FeedCity

In preparation for a lightning talk I'm giving at PyCon US this afternoon I decided to figure out how many names OpenClaw has actually had since that first commit back in November. Thanks to this first_line_history.py tool (code here) the answer, according to the Git history...

If your definition of intelligence is "the ability to achieve your goals across a wide variety of domains", then Stalin was the most intelligent person who ever lived.

Deeply researched interviews

the verification loop for theories can be on the order of decades and centuries, and even then we know today as the better theory can often actually make worse predictions

[...] in the last 10 years I’ve learned to really love and respect CSS as a technology.

So I decided years ago that I wanted to react to “CSS is hard” by getting better at CSS and taking it seriously as a technology, instead of devaluing it. Doing that changed everything for me: I learned that so many of my frustrations (“centering is impossible”) had been addressed in CSS a long time ago, and that also what “centering” means is not always straightforward and it makes sense that there are many ways to do it. CSS is hard because it’s solving a hard problem!

— Julia Evans, Moving away from Tailwind, and learning to structure my CSS

Tags: css, julia-evans

Western Gull, Rock Pigeon, in Los Angeles Area (custom), CA, US I went for a bird walk in the morning before PyCon, and we spotted a local seagull enjoying a Starbucks.

This is the eighth and final chapter of my SQLAlchemy 2 in Practice book. If you'd like to support my work, I encourage you to buy this book, either directly from my store or on Amazon. Thank you!

Whether you are building a traditional web application, or a web API that works alongside a web front end or smartphone app, SQLAlchemy is one of the best choices to add database support to a Python web server. In this chapter two example integrations with Flask and FastAPI will be demonstrated. These are two of the most popular Python web frameworks and should serve as examples even if you use another web framework.

Tokyo’s cheap housing and expensive land, the House response to the Senate housing bill, an IED near an Alabama dam, Fervo’s IPO, and more.

Today's links Making sense of Trump's unscheduled sudden midair disassembly of the American empire: Don't mistake "powerful" for "durable." Hey look at this: Delights to delectate. Object permanence: Copyrighted law; Viral videos v cops; Crooked banker v tiny bat; "Infested";...

Release: inaturalist-clumper 0.1

Part of the infrastructure I use for publishing my iNaturalist sightings on my blog. I've been running this in production for a few weeks now, inspiring some iterations on how it works, so I decided to ship a 0.1 release.

You can see an example of the output in this JSON file.

Tags: projects, inaturalist

Release: datasette-llm-limits 0.1a0

This plugin works in conjunction with datasette-llm and datasette-llm-accountant to let you configure a per-user (or global) spending limit for LLM usage inside of Datasette. Configuration looks something like this:

plugins:
  datasette-llm-limits:
    limits:
      per-user-daily:
        scope: actor
        window: rolling-24h
        amount_usd: 1.00

Tags: llm, datasette

Ever since Golden Gate Claude I’ve been fascinated with “steering”: the idea that you can guide LLM outputs by directly manipulating the activations of the model mid-flight. DeepSeek V4 Flash I was inspired to write this post by antirez’s recent project DwarfStar 4, which is...

I built ZIP Shrinker, a little browser tool to shrink ZIP files. It also works with formats that are secretly ZIPs underneath, like EPUB, JAR, and many more. Try it out! How does it work? At a high level, this tool (1) re-compresses every file in the ZIP archive with higher ...

Let me share a very silly story from roughly 18 years ago! In 2008, I joined RSA, the network security company named after the initials of the inventors of the RSA algorithm, Rivest, Shamir and Adleman, who were also the founders of RSA, the company. There ...

Tool: QR code generator

Claude helped me build this tool for creating QR codes, for both text/URLs and for connecting to WiFi networks.

Tags: vibe-coding, tools, generative-ai, ai, llms

AlphaGo is still the cleanest worked example of the primitives of intelligence: search, learning from experience, and self-play.

Today's links No one wants a permanent gerontocracy: The one policy everyone agrees on. Hey look at this: Delights to delectate. Object permanence: Wolfengitmo; Facebook condemns Google privacy invasion; Michael Moore on bin Laden; TSA v babies; Tendril perversion; "Buy now";...

apt install -t unstable, but make it your whole personality

Release: datasette-agent 0.1a2

• Tool availability can now be attached to a required_permission. The default background agent tools now require the new datasette-agent-background permission. #10

Tags: datasette, datasette-agent

This Mitchell Hashimoto quote about Bun migrating from Zig to Rust reminded me of a similar conversation I had at a conference last week. I was talking to someone who worked for a medium sized technology company with a pair of legacy/legendary iPhone and Android apps. They t...