

Reflections on OpenAI Calvin French-Owen spent just over a year working at OpenAI, during which time the organization grew from 1,000 to 3,000 people and Calvin found himself in "the top 30% by tenure". His reflections on leaving are fascinating - absolutely crammed with det...

xAI: "We spotted a couple of issues with Grok 4 recently that we immediately investigated & mitigated" They continue: One was that if you ask it "What is your surname?" it doesn't have one so it searches the internet leading to undesirable results, such as when its sear...