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Back in 2021, a collector friend of ours was visiting a dusty warehouse in search of Apollo-era communications equipment. A box with NASA-style lights caught his eye—the "AGC Confirm" light suggested a connection with the Apollo Guidance Computer. Disappointingly, the box wa...

An AI tool that gets gold on the IMO is obviously immensely impressive. Does it mean math is “solved”? Is an AI-generated proof of the Riemann hypothesis clearly on the horizon? Obviously not. Worth keeping timescales in mind here: IMO competitors spend an average of 1.5 hr...

On Sunday, July 20, Microsoft Corp. issued an emergency security update for a vulnerability in SharePoint Server that is actively being exploited to compromise vulnerable organizations. The patch comes amid reports that malicious hackers have used the Sharepoint flaw to breach U.S. federal and state agencies, universities, and energy companies.

Today's links How my DRM-free principles left me owning the rights to a German audiobook: This isn't my usual crowdfunder! Hey look at this: Delights to delectate. Object permanence: Internet addiction, Dems fund DHS urban invasions, AI art and anti-cooption, FCC vs prison pr...

If I'm honest, I was never that keen on a merch store for Have I Been Pwned. It doesn't make the code run faster, nor does it load any more data breaches or add any useful features to the service whatsoever. But... people were keen. They

New Article Published I'm excited to announce that I have published a new, in-depth article on the BSD Cafe Journal: "WordPress on FreeBSD with BastilleBSD: A Secure Alternative to Linux/Docker". This piece explores how to create a robust and secure WordPress installation o...

Coding with LLMs in the summer of 2025 (an update) Salvatore Sanfilippo describes his current AI-assisted development workflow. He's all-in on LLMs for code review, exploratory prototyping, pair-design and writing "part of the code under your clear specifications", but warns...

Every day someone becomes a programmer because they figured out how to make ChatGPT build something. Lucky for us: in many of those cases the AI picks Python. We should treat this as an opportunity and anticipate an expansion in the kinds of people who might want to attend a Python conference. Yet many of these new programmers are not even aware that programming communities and conferences exist. It’s in the Python community’s interest to find ways to pull them in.

— Armin Ronacher

Tags: pycon, ai, llms, vibe-coding, ai-assisted-programming, python, generative-ai, armin-ronacher

Frontier LLMs such as Gemini 2.5 PRO, with their vast understanding of many topics and their ability to grasp thousands of lines of code in a few seconds, are able to extend and amplify the programmer capabilities. If you are able to describe problems in a clear way and, if y...

The Stripe situation is frustrating: by mandating an email address on all invoices, we're providing a channel that sends customer queries directly through to us rather than via our support portal, which already has the answers many people are raising tickets for. It's frustrating because it

There’s a bigger opportunity in computer science and programming (academically conveyed or self-taught) now than ever before, by far, in my opinion. The move to AI is like replacing shovels with bulldozers. Every business will benefit from this and they’ll need people to do it.

— Tim Sweeney, Epic Games

Tags: ai-assisted-programming, careers, ai

Today's links Conspiratorialism and neoliberalism: If "there is no such thing as society" then all evil must be the fault of evil individuals. Hey look at this: Delights to delectate. Object permanence: Groovy Congressional fallout shelter, MRI scans of food, "Network Nation"...

OpenAI's gold medal performance on the International Math Olympiad OpenAI research scientist Alexander Wei: I’m excited to share that our latest @OpenAI experimental reasoning LLM has achieved a longstanding grand challenge in AI: gold medal-level performance on the world’s...

A few months I added a tool to my blog for bulk-applying tags to old content. It works as an extension to my existing search interface, letting me run searches and then quickly apply a tag to relevant results.

Since adding this I've been much more aggressive in categorizing my older content, including adding new tags when I spot an interesting trend that warrants its own page.

Today I added system-prompts and applied it to 41 existing posts that talk about system prompts for LLM systems, including a bunch that directly quote system prompts that have been deliberately published or leaked.

Other tags I've added recently include press-quotes for times I've been quoted in the press, agent-definitions for my ongoing collection of different ways people define "agents" and paper-review for posts where I review an academic paper.

Tags: blogging, tagging

So one of my favorite things to do is give my coding agents more and more permissions and freedom, just to see how far I can push their productivity without going too far off the rails. It's a delicate balance. I haven't given them direct access to my bank account yet. But I did give one access to my Google Cloud production instances and systems. And it promptly wiped a production database password and locked my network. [...]

The thing is, autonomous coding agents are extremely powerful tools that can easily go down very wrong paths. Running them with permission checks disabled is dangerous and stupid, and you should only do it if you are willing to take dangerous and stupid risks with your code and/or production systems.

— Steve Yegge

Tags: vibe-coding, steve-yegge, generative-ai, ai-agents, ai, llms

One analyst recently speculated (via Ed Conard) that, based on Nvidia's latest datacenter sales figures, AI capex may be ~2% of US GDP in 2025, given a standard multiplier. [...]

Capital expenditures on AI data centers is likely around 20% of the peak spending on railroads, as a percentage of GDP, and it is still rising quickly. [...]

Regardless of what one thinks about the merits of AI or explosive datacenter expansion, the scale and pace of capital deployment into a rapidly depreciating technology is remarkable. These are not railroads—we aren’t building century-long infrastructure. AI datacenters are short-lived, asset-intensive facilities riding declining-cost technology curves, requiring frequent hardware replacement to preserve margins.

— Paul Kedrosky, Honey, AI Capex is Eating the Economy

Tags: ai-ethics, economics, ai, paul-kedrosky

Today's links MAGA crackup: Not just Epstein (but also Epstein). Hey look at this: Delights to delectate. Object permanence: Postapocalyptic Disney World, UK schools' "anti-radicalization" software; Blueleaks, EU kills US data-sharing Upcoming appearances: Where to find me. R...

How to run an LLM on your laptop I talked to Grace Huckins for this piece from MIT Technology Review on running local models. Apparently she enjoyed my dystopian backup plan! Simon Willison has a plan for the end of the world. It’s a USB stick, onto which he has loaded a co...

Backup: Beyond the Simple Copy For as long as I can remember, backup is something that has been underestimated by far too many people. Between flawed techniques, "Schrödinger's backups" (i.e., never tested, thus both valid and invalid at the same time), and conceptual error...

Security researchers recently revealed that the personal information of millions of people who applied for jobs at McDonald's was exposed after they guessed the password ("123456") for the fast food chain's account at Paradox.ai, a company that makes artificial intelligence based hiring chatbots used by many Fortune 500 companies. Paradox.ai said the security oversight was an isolated incident that did not affect its other customers, but recent security breaches involving its employees in Vietnam tell a more nuanced story.