FeedCity

I'm behind on writing about Qwen 3.5, a truly remarkable family of open weight models released by Alibaba's Qwen team over the past few weeks. I'm hoping that the 3.5 family doesn't turn out to be Qwen's swan song, seeing as that team has had some very high profile departure...

Shock! Shock! I learned yesterday that an open problem I'd been working on for several weeks had just been solved by Claude Opus 4.6 - Anthropic's hybrid reasoning model that had been released three weeks earlier! It seems that I'll have to revise my opinions about "generative AI" one of these days. What a joy it is to learn not only that my conjecture has a nice solution but also to celebrate this dramatic advance in automatic deduction and creative problem solving.

— Donald Knuth, Claude's Cycles

Tags: november-2025-inflection, claude, generative-ai, ai, llms

Gemini 3.1 Flash-Lite Google's latest model is an update to their inexpensive Flash-Lite family. At $0.25/million tokens of input and $1.5/million output this is 1/8th the price of Gemini 3.1 Pro. It supports four different thinking levels, so I had it output four different pelicans: minimal low medium high Tags: google, ai, generative-ai, llms, llm, gemini, llm-pricing, pelican-riding-a-bicycle, llm-release

Today's links Supreme Court saves artists from AI: Just because you're on their side, it doesn't mean they're on your side. Hey look at this: Delights to delectate. Object permanence: KKK x D&D; Martian creativity; Scott Walker's capital ringers; UK v adblocking; Shitty j...

OR: the long overdue forest fire

The other day I was looking at the team billing section of an AI product. They had a widget labeled “Usage leaderboard”. For whatever reason, that phrase at that moment made me pause and reflect — and led me here to this post. It’s an interesting label. You could argue the w...

We reward complexity and ignore simplicity. In interviews, design reviews, and promotions. Here's how to fix it.

I’ve worked as a developer for 20 years, and I’ve always cared about clear writing. When I join a new team, the first thing I do is ask to update the onboarding documents. As I ramp up on the team, I document what I learn and encourage my teammates to do the same.

Sometimes, other developers ask me why I invest so much into writing. Programming is technical, so why spend time on a “soft skill” like writing? Isn’t that why we have technical writers and product managers?

Teaching an adult to ride a bike is easy. This is how:

1. You hand them a smaller bike so they can comfortably reach the ground.
2. You instruct them to not focus on going in any particular direction, but instead always steer into the fall.

That’s it. That’s the whole trick to cycling. 99 % of the time, the handlebars are only there to keep the bike under your body. 1 % of the time you use the handlebars to upset the balance to initiate a turn.

(Continue reading the full article on the web.)

To kick off MARCHintosh, I built this tiny pint-sized Macintosh with a Raspberry Pi Pico:

This is not my own doing—I just assembled the parts to run Matt Evans' Pico Micro Mac firmware on a Raspberry Pi Pico (with an RP2040).

The version I built outputs to a 640x480 VGA display at 60 Hz, and allows you to plug in a USB keyboard and mouse.

Since the original Pico's RAM is fairly constrained, you get a maximum of 208 KB of RAM with this setup—which is 63% more RAM than you got on the original '128K' Macintosh!

Agentic Engineering Patterns > I like to include animated GIF demos in my online writing, often recorded using LICEcap. There's an example in the Interactive explanations chapter. These GIFs can be pretty big. I've tried a few tools for optimizing GIF file size and my...

I just sent the February edition of my sponsors-only monthly newsletter. If you are a sponsor (or if you start a sponsorship now) you can access it here. In this month's newsletter:

• More OpenClaw, and Claws in general
• I started a not-quite-a-book about Agentic Engineering
• StrongDM, Showboat and Rodney
• Kākāpō breeding season
• Model releases
• What I'm using, February 2026 edition

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

I use Claude as a proofreader for spelling and grammar via this prompt which also asks it to "Spot any logical errors or factual mistakes". I'm delighted to report that Claude Opus 4.6 called me out on this one:

Tags: newsletter, kakapo, claude

The Odido breach leaks were towards the beginning during this week's update. I recorded it the day after the second dump of data had hit, with a third dump coming a few hours later, and a final dump of everything the day after that. From what I hear,

Today's links No one wants to read your AI slop: If you must do this, for god's sake, do it privately. Hey look at this: Delights to delectate. Object permanence: AOL email tax; Ebook readers' bill of rights; Sanders media blackout. Upcoming appearances: Where to find me...

My post-surgery medication stack gave me the most on-the-nose dream of my life.

For my future self, these are a few of my notes from this book. A take from one historian on the Luddite movement: If workmen disliked certain machines, it was because of the use that they were being put, not because they were machines or because they were new Can’t help ...

After migrating this blog from a static site generator into Drupal in 2009, I noted:

As a sad side-effect, all the blog comments are gone. Forever. Wiped out. But have no fear, we can start new discussions on many new posts! I archived all the comments from the old 'Thingamablog' version of the blog, but can't repost them here (at least, not with my time constraints... it would just take a nice import script, but I don't have the time for that now).

Today, DDoSecrets published data about ICE contracts hacked from DHS's Office of Industry Partnership. The hacker group, Department of Peace, published a statement that included:

Why hack the DHS? I can think of a couple Pretti Good reasons! I'm releasing this because the DHS is killing

On surviving surgery, confronting mortality, and finding peace on the other side.