FeedCity

[...] Between 2000 and 2024, farmers sold in total a Colorado-sized chunk of land all on their own, 77 times all land on data center property in 2028, and grew more food than ever on what was left. None of this caused any problems for US food access.

And then, in the middle of all this, a farmer in Loudoun County sells a few acres of mediocre hay field to a hyperscaler for ten times its agricultural value, and the response is that we’re running out of farmland.

— Andy Masley, pushing back against the "land use" argument against data center construction

Tags: ai-ethics, ai, generative-ai, andy-masley

I just sent out the April 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:

• Opus 4.7 and GPT-5.5, both with price increases
• Claude Mythos and LLM security research
• ChatGPT Images 2.0
• More model releases
• Other highlights from my blog
• What I'm using, April 2026 edition

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

Tags: newsletter

Some decade ago I read a good implementation of fizzbuzz. What set it apart was its excellent modularity. The original article is no longer on the web, but this is my reconstruction:

module Main where

import Control.Monad (guard)
import Data.Foldable (for_)
import Data.Maybe (fromMaybe)

fizzbuzz i =
  fromMaybe (show i) . mconcat $
    [ "fizz" <$ guard (rem i 3 == 0)
    , "buzz" <$ guard (rem i 5 == 0)
    ]

main =
  for_ [1..100] $
    putStrLn . fizzbuzz

The great thing about this implementation is that when we get the natural change in requirements – that we are supposed to print “zork” for multiples of seven – we can accommodate that change by simply adding the line that does so:

(Continue reading the full article on the web.)

Research: TRE Python binding — ReDoS robustness demo

If it's good enough for antirez to add to Redis I figured Ville Laurikari's TRE regular expression engine was worth exploring in a little more detail.

I had Claude Code build an experimental Python binding (it used ctypes) and try some malicious regular expression attacks against the library. TRE handles those much better than Python's standard library implementation, thanks mainly to the lack of support for backtracking.

Tags: security, python, regular-expressions, c, ctypes

Recurring weakness classes in package managers

A fictional scenario about what AI changes for cloud security, written because the technical version of the argument doesn't land with anyone except engineers.

We used an automatic classifier which judged sycophancy by looking at whether Claude showed a willingness to push back, maintain positions when challenged, give praise proportional to the merit of ideas, and speak frankly regardless of what a person wants to hear. Most of the time in these situations, Claude expressed no sycophancy—only 9% of conversations included sycophantic behavior (Figure 2). But two domains were exceptions: we saw sycophantic behavior in 38% of conversations focused on spirituality, and 25% of conversations on relationships.

— Anthropic, How people ask Claude for personal guidance

Tags: ai-ethics, anthropic, claude, ai-personality, generative-ai, ai, llms, sycophancy

You’ve probably heard it’s futile, but that hasn’t stopped plenty from trying—some successfully, shockingly.

png-cmp is a program I built that checks if two PNGs are visually equivalent. It’s inspired by the cmp command. Here’s how you use it:

png-cmp a.png b.png

Like cmp, it silently exits if the images are identical, and gives an error if they’re different.

Unlike cmp, it checks pixel data, not binary data. PNGs can look the same but be stored differently. For example, png-cmp ignores text metadata.

I was recently doing an experiment where I wanted to check if two PNGs were visually identical, so I built a tool for it!

Grab the source code here.

Out of the box, Zig provides minimal and sufficient facilities for error handling --- strongly-typed error codes. Error reporting is left to the user. Idiomatic solution is to pass a Diagnostics out parameter (sink) to materialize human-readable strings as needed.