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Steve Krouse wrote a piece that has me nodding along: Programming, like writing, is an activity, where one iteratively sharpens what they're doing as they do it. (You wouldn't believe how many drafts I've written of this essay.) There’s an incredible amount of learning and...

After learning Apple killed off FireWire (IEEE 1394) support in macOS 26 Tahoe, I started looking at alternatives for old FireWire equipment like hard drives, DV cameras, and A/V gear.

I own an old Canon GL1 camera, with a 'DV' port. I could plug that into an old Mac (like the dual G4 MDD above) with FireWire—or even a modern Mac running macOS < 26, with some dongles—and transfer digital video footage between the camera and an application like Final Cut Pro.

Malicious litellm_init.pth in litellm 1.82.8 — credential stealer The LiteLLM v1.82.8 package published to PyPI was compromised with a particularly nasty credential stealer hidden in base64 in a litellm_init.pth file, which means installing the package is enough to trigger i...

Penn & Teller have this philosophy about their craft.

Today's links Goodhart's Law vs "prediction markets": Putting a gun to the metric's head. Hey look at this: Delights to delectate. Object permanence: Apple v interop; Yahoo v the world; Rasputin v the Haunted Mansion; Opening chord from A Hard Day's Night; Mondrian Pong; "IP"...

Watching OpenClaw do its thing must be like watching the first plane take flight. It's a bit rickety and stuck together with a lot of sticky tape, but squint and you can see the potential for agentic AI to change the world as we know it. And I

TLDR PT2 is in production!! Water resistance update - 30m What you need to know about Pebble Time 2 Address confirmation email…

I wrote about Dan Woods' experiments with streaming experts the other day, the trick where you run larger Mixture-of-Experts models on hardware that doesn't have enough RAM to fit the entire model by instead streaming the necessary expert weights from SSD for each token that...

slop is something that takes more human effort to consume than it took to produce. When my coworker sends me raw Gemini output he’s not expressing his freedom to create, he’s disrespecting the value of my time

— Neurotica, @schwarzgerat.bsky.social

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

Release: datasette-files 0.1a2

The most interesting alpha of datasette-files yet, a new plugin which adds the ability to upload files directly into a Datasette instance. Here are the release notes in full:

• Columns are now configured using the new column_types system from Datasette 1.0a26. #8
• New file_actions plugin hook, plus ability to import an uploaded CSV/TSV file to a table. #10
• UI for uploading multiple files at once via the new documented JSON upload API. #11
• Thumbnails are now generated for image files and stored in an internal datasette_files_thumbnails table. #13

Tags: annotated-release-notes, datasette

The internet is full of people dismissing lines of code as a measurement. People say things like

Lines of code written has been firmly established over the decades as a largely meaningless metric.

and

(Continue reading the full article on the web.)

I have been doing this for years, and the hardest parts of the job were never about typing out code. I have always struggled most with understanding systems, debugging things that made no sense, designing architectures that wouldn't collapse under heavy load, and making dec...

A financially motivated data theft and extortion group is attempting to inject itself into the Iran war, unleashing a worm that spreads through poorly secured cloud services and wipes data on infected systems that use Iran's time zone or have Farsi set as the default language.

Today's links Understaffing as a form of enshittification: A way to shift value from workers, patients and shoppers to investors. Hey look at this: Delights to delectate. Object permanence: Marvel v "superhero"; What's a photocopier?; "Up Against It"; "Medusa's Web"; AI can't...

Last month I added a feature I call beats to this blog, pulling in some of my other content from external sources and including it on the homepage, search and various archive pages on the site.

On any given day these frequently outnumber my regular posts. They were looking a little bit thin and were lacking any form of explanation beyond a link, so I've added the ability to annotate them with a "note" which now shows up as part of their display.

Here's what that looks like for the content I published yesterday:

I've also updated the /atom/everything/ Atom feed to include any beats that I've attached notes to.

Tags: atom, blogging, site-upgrades

Research: Starlette 1.0 skill

See Experimenting with Starlette 1.0 with Claude skills.

Tags: starlette

Research: PCGamer Article Performance Audit

Stuart Breckenridge pointed out that PC Gamer Recommends RSS Readers in a 37MB Article That Just Keeps Downloading, highlighting a truly horrifying example of web bloat that added up to 100s more MBs thanks to auto-playing video ads. I decided to have Claude Code for web use Rodney to investigate the page - prompt here.

Tags: web-performance, rodney

Research: JavaScript Sandboxing Research

Aaron Harper wrote about Node.js worker threads, which inspired me to run a research task to see if they might help with running JavaScript in a sandbox. Claude Code went way beyond my initial question and produced a comparison of isolated-vm, vm2, quickjs-emscripten, QuickJS-NG, ShadowRealm, and Deno Workers.

Tags: sandboxing, javascript, nodejs, claude-code

Tool: DNS Lookup

TIL that Cloudflare's 1.1.1.1 DNS service (and 1.1.1.2 and 1.1.1.3, which block malware and malware + adult content respectively) has a CORS-enabled JSON API, so I had Claude Code build me a UI for running DNS queries against all three of those resolvers.

Tags: dns, cors, cloudflare