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The Intel 285K CPU in my high-end 2025 Linux PC died again! 😡 Notably, this was the replacement CPU for the original 285K that died in March, and after reading through the reviews of Intel CPUs on my electronics store of choice, many of which (!) mention CPU replacements, I ...

These are my notes and expanded thoughts from this month’s Space News segment on ABC Radio Hobart and ABC Northern Tasmania. Every month I join Lucie Cutting on Sunday mornings to chat about what’s happening above and beyond.

Here’s what we discussed, plus some of my notes, from this edition of the programme:

Space Command: Politics Over Strategy

President Trump announced he’s moving US Space Command from Colorado Springs to Huntsville, Alabama—reversing the Biden administration’s decision and bringing domestic politics into military space strategy. This isn’t just bureaucratic reshuffling, it’s a $1 billion economic decision affecting 1,400 jobs and America’s space defence capabilities.

"Don't use chatbots as search engines" was great advice for several years... until it wasn't. I wrote about how good OpenAI's o3 was at using its Bing-backed search tool back in April. GPT-5 feels even better. I've started calling it my Research Goblin. I can assign a task t...

I am once again shocked at how much better image retrieval performance you can get if you embed highly opinionated summaries of an image, a summary that came out of a visual language model, than using CLIP embeddings themselves. If you tell the LLM that the summary is going to be embedded and used to do search downstream. I had one system go from 28% recall at 5 using CLIP to 75% recall at 5 using an LLM summary.

— Jason Liu

Tags: vision-llms, generative-ai, ai, embeddings, llms, jason-liu

Kimi-K2-Instruct-0905 New not-quite-MIT licensed model from Chinese Moonshot AI, a follow-up to the highly regarded Kimi-K2 model they released in July. This one is an incremental improvement - I've seen it referred to online as "Kimi K-2.1". It scores a little higher on a b...

Today's links Stock buybacks are stock swindles: Raising the value of a stock without raising the value of the company. Hey look at this: Delights to delectate. Object permanence: Marshmellow longtermism; Physicists are not epidemiologists; CO asphyxiation accounts for half o...

The noted Diné (Navajo) weaver Marilou Schultz recently completed an intricate weaving composed of thick white lines on a black background, punctuated with reddish-orange diamonds. Although this striking rug may appear abstract, it shows the internal circuitry of a tiny sili...

RDF has the same problems as the SQL schemas with information scattered. What fields mean requires documentation. There - they have a name on a person. What name? Given? Legal? Chosen? Preferred for this use case? You only have one ID for Apple eh? Companies are complex to ...

Anthropic to pay $1.5 billion to authors in landmark AI settlement I wrote about the details of this case when it was found that Anthropic's training on book content was fair use, but they needed to have purchased individual copies of the books first... and they had seeded t...

The chairman of the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) last week sent a letter to Google's CEO demanding to know why Gmail was blocking messages from Republican senders while allegedly failing to block similar missives supporting Democrats. The letter followed media reports accusing Gmail of disproportionately flagging messages from the GOP fundraising platform WinRed and sending them to the spam folder. But according to experts who track daily spam volumes worldwide, WinRed's messages are getting blocked more because its methods of blasting email are increasingly way more spammy than that of ActBlue, the fundraising platform for Democrats.

Today's links Why Wikipedia works: Agreeing on source notability, not facts. Hey look at this: Delights to delectate. Object permanence: Zero History; XKCD cake; Kazaa judgment. Upcoming appearances: Where to find me. Recent appearances: Where I've been. Latest books: You kee...

Today I’m 50 years old! That feels absurd, because it’s a big number, the kind of round number that people usually obscure by saying “I’m celebrating a big birthday” or something vague like that. But, since you only get so many of these to celebrate, I’m using this chance to...

After struggling for years trying to figure out why people think [Cloudflare] Durable Objects are complicated, I'm increasingly convinced that it's just that they sound complicated.

Feels like we can solve 90% of it by renaming DurableObject to StatefulWorker?

It's just a worker that has state. And because it has state, it also has to have a name, so that you can route to the specific worker that has the state you care about. There may be a sqlite database attached, there may be a container attached. Those are just part of the state.

— Kenton Varda

Tags: kenton-varda, sqlite, cloudflare

On aligning price with value, and product with market.

Introducing EmbeddingGemma

Brand new open weights (under the slightly janky Gemma license) 308M parameter embedding model from Google:

Based on the Gemma 3 architecture, EmbeddingGemma is trained on 100+ languages and is small enough to run on less than 200MB of RAM with quantization.

It's available via sentence-transformers, llama.cpp, MLX, Ollama, LMStudio and more.

As usual for these smaller models there's a Transformers.js demo (via) that runs directly in the browser (in Chrome variants) - Semantic Galaxy loads a ~400MB model and then lets you run embeddings against hundreds of text sentences, map them in a 2D space and run similarity searches to zoom to points within that space.

Tags: google, ai, embeddings, transformers-js, gemma

Any time I share my collection of tools built using vibe coding and AI-assisted development (now at 124, here's the definitive list) someone will inevitably complain that they're mostly trivial. A lot of them are! Here's a list of some that I think are genuinely useful and w...

Beyond Vibe Coding Back in May I wrote Two publishers and three authors fail to understand what “vibe coding” means where I called out the authors of two forthcoming books on "vibe coding" for abusing that term to refer to all forms of AI-assisted development, when Not all A...

(I present to you my stream of consciousness on the topic of casing as it applies to the web platform.) I’m reading about the new command and commandfor attributes — which I’m super excited about, declarative behavior invocation in HTML? YES PLEASE!! — and one thing that str...

Today's links Canny Valley: My little art-book is here! Hey look at this: Delights to delectate. Object permanence: Ballmer throws a chair; Bruce Sterling on Singapore; RIP David Graeber; Big Car warns of lethal Right to Repair. Upcoming appearances: Where to find me. Recent ...

I bought the cheapest EV (a used Nissan Leaf) Jeff Geerling September 4, 2025