FeedCity

Today's links All the books I reviewed in 2025: A year in books. Hey look at this: Delights to delectate. Object permanence: David Byrne v RIAA; Sam Buck vs Starbucks; Eek-A-Trad; Mesopotamian DRM; Distanced stage plays. Upcoming appearances: Where to find me. Recent appearan...

Je vraagt de makelaar of je nieuwe droomhuis last heeft van lekkage, en hij vertelt je dat de dakkapel niet lekt. Alle alarmbellen moeten nu afgaan - want waarom krijg ik zo’n specifiek antwoord op deze vraag? Lekt het ergens anders wel? De belastingdienst is bezig al hun email en documenten door te sturen naar Amerikaanse servers. En dan vraag je je tegenwoordig natuurlijk af, gaan ze in Amerika dan allemaal meelezen met wat wij en onze bedrijven aan het doen zijn?

If the first line of a set of commands isn't indented but the rest are: the post is AI slop

Claude 4.5 Opus' Soul Document Richard Weiss managed to get Claude 4.5 Opus to spit out this 14,000 token document which Claude called the "Soul overview". Richard says: While extracting Claude 4.5 Opus' system message on its release date, as one does, I noticed an interest...

DeepSeek-V3.2 Two new open weight (MIT licensed) models from DeepSeek today: DeepSeek-V3.2 and DeepSeek-V3.2-Speciale, both 690GB, 685B parameters. Here's the PDF tech report. DeepSeek-V3.2 is DeepSeek's new flagship model, now running on chat.deepseek.com. The difference be...

I just send out the November edition of my sponsors-only monthly newsletter. If you are a sponsor (or if you start a sponsorship now) you can access a copy here. In the newsletter this month:

• The best model for code changed hands four times
• Significant open weight model releases
• Nano Banana Pro
• My major coding projects with LLMs this month
• Prompt injection news for November
• Pelican on a bicycle variants
• Two YouTube videos and a podcast
• Miscellaneous extras
• Tools I'm using at the moment

Here's a copy of the October newsletter as a preview of what you'll get. Pay $10/month to stay a month ahead of the free copy!

Tags: newsletter

More than half of the teens surveyed believe journalists regularly engage in unethical behaviors like making up details or quotes in stories, paying sources, taking visual images out of context or doing favors for advertisers. Less than a third believe reporters correct their errors, confirm facts before reporting them, gather information from multiple sources or cover stories in the public interest — practices ingrained in the DNA of reputable journalists.

— David Bauder, AP News, A lost generation of news consumers? Survey shows how teenagers dislike the news media

Tags: journalism

Today's links Meta's new top EU regulator is contractually prohibited from saying mean things about Meta: It's one thing to hire an ex-Meta lobbyist, another entirely if she's signed a non-disparagement contract. Hey look at this: Delights to delectate. Object permanence: Cus...

This is a mostly verbatim transcript of my lecture at the TU Delft VvTP Physics symposium “Security of Science” held on the 20th of November. Audio version (scroll along the page to see the associated slides): Thank you so much for being here tonight. It’s a great honor. I used to study here. I’m a dropout. I never finished my studies, so I feel like I graduate tonight. This is a somewhat special presentation, it has footnotes and references, which you can browse later if you like what you saw.

Well, I now have the answer to how Snapchat does age verification for under-16s: they give an underage kid the ability to change their date of birth, then do a facial scan to verify. The facial scan (a third party tells me...) allows someone well under 16 to pass it

I wrote about the 404s I serve for robots.txt. Now it’s time to look at some of the other common 404s I serve across my static sites (as reported by Netlify’s analytics): /wp-login.php /wp-admin /news/wp-includes/wlwmanifest.xml /login/ /wp-includes/wlwmanifest.xml /news/wp...

YouTube embeds fail with a 153 error I just fixed this bug on my blog. I was getting an annoying "Error 153: Video player configuration error" on some of the YouTube video embeds (like this one) on this site. After some digging it turns out the culprit was this HTTP header, ...

I am increasingly worried about AI in the video game space in general. [...] I'm not sure that the CEOs and the people making the decisions at these sorts of companies understand the difference between actual content and slop. [...] It's exactly the same cryolab, it's exact...

It's ChatGPT's third birthday today. It's fun looking back at Sam Altman's low key announcement thread from November 30th 2022: today we launched ChatGPT. try talking with it here: chat.openai.com language interfaces are going to be a big deal, i think. talk to the compute...

The most annoying problem is that the [GitHub] frontend barely works without JavaScript, so we cannot open issues, pull requests, source code or CI logs in Dillo itself, despite them being mostly plain HTML, which I don't think is acceptable. In the past, it used to gracefully degrade without enforcing JavaScript, but now it doesn't.

— Rodrigo Arias Mallo, Migrating Dillo from GitHub

Tags: browsers, progressive-enhancement, github

Gemini 3 Pro's design capabilities and Opus 4.5's reduced babysitting needs represent a subtle but significant leap that traditional benchmarks completely miss.

The disgraced financier’s Kindle library reveals his interests in Lolita, how the elite avoid accountability, and Trump’s many scandals.

Context plumbing

Matt Webb coins the term context plumbing to describe the kind of engineering needed to feed agents the right context at the right time:

Context appears at disparate sources, by user activity or changes in the user’s environment: what they’re working on changes, emails appear, documents are edited, it’s no longer sunny outside, the available tools have been updated.

This context is not always where the AI runs (and the AI runs as closer as possible to the point of user intent).

So the job of making an agent run really well is to move the context to where it needs to be. [...]

So I’ve been thinking of AI system technical architecture as plumbing the sources and sinks of context.

Tags: definitions, matt-webb, ai, generative-ai, llms, ai-agents, context-engineering

Large language models (LLMs) can be useful tools, but they are not good at creating entirely new Wikipedia articles. Large language models should not be used to generate new Wikipedia articles from scratch.

— Wikipedia content guideline, promoted to a guideline on 24th November 2025

Tags: ai-ethics, slop, generative-ai, wikipedia, ai, llms

For every cloud service I use, I want to have a local copy of my data for backup purposes and independence. Unfortunately, the gphotos-sync tool stopped working in March 2025 when Google restricted the OAuth scopes, so I needed an alternative for my existing Google Photos se...