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Using AI to analyse photos and send alerts if I've forgotten to take the bins out isn't going to revolutionise my life, no more so than using it to describe who's at the mailbox when a letter arrives and at the front door when

Untangling the myths and mysteries of Dvorak and QWERTY. (First online appearance of a chapter originally published in printed form in December 2023. 8,000 words. 33 photos.)

Sideloading has been a hot topic for the last decade. Most recently, Google has announced further restrictions on the practice in Android. Many hundreds of comment threads have discussed these changes over the years. One point in particular is always made: “I should be able to run whatever code I want on hardware I own”. I agree entirely with this point, but within the context of this discussion it’s moot.

Claude Opus 4.1 and Opus 4 degraded quality Notable because often when people complain of degraded model quality it turns out to be unfounded - Anthropic in the past have emphasized that they don't change the model weights after releasing them without changing the version nu...

Eerder schreef ik in de Volkskrant dat het niet makkelijk is om als kamerlid iets te bereiken: Het inhoudelijk gemotiveerde Kamerlid loopt grote kans om geknipt en geschoren te worden door het kabinet. Als Kamerleden in een debat inhoudelijke vragen stellen aan een minister staan ze er vrijwel alleen voor. Maar de minister heeft op de achtergrond een zaal vol beleidsmedewerkers die live een antwoord op alles kunnen componeren, inclusief antwoorden waarmee het Kamerlid geheel het bos in wordt gestuurd.

Today's links A weekend's worth of links: Short hits for a long weekend. Object permanence: Floppy disk CD sleeves; Rules for radicals; California's preventable fires; Muppet Haunted Mansion; Wells Fargo steals rescued Nazi loot; Texas abortion release. Upcoming appearances: ...

LLMs are intelligence without agency—what we might call "vox sine persona": voice without person. Not the voice of someone, not even the collective voice of many someones, but a voice emanating from no one at all.

— Benj Edwards

Tags: benj-edwards, ai-personality, generative-ai, ai, llms

Talk Python: Celebrating Django's 20th Birthday With Its Creators

I recorded this podcast episode recently to celebrate Django's 20th birthday with Adrian Holovaty, Will Vincent, Jeff Triplet, and Thibaud Colas.

We didn’t know that it was a web framework. We thought it was a tool for building local newspaper websites. [...]

Django’s original tagline was ‘Web development on journalism deadlines’. That’s always been my favorite description of the project.

Tags: adrian-holovaty, django, python, podcast-appearances

The perils of vibe coding I was interviewed by Elaine Moore for this opinion piece in the Financial Times, which ended up in the print edition of the paper too! I picked up a copy yesterday: From the article, with links added by me to relevant projects: Willison thinks the...

Since I love collecting questionable analogies for LLMs, here's a new one I just came up with: an LLM is a lossy encyclopedia. They have a huge array of facts compressed into them but that compression is lossy (see also Ted Chiang). The key thing is to develop an intuition f...

For the past eight months, I’ve been working on my book, Refactoring English: Effective Writing for Software Developers. I’m publishing the book incrementally as I write, which means readers give me feedback about the book in real time.

I started writing the chapters I felt most confident readers would like, but now that I’m about 50% complete, I want to make sure the remaining chapters are things my readers actually want to learn.

Python: The Documentary

New documentary about the origins of the Python programming language - 84 minutes long, built around extensive interviews with Guido van Rossum and others who were there at the start and during the subsequent journey.

Tags: computer-history, guido-van-rossum, python, youtube

Today's links The capitalism of fools: Trump's mirror-world New Deal. Hey look at this: Delights to delectate. Object permanence: IBM's fabric design; Nixon Cthulu; Surveillance capitalism is capitalism, with surveillance; Dismaland ad; Outdoor ed vs TB; Mathematicians' fave ...

Last month, KrebsOnSecurity tracked the sudden emergence of hundreds of polished online gaming and wagering websites that lure people with free credits and eventually abscond with any cryptocurrency funds deposited by players. We've since learned that these scam gambling sites have proliferated thanks to a new Russian affiliate program called "Gambler Panel" that bills itself as a "soulless project that is made for profit."

it offers lessons on your nature

How to install TrueNAS on a Raspberry Pi Jeff Geerling August 28, 2025

Earlier this year, I wrote about how I rescued a special recovery partition from an old Macintosh Performa 550’s dead hard drive. This partition had been lost to time and it was a race to try to save it before the remaining Performa 550 machines out there with their original hard drives were reformatted or […]

This post discusses how dividing an odd number of CPU cores by 2 in JavaScript creates decimal thread counts, causing invalid responses in Anubis. The fix truncates decimal values using Math.trunc.

We were back in London for a few days and yesterday had a day of culture. First up: the brand new V&A East Storehouse museum in the Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park near Stratford, which opened on May 31st this year. This is a delightful new format for a museum. The building...