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The relationship engineers have with product management is more dysfunctional than with any other part of the company. There’s no shared culture or language like there is with other engineers, and the rules of “who gets to tell who what to do” aren’t as clear-cut as they are...

xAI is renting huge amounts of GPU capacity to Anthropic and Google. Financial engineering ahead of the SpaceX IPO, a real compute shortage, or a genuine datacentre advantage? Probably all three.

1948 was an interesting time for computing. For decades, businesses had used punch card equipment that added and sorted electromechanically. Now these electromechanical relays and counting wheels were being used to build room-filling general-purpose computers such as Harvard...

Just saw a graph at the FT from John Burn-Murdoch that really distills something I have been trying to articulate.

Automatic programming dramatically speeds up writing software in certain use cases and in the right hands. In my experience the output does not reach the structural quality and economy of complexity of the best hand-written software. However, not all the software is stellar, ...

They are a highly sophisticated statistical model designed to mimic the distribution of programming. The output is broken, but in a way that’s getting harder and harder to detect. Which is exactly what you’d expect from an increasingly accurate statistical model.   – The Eternal Sloptember

Can you legally protect an artistic style? Not currently, but an Adobe-backed bill, a seeming reaction to AI, is pitching the idea. Personally, I see a bunch of blurred lines.

A few months ago I wrote about using LLM agents to help restructuring one of my Python projects. It's worth beginning by saying that the rewrite has been successful by all reasonable measures; I've been able to continue maintaining that project since then without an issue.

In this post, I …

Today's links Criticizing the everything machine: It slices, it dices, it even makes paperclips! Hey look at this: Delights to delectate. Object permanence: Parliament v DRM; Colbert's commencement; Counterfeiting x luxury goods; Joule thief; Lean-back media. Upcoming appeara...

Some thoughts on what just happened

Chatbots replacing realtors, Chinese synthetic diamonds, Australian batteries, Meta’s data center tents, and more

Six years ago, I nearly got my ISP to upgrade our fibre connection to 1Gbps. As I said at the time: This is a curmudgeonly post which is going to look ridiculously outdated in a few years. What's the point of Gigabit broadband? Well, it's a few years later and Virgin Media have just given me their Gig1 package for £30 per month. Nice! With all the inflation related price rises, it's great to …

Releases, advisories, and articles from across the package management world

I often come back to the question of why this is happening. Why do people want the centralized world? Why do people want the administered reality? Why do people want to be managed? Why do people not want root?

Release: micropython-wasm 0.1a2

I added a CLI to micropython-wasm (issue #7), inspired by the first draft of the blog entry when I realized it would be a great way to illustrate the Try it yourself section.

Tags: python, sandboxing, webassembly, micropython

I've been experimenting with different approaches to running code in a sandbox for several years now, but my latest attempt feels like it might finally have all of the characteristics I've been looking for. I've released it as an alpha package called micropython-wasm, and I'...

Read on to uplevel your coding SKILLS.md.

Not really

OpenAI Help: Lockdown Mode OpenAI first teased this in February, but now it's live and "rolling out to eligible personal accounts, including Free, Go, Plus, and Pro, and self-serve ChatGPT Business accounts": Lockdown Mode is designed to help prevent the final stage of data...

There is a strange thing that happens in communities that gather around abstinence from something: identity from opposition. At their best these communities are not just negative: childfree spaces can be about autonomy, choice and acceptance, anti-car spaces about safer str...