FeedCity

My trepidation extends to complex literature searches. I use LLMs as secondary librarians when I’m doing research. They reliably find primary sources (articles, papers, etc.) that I miss in my initial searches.

But these searches are dangerous. I distrust LLM librarians. There is so much data in the world: you can (in good faith!) find evidence to support almost any position or conclusion. ChatGPT is not a human, and, unlike teachers & librarians & scholars, ChatGPT does not have a consistent, legible worldview. In my experience, it readily agrees with any premise you hand it — and brings citations. It may have read every article that can be read, but it has no real opinion — so it is not a credible expert.

— Ben Stolovitz, How I use AI

Tags: ai-assisted-search, llms, ai, generative-ai

Kimi K2 Thinking Chinese AI lab Moonshot's Kimi K2 established itself as one of the largest open weight models - 1 trillion parameters - back in July. They've now released the Thinking version, also a trillion parameters (MoE, 32B active) and also under their custom modified...

At the start of the year, most people loosely following AI probably knew of 0 [Chinese] AI labs. Now, and towards wrapping up 2025, I’d say all of DeepSeek, Qwen, and Kimi are becoming household names. They all have seasons of their best releases and different strengths. The...

For the past week, domains associated with the massive Aisuru botnet have repeatedly usurped Amazon, Apple, Google and Microsoft in Cloudflare's public ranking of the most frequently requested websites. Cloudflare responded by redacting Aisuru domain names from their top websites list. The chief executive at Cloudflare says Aisuru's overlords are using the botnet to boost their malicious domain rankings, while simultaneously attacking the company's domain name system (DNS) service.

I'm upgrading various plugins for compatibility with the new Datasette 1.0a20 alpha release and I decided to record a video of the process. This post accompanies that video with detailed additional notes. The datasette-checkbox plugin I picked a very simple plugin to ill...

I've been experimenting with a pattern for LLM usage recently that's working out really well: asynchronous code research tasks. Pick a research question, spin up an asynchronous coding agent and let it go and run some experiments and report back when it's done. Code resea...

Today's links The 40-year economic mistake that let Google conquer (and enshittify) the world: If reality doesn't fit the theory, ignore reality. Hey look at this: Delights to delectate. Object permanence: The Master Switch; Dueling useless machines; Chrome delists Symantec; ...

Mastodon 4.5.0 is here, and with it come some interesting changes that, in my opinion, might encourage more people to consider it for self-hosting their Fediverse community. While it may not be as lightweight and simple as other solutions (like snac or GoToSocial or many ot...

I hate hyperbolic news headlines about data breaches, but for the "2 Billion Email Addresses" headline to be hyperbolic, it'd need to be exaggerated or overstated - and it isn't. It's rounded up from the more precise number of 1,957,476,

Open redirect endpoint in Datasette prior to 0.65.2 and 1.0a21 This GitHub security advisory covers two new releases of Datasette that I shipped today, both addressing the same open redirect issue with a fix by James Jefferies. Datasette 0.65.2 fixes the bug and also adds Py...

Removing XSLT for a more secure browser Previously discussed back in August, it looks like it's now official: Chrome intends to deprecate and remove XSLT from the browser. [...] We intend to remove support from version 155 (November 17, 2026). The Firefox and WebKit project...

This blog post is MUCH longer than I intended. It’s way too long. I can’t imagine that anyone will finish it. How about this - if you have…

Today's links "Science Comics Computers: How Digital Hardware Works": Steampunk dinosaurs scratch-build a pressurized air-based, Turing complete, universal von Neumann machine. Hey look at this: Delights to delectate. Object permanence: Google Print vs Great Ormond; Lincolnbo...

Today marked a completely new moment for New York City, and for America. There will be countless attempts at analysis and reflection and what-does-it-all-mean in the days to come, along with an unimaginable number of hateful attacks. But what's worth reflecting on right now ...

A Ukrainian man indicted in 2012 for conspiring with a prolific hacking group to steal tens of millions of dollars from U.S. businesses was arrested in Italy and is now in custody in the United States, KrebsOnSecurity has learned. Sources close to the investigation say Yuriy Igorevich Rybtsov, a 41-year-old from the Russia-controlled city of Donetsk, Ukraine, was previously referenced in U.S. federal charging documents only by his online handle "MrICQ." According to a 13-year-old indictment filed by prosecutors in Nebraska, MrICQ was a developer for a cybercrime group known as "Jabber Zeus."

I'm worried that they put co-pilot in Excel because Excel is the beast that drives our entire economy and do you know who has tamed that beast? Brenda. Who is Brenda? She is a mid-level employee in every finance department, in every business across this stupid nation and th...

Code execution with MCP: Building more efficient agents When I wrote about Claude Skills I mentioned that I don't use MCP at all any more when working with coding agents - I find CLI utilities and libraries like Playwright Python to be a more effective way of achieving the s...

It's not that hard to stop a Trane Jeff Geerling November 4, 2025

Six years ago, I replaced the old HVAC system that came with our house, a central forced air system installed in 1995¹.

The new system is a Trane XR AC paired with an S9V2 96% efficiency forced-air gas furnace. And it ran great! Better efficiency, quieter, multiple fan speeds so I can circulate air and prevent stale air in some parts of the house... what's not to love?

Well, apparently the engineering:

Datasette 1.0a20 is out with the biggest breaking API change on the road to 1.0, improving how Datasette's permissions system works by migrating permission logic to SQL running in SQLite. This release involved 163 commits, with 10,660 additions and 1,825 deletions, most of w...