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Where do we go from here?

AI made you faster. But you're not more productive; you're outsourcing the slow part to everyone else

I’ve been testing Claude’s ability to generate Lean 4 code to prove theorems. I’ve written about a couple experiments that verified calculations. I did not write about my failed attempt to get Claude to formalize a proof of the pqr theorem for seminorms. This time I asked Claude to formally prove the theorem from the […]

The post Formalizing a ring theorem with Lean 4 and Claude first appeared on John D. Cook.

Watch you hit the stage like a willing bomb Strapped to crippled children It’s hard to watch you whore out your damaged pride I spit on what you’re building   – The Stephen Hawking

Tool: <click-to-play> — a still that plays

A progressive enchantment Web Component that turns this markup:

<click-to-play>
  <a href="URL to GIF">
    <img src="URL to first frame" alt="...">
  </a>
</click-to-play>

Into a still frame with a click to play button which loads the GIF on demand. For when you don't want big GIFs to be loaded unless people want to play them.

Tags: gif, javascript, progressive-enhancement, web-components

NetNewsWire Status

I find this inspiring. Brent Simmons retired a year ago, and his retirement project is making one piece of software really, really good - free from any commercial pressure.

The software is NetNewsWire, first released in 2002 and made open source in 2018. I've been using it on Mac and iPhone for several years now and I'm finding it indispensable.

Via Lobste.rs

Tags: brent-simmons, netnewswire, open-source

Release: datasette-tailscale 0.1a0

A very experimental alpha plugin which lets you do this:

datasette tailscale mydata.db \
  --ts-authkey tskey-auth-xxxx --ts-hostname datasette-preview

This starts a localhost Datasette server with a Tailscale sidecar that connects it to your Tailnet, such that http://datasette-preview/ serves Datasette.

It's using the Python bindings for the experimental tailscale-rs library. I filed an issue asking if there's a cleaner way of setting up the proxy mechanism.

Tags: datasette, tailscale

As James Carville might have said, “It’s the lack of a moat, stupid”

The worst type of bug is one that only happens on prod. And only on prod. If you checked this blog in the past few weeks, you might have encountered a big fat 500 error. I'd had the same design for 10 years, and I wanted something fresh. But who can redesign without also i...

Some time ago, I attended an event to discuss European digital autonomy and digital dependencies. I accepted the invitation without checking too carefully, and I belatedly found out that most of US big tech was invited as well, and would be presenting their thoughts. Now, even in our gloriously digitally autonomous future, we’ll still be doing business with Microsoft, Google and Amazon. And it is fine if they have a role.

A guide, of sorts, to keyboard customization. (9,400 words.)

Nearly everyone who has seen partial fraction decomposition was introduced to it as a way to compute integrals. If P(x) and Q(x) are polynomials, then you can break their ratio P(x)/Q(x) into a sum of terms that can each be integrated in closed form. As with most topics in a calculus class, partial fractions go by in […]

The post Partial fraction decomposition first appeared on John D. Cook.

"He begged to work for the regime that tortured him."

I can 100% attest to the fact that Qwen3.6-27B is a very capable local model for coding tasks. Over the last month and a half I've been using it almost daily, either on my M2 Ultra or on my RTX 5090 box. I use it for small mundane tasks at ggml-org - nothing really impressive, but definitely a helpful tool for a maintainer. I think I would be using it much more, if I didn't have to spend a lot of my time on reviewing PRs. Currently, I have a very lightweight harness - the pi agent with everything stripped (pi -nc --offline) and a short system prompt to align it a bit with my style.

— Georgi Gerganov, Hacker News comment on Running local models is good now by Boykis

Tags: georgi-gerganov, llms, ai, generative-ai, pi, ai-assisted-programming, local-llms, qwen, coding-agents

There are fewer ways to leave your package than to kill it.

We just finished the 16th annual Lean LaunchPad class at Stanford. In those 16 years, the class has gone from a radical idea – that the Lean method could provide a more productive framework for new startups – to something that everyone agrees is a way to build new startups. The class had gotten so […]

Back in the late 1990s, I did a brief stint of work experience at the BBC. One of the most memorable moments was sitting in on a meeting about early forms of Interactive TV. I saw a demo of "Two Way TV". A flimsy grey box which (somehow) integrated with your OnDigital TV Box and connected to a server via a modem. If you were watching "Who Wants To Be A Millionaire" you could play along at home,…

You can’t prove a theorem by just checking a few examples. Except sometimes you can. A few weeks ago I wrote Pentagonal numbers are truncated triangular numbers. In a nutshell, if the pentagonal numbers are defined by Pn = (3n² − n)/2 and the triangular numbers by Tn = (n² + n)/2 then Pn = T2n − 1 − Tn − 1. Here’s a visualization […]

The post Three examples suffice first appeared on John D. Cook.

The Fable 5 Export Controls Harm US Cyber Defense I quoted The Atlantic quoting Kate Moussouris earlier, when I should have gone straight to the source. Here she is confirming that the "jailbreak" that got Claude Fable 5 banned under an export control really was "fix this co...