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This series of articles chronicles the history, both real and pseudo, behind Gabriel Knight 3: Blood of the Sacred, Blood of the Damned. Rennes-le-Château enjoyed its first watershed moment as a media phenomenon when Albert Salamon wrote his newspaper articles in 1956. Its second came when a documentary about the village was aired on French […]

“And what those stories teach us about how AI will revolutionize math”

Today I posted a video titled The best laptop Apple ever made, and tl;dw¹ it's the 11" MacBook Air.

I acknowledge in the video my pick is slightly subjective, and I also asked a number of other YouTubers which Mac laptop they consider the best (or at least most influential). If you don't want to watch the video, I'll summarize their choices here:

Yesterday morning, first thing after waking up, I checked my emails. One of them was from a client - a sharp person, but not a tech expert - forwarding a message from one of their "digital marketplaces". They claimed that during site crawling, their bot upgrades the connect...

Research: SQLite Tags Benchmark: Comparing 5 Tagging Strategies

I had Claude Code run a micro-benchmark comparing different approaches to implementing tagging in SQLite. Traditional many-to-many tables won, but FTS5 came a close second. Full table scans with LIKE queries performed better than I expected, but full table scans with JSON arrays and json_each() were much slower.

Tags: json, sqlite

The U.S. Justice Department joined authorities in Canada and Germany in dismantling the online infrastructure behind four highly disruptive botnets that compromised more than three million hacked Internet of Things (IoT) devices, such as routers and web cameras. The feds say the four botnets -- named Aisuru, Kimwolf, JackSkid and Mossad -- are responsible for a series of recent record-smashing distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks capable of knocking nearly any target offline.

My biggest game-changer

The big news this morning: Astral to join OpenAI (on the Astral blog) and OpenAI to acquire Astral (the OpenAI announcement). Astral are the company behind uv, ruff, and ty - three increasingly load-bearing open source projects in the Python ecosystem. I have thoughts! The o...

Today's links Love of corporate bullshit is correlated with bad judgment: Synergizing the strategic inflection points on the global data network. Hey look at this: Delights to delectate. Object permanence: Bluetooth headsets; Fruit sticker decoder; iPod batteries v DRM; Bruce...

When life gives you switches...

When life gives you switches...

Autoresearching Apple's "LLM in a Flash" to run Qwen 397B locally Here's a fascinating piece of research by Dan Woods, who managed to get a custom version of Qwen3.5-397B-A17B running at 5.5+ tokens/second on a 48GB MacBook Pro M3 Max despite that model taking up 209GB (120G...

I have an early adulthood trauma from struggling to understand consensus amidst a myriad of poor explanations. I am overcompensating for that by adding my own attempts to the fray. Today, I want to draw a series of pictures which could be helpful. You can see this post as a set of missing illustrations for Notes on Paxos, or, alternatively, you can view that post as a more formal narrative counter-part for the present one.

I know, I know, this sounds controversial. But hear me out. A few years ago a new trend in UI design emerged where related elements would appear more and more detached and unrelated to the things they are meant to point to. Here's a screenshot of Google Chrome circa 2010: ...

Release: datasette 1.0a26

Datasette now has a mechanism for assigning semantic column types. Built-in column types include url, email, and json, and plugins can register additional types using the new register_column_types() plugin hook.

Snowflake Cortex AI Escapes Sandbox and Executes Malware PromptArmor report on a prompt injection attack chain in Snowflake's Cortex Agent, now fixed. The attack started when a Cortex user asked the agent to review a GitHub repository that had a prompt injection attack hidde...

Why not benchmark with physical experiments?

Turns out everything DID NOT go offline somehow. Yay!

Great news—we’ve hit our (very modest) performance goals for the CPython JIT over a year early for macOS AArch64, and a few months early for x86_64 Linux. The 3.15 alpha JIT is about 11-12% faster on macOS AArch64 than the tail calling interpreter, and 5-6%faster than the standard interpreter on x86_64 Linux.

— Ken Jin, Python 3.15’s JIT is now back on track

Tags: python

OpenAI today: Introducing GPT‑5.4 mini and nano. These models join GPT-5.4 which was released two weeks ago. OpenAI's self-reported benchmarks show the new 5.4-nano out-performing their previous GPT-5 mini model when run at maximum reasoning effort. The new mini is also 2x f...