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Today's links Hold on for dear life: Not your keys, not your wallet, entirely your problem. Hey look at this: Delights to delectate. Object permanence: Who owns "Web 2.0"; EFF saves bloggers' sources; Non-porn porn; Redaction fails; Canadian Tories say markets, not government...

Over the last few months we’ve examined the extent of the construction industry’s productivity problem.

brew install pip install poetry add pdm add uv tool install conda

The trigonometric Fourier series is a beautiful mathematical theory that shows how to decompose a periodic function into an infinite sum of sinusoids. These are my notes on the subject, with some examples and the connection to linear algebra in Hilbert space.

sqlite AGENTS.md SQLite gained an AGENTS.md file five days ago - but it's not intended for their own development, it's presumably aimed at people who are pointing agents at the SQLite codebase. It includes: SQLite does not accept pull requests without prior agreement and/or...

A detailed look at a still from a 16-year-old film, which I recently found to make a good educational exercise, with the bonus of being fun.

To conclude with my SQLAlchemy 2 in Practice series, this article contains the solutions to all the exercises. 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!

Anthropic are strongly rumored to be about to have their first profitable quarter. Stories are circulating of companies surprised at how expensive their LLM bills are becoming from usage by their staff. I think this is because OpenAI and Anthropic have both found product-mar...

CHAOSS metrics were calibrated for human-speed contribution

Some posts you may have missed

AI is great when it extends your brain. It gets dangerous when it quietly replaces the part that was supposed to think.

Gisteren verscheen de brief waarmee de staatssecretaris van Economische Zaken en Klimaat liet weten dat ze de overname van Solvinity door Kyndryl ging verbieden. Een forse cast mensen, waaronder 200.000 ondertekenaars van een petitie, hebben geholpen de zorgen over deze overname bovenop de stapel te krijgen. Ook heeft de nieuwe stichting The Firewall juridisch van zich laten horen. Ik schreef ook wat stukjes en mocht er in de Tweede Kamer over komen vertellen (en toen kwamen er zoveel mensen dat er vier overflowzalen nodig waren!

Today's links AI and a world without migrants: It's solipsism all the way down. Hey look at this: Delights to delectate. Object permanence: Manuscript rabbits; "What Will Come After"; Pastejacking; Terrorism phrenology; Vaccine waivers were promised 20 years ago. Upcoming app...

PICARD: Data, shields up

DATA: Brilliant! Shields can reduce damage we sustain. Not immunity. Not hubris. Just prudence. It's not precaution—it's strategy.

[camera shakes]

WORF: HULL BREACHES ON NINE DECKS

DATA: Here's what happened: you told me to raise shields, and I didn't

— Kyle Ferrana, @KyleTrainEmoji

Tags: ai-misuse, coding-agents, ai, llms

A decade ago, I settled on iozone for disk benchmarking on all my systems. Tools like fio ('Flexible IO' tester) are a little more capable for raw disk performance testing, and other tools test network-scale filesystems better, but iozone gives me an easy overview of real-world disk performance across hard drives and SSDs, and runs on Mac, Windows, and Linux (and a smattering of other OSes).

It's been around since 1991, and is still updated today—in fact, the two latest updates (version 509 and 510) contain patches I sent in to get iozone to compile on Apple Silicon Macs running newer releases of macOS.

The pressure Daniel Stenberg on the unprecedented level of pressure the curl team are facing right now thanks to the deluge of (credible) AI-assisted security issues being reported. The rate of incoming security reports is 4-5 times higher than it was in 2024 and double the...

(Yes, but.)

OR: hit me with your Honda

Microsoft Copilot Cowork Exfiltrates Files The biggest challenge in designing agentic systems continues to be preventing them from enabling attackers to exfiltrate data. In this case Microsoft Copilot Cowork (yes, that's a real product name) was allowing agents to send email...

A lot of the emails I get from founders are now written in a hard-hitting journalistic style. I know they're written by AI, because no founder ever wrote this way before. And once you realize something is written by AI, it's hard not to ignore it.

I have never knowingly finished reading an email signed by a human but written by AI. It feels like being lied to, and who would stand for that?

[...] It makes me think less of the author. It means they can't write well unaided (or feel they can't), and that they're trying to trick me.

It's not impressive to use AI to write stuff for you; any teenager can do that.

— Paul Graham

Tags: writing, ai-misuse, paul-graham, generative-ai, ai, llms