OR: crock pots and lightning bolts
Experimental History
• Adam Mastroianni
Shame them, shun them, ban them, beat them!
Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow
• Cory Doctorow
Pluralistic: A fascist paradigm (12 May 2026)
Today's links A fascist paradigm: The change that changed everything. Hey look at this: Delights to delectate. Object permanence: Openstreetmap x Isle of Wight; Found grocery lists; Mayor wants to pray away potholes; Designing a D120; "Too Like the Lightning." Upcoming appear...
I'm really frustrated that GitLab is doing layoffs
Winning at this could have been so easy
Thoughts on GitLab's workforce reduction" and "structural and strategic decisions"
GitLab Act 2
There's a lot going on in this announcement from GitLab about the "workforce reduction" and "structural and strategic decisions" they are making with respect to the agentic era.
They're "planning to reduce the number of countries by up to 30% where we have smal...
Troy Hunt
• Troy Hunt
Welcoming the Bangladesh Government to Have I Been Pwned
Today, we welcome the 43rd government onboarded to Have I Been Pwned's free gov service, Bangladesh. The BGD e-GOV CIRT department now has full access to query all their government domains via API, and monitor them against future breaches.
Bangladesh joins a growing list of national governments using
Thinking Machines and interaction models
Thinking Machines just released Interaction Models. This is their first real AI model release1 after a year of work and two billion dollars of capital. What is an “interaction model”? First, it’s not a frontier model. Thinking Machines is not yet competing with OpenAI, Anthr...
matklad
• Alex Kladov
Learning Software Architecture
In reply to an email asking about learning software design skills as a researcher physicist:
Partial static single information form
In compilers, static single information form (SSI) is a common extension to
static single assignment form (SSA). It was introduced by C. Scott Ananian in
1999 in his MS thesis (PDF) 1.
SSI extends your existing SSA intermediate representation by discovering facts
from your ...
Entropic Thoughts
• kqr
Regatta Starting Stations – Chi-squared Continued
In the Henley Royal Regatta two teams at a time propel their boats up a river
and compete to be first to go a distance. Teams get assigned to their starting
stations – Berkshire or Buckinghamshire – at random. From there, it is a
straight shot up the river, with the l...
Quoting James Shore
Your AI coding agent, the one you use to write code, needs to reduce your maintenance costs. Not by a little bit, either. You write code twice as quick now? Better hope you’ve halved your maintenance costs. Three times as productive? One third the maintenance costs. Otherwi...
Your AI Use Is Breaking My Brain
Your AI Use Is Breaking My Brain
Excellent, angry piece by Jason Koebler on how AI writing online is becoming impossible to avoid, filtering it is mentally exhausting and it's even starting to distort regular human writing styles.
I particularly liked his use of the term "Zo...
Using LLM in the shebang line of a script
TIL: Using LLM in the shebang line of a script
Kim_Bruning on Hacker News:
But seriously, you can put a shebang on an english text file now (if you're sufficiently brave) [...]
This inspired me to look at patterns for doing exactly that with LLM. Here's the simples...
Learning on the Shop floor
Learning on the Shop floor
Tobias Lütke describes Shopify's internal coding agent tool, River, which operates entirely in public on their Slack:
River does not respond to direct messages. She politely declines and suggests to create a public channel for you and her to start...
Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow
• Cory Doctorow
Pluralistic: 2024 (apart from the obvious) (11 May 2026)
Today's links 2024 (apart from the obvious): Some unforced errors. Hey look at this: Delights to delectate. Object permanence: Denmark legalizing music trading; Babysuit; Patent Office invites "peer review"; DRM protest at the Bastille; Scientology's "super powers"; Banana Da...
Andrew Nesbitt
• Andrew Nesbitt
proxy
A lightweight multi-ecosystem caching package proxy
Out With the JS, In With the HTML
I’ve been posting about how you can make lots of HTML pages and leverage navigations over in-page, JS-dependent interactions.
Now I’m gonna post another example.
On my icon sites, I have a little widget that allows you to resize the icons you’re looking at.
Previously, I ...
Troy Hunt
• Troy Hunt
Welcoming the Costa Rican Government to Have I Been Pwned
Today, we welcome the 42nd government onboarded to Have I Been Pwned’s free gov service: Costa Rica.
The CSIRT of the Government of Costa Rica now has access to monitor government domains against the data in HIBP. This enables their national cybersecurity incident response team to identify exposure
Troy Hunt
• Troy Hunt
Weekly Update 503
Well, it's the day before the Instructure "pay or leak" deadline (at least by my Aussie watch), and the company remains removed from the ShinyHunters website. In its place sits a press statement that amounts to "we're not making any statements". So
Quoting New York Times Editors’ Note
This article was updated after The Times learned that a remark attributed to Pierre Poilievre, the Conservative leader, was in fact an A.I.-generated summary of his views about Canadian politics that A.I. rendered as a quotation. The reporter should have checked the accuracy of what the A.I. tool returned. The article now accurately quotes from a speech delivered by Mr. Poilievre in April. [...] He did not refer to politicians who changed allegiances as turncoats in that speech.
— New York Times Editors’ Note
Tags: ai-ethics, hallucinations, generative-ai, new-york-times, journalism, ai, llms
The Problem of Pedagogy in Advanced Mathematics
It is a commonly held opinion that educational institutions could do
more to improve the pedagogy of mathematics. This is especially
applicable to primary and secondary schools, where students are
first exposed to mathematics as a formal subject, along with other
...