FeedCity

The TL;DR is that Google engineering appears to have the same AI adoption footprint as John Deere, the tractor company. Most of the industry has the same internal adoption curve: 20% agentic power users, 20% outright refusers, 60% still using Cursor or equivalent chat tool. It turns out Google has this curve too. [...]

There has been an industry-wide hiring freeze for 18+ months, during which time nobody has been moving jobs. So there are no clued-in people coming in from the outside to tell Google how far behind they are, how utterly mediocre they have become as an eng org.

— Steve Yegge

Tags: steve-yegge, google, generative-ai, agentic-engineering, ai, llms

Research: Exploring the new `servo` crate In Servo is now available on crates.io the Servo team announced the initial release of the servo crate, which packages their browser engine as an embeddable library. I set Claude Code for web the task of figuring out what it can ...

The problem is that LLMs inherently lack the virtue of laziness. Work costs nothing to an LLM. LLMs do not feel a need to optimize for their own (or anyone's) future time, and will happily dump more and more onto a layercake of garbage. Left unchecked, LLMs will make systems larger, not better — appealing to perverse vanity metrics, perhaps, but at the cost of everything that matters.

As such, LLMs highlight how essential our human laziness is: our finite time forces us to develop crisp abstractions in part because we don't want to waste our (human!) time on the consequences of clunky ones.

— Bryan Cantrill, The peril of laziness lost

Tags: bryan-cantrill, ai, llms, ai-assisted-programming, generative-ai

Thanks to a tip from Rahim Nathwani, here's a uv run recipe for transcribing an audio file on macOS using the 10.28 GB Gemma 4 E2B model with MLX and mlx-vlm: uv run --python 3.13 --with mlx_vlm --with torchvision --with gradio \ mlx_vlm.generate \ --model google/gemma-4...

Today's links Austerity creates fascism: We can't afford to not afford nice things. Hey look at this: Delights to delectate. Object permanence: The Server of Amontillado; Flapper's Dictionary; Mastercard v rec.humor.funny; Philippines electoral data breach; A front page from ...

I built a small tool to visualise how Mixture of Experts models route tokens through different experts. It's genuinely fascinating to watch.

I quipped on BlueSky: It’s interesting how AI proponents are often like "skill issue" when the LLM doesn't work like someone expects. Whereas when human-centered UX people see someone using it wrong, they're like "skill issue on us, the people who made this" This is top of...

SQLite 3.53.0

SQLite 3.52.0 was withdrawn so this is a pretty big release with a whole lot of accumulated user-facing and internal improvements. Some that stood out to me:

• ALTER TABLE can now add and remove NOT NULL and CHECK constraints - I've previously used my own sqlite-utils transform() method for this.
• New json_array_insert() function and its jsonb equivalent.
• Significant improvements to CLI mode, including result formatting.

The result formatting improvements come from a new library, the Query Results Formatter. I had Claude Code (on my phone) compile that to WebAssembly and build this playground interface for trying that out.

Via Lobste.rs

Tags: sql, sqlite

Tool: SQLite Query Result Formatter Demo

See my notes on SQLite 3.53.0. This playground provides a UI for trying out the various rendering options for SQL result tables from the new Query Result Formatter library, compiled to WebAssembly.

Tags: tools, sqlite

Today's links Don't Be Evil: Evil genius is just a lack of shame. Hey look at this: Delights to delectate. Object permanence: FBI x Trotsky; Jakob Nielsen x headlines; Floppy disk stained glass; Zero tolerance for mismatched socks; EFF v DOGE. Upcoming appearances: Toronto, S...

Lenny posted another snippet from our 1 hour 40 minute podcast recording and it's about kākāpō parrots!

Tags: kakapo

I think it's non-obvious to many people that the OpenAI voice mode runs on a much older, much weaker model - it feels like the AI that you can talk to should be the smartest AI but it really isn't. If you ask ChatGPT voice mode for its knowledge cutoff date it tells you Apri...

Today's links Canny Valley and Creative Commons: Another bite at the apple. Hey look at this: Delights to delectate. Object permanence: Bidenomics needs to be bigger; Al Franken's balanced war budget; Bernie x The Pope; Art is a money-laundry; UK government condemns copyright...

In just the last few weeks, we’ve seen a series of software security vulnerabilities that, until recently, would each have been the biggest exploit of the year in which they were discovered. Now, they’ve become nearly routine. There’s a new one almost every day. The reason f...

In short: GitHub’s downtime is bad, but uptime numbers can be misleading. It’s not as bad as it looks; more like a D than an F. “Zero nines uptime”? 99.99% uptime, or “four nines”, is a common industry standard. Four nines of uptime is equivalent to 1.008 minutes of downtime...

What Anthropic's Mythos research preview tells us about the trajectory of frontier models, sandbox escapes, and the cybersecurity risk ahead.

Tool: GitHub Repo Size

GitHub doesn't tell you the repo size in the UI, but it's available in the CORS-friendly API. Paste a repo into this tool to see the size, for example for simonw/datasette (8.1MB).

Tags: cors, github

Release: asgi-gzip 0.3

I ran into trouble deploying a new feature using SSE to a production Datasette instance, and it turned out that instance was using datasette-gzip which uses asgi-gzip which was incorrectly compressing event/text-stream responses.

asgi-gzip was extracted from Starlette, and has a GitHub Actions scheduled workflow to check Starlette for updates that need to be ported to the library... but that action had stopped running and hence had missed Starlette's own fix for this issue.

I ran the workflow and integrated the new fix, and now datasette-gzip and asgi-gzip both correctly handle text/event-stream in SSE responses.

Tags: gzip, asgi, python

Me, in 2025, on Mastodon: I love tools like Netlify and deploying my small personal sites with git push But i'm not gonna lie, 2025 might be the year I go back to just doing builds locally and pushing the deploys from my computer. I'm sick of devops'ing stupid stuff because...

In early January 2025, a family friend was over for lunch. One of my many guilty midwit pleasures is a love of New Year’s resolutions, so I asked her if she had made any. She said no, but mentioned that she had some relatives that were doing “damp January”. In case you’re n...