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OR: if we were playing by Settlers of Catan rules, I'd be dead already

Join us at The 7th Annual Red Queen Conference April 22 -23 – Silicon Valley How do Portfolio Acquisition Executives and COCOMs ensure they’re working on the right problem with the right priority before locking in a requirement? Discuss, share and prototype Innovation Targeting concepts with your peers.  Get hands-on with the companies and venture […]

Today's links State Dems must stop ICE from stealing the midterms: The literal least they can do. Hey look at this: Delights to delectate. Object permanence: Power-strip bug; "Peaceful Baghdad" was actually Istanbul; Disney pirates Disney font; AMC v day-and-date; SF growth c...

Day by day, I find we're eeking more goodness out of OpenClaw and finding the sweet spot between what the humans do well and the agent can run off and do on its own. Significantly, we're shifting more and more of the workload to the latter

Release: datasette-files 0.1a3

I'm working on integrating datasette-files into other plugins, such as datasette-extract. This necessitated a new release of the base plugin.

• owners_can_edit and owners_can_delete configuration options, plus the files-edit and files-delete actions are now scoped to a new FileResource which is a child of FileSourceResource. #18
• The file picker UI is now available as a <datasette-file-picker> Web Component. Thanks, Alex Garcia. #19
• New from datasette_files import get_file Python API for other plugins that need to access file data. #20

Tags: datasette

Release: datasette-llm 0.1a3

Adds the ability to configure which LLMs are available for which purpose, which means you can restrict the list of models that can be used with a specific plugin. #3

Tags: llm, datasette

March always seems to be my life’s busiest month. Things I wrote and made “The two kinds of error”: in my mind, software errors are divided into two categories: expected and unexpected errors. I finally wrote up this idea I’ve had for a long time. “All tests pass” is a s...

If global large-scale human communication continues to be concentrated within large social media platforms and content providers like YouTube, human languages may become sort of irrelevant in that space. Sometimes I Google for something and see a Reddit result in Finnish. I ...

A cascading wave of supply chain attacks has hit npm and PyPI in under two weeks. LLMs are making it worse, and current mitigations aren't enough.

Creating abstractions should not be left to beginners. Richard Gabriel says puts it well::

Abstractions must be carefully and expertly designed, especially when reuse or compression is intended. However, because abstractions are designed in a particular context and for a particular purpose, it is hard to design them while anticipating all purposes and forgetting all purposes, which is the hallmark of the well-designed abstractions.

This is one of my favourite quotes on abstraction, because “anticipating all purposes and forgetting all purposes” so aptly summarises how a good abstraction is made. I was reminded of this when I read the first sentence of issue 34 of Frontend at Scale, where it is phrased as “how to care about anything without caring about everything”.

(Continue reading the full article on the web.)

For a hobby project built in my spare time to provide a simple community service, Have I Been Pwned sure has, well, "escalated". Today, we support hundreds of thousands of website visitors each day, tens of millions of API queries, and hundreds of millions of password searches. We&

Note that the main issues that people currently unknowingly face with local models mostly revolve around the harness and some intricacies around model chat templates and prompt construction. Sometimes there are even pure inference bugs. From typing the task in the client to the actual result, there is a long chain of components that atm are not only fragile - are also developed by different parties. So it's difficult to consolidate the entire stack and you have to keep in mind that what you are currently observing is with very high probability still broken in some subtle way along that chain.

— Georgi Gerganov, explaining why it's hard to find local models that work well with coding agents

Tags: coding-agents, generative-ai, ai, local-llms, llms, georgi-gerganov

Jason Gorman writes about the word “continuous” and its place in making software. We think of making software in stages (and we often assign roles to ourselves and other people based on these stages): the design phase, the coding phase, the testing phase, the integration ph...

Today's links Market participation is exhausting: No one wants to be the sucker at the table. Hey look at this: Delights to delectate. Object permanence: EMI DRM v Brazil; "The Information"; Genome patenter v copyright troll (let them fight); Green investing isn't; Trump love...

We are in a renaissance era of reverse engineering. Defenders are going to be on the back foot until we figure out some way to cope with LLM's.

Trip Venturella released Mr. Chatterbox, a language model trained entirely on out-of-copyright text from the British Library. Here's how he describes it: Mr. Chatterbox is a language model trained entirely from scratch on a corpus of over 28,000 Victorian-era British texts ...

Release: llm-mrchatterbox 0.1

See Mr. Chatterbox is a (weak) Victorian-era ethically trained model you can run on your own computer.

Tags: llm

They are graphical processing units that can't process graphics.

Pretext Exciting new browser library from Cheng Lou, previously a React core developer and the original creator of the react-motion animation library. Pretext solves the problem of calculating the height of a paragraph of line-wrapped text without touching the DOM. The usual...

Tool: Pretext — Under the Hood

See my notes on Pretext here.