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Consistency serves a purpose in visual design, but it seems to have become the purpose of a lot of visual design. Look no further than these evolutions of macOS icons (image courtesy of BasicAppleGuy): The Creator Studio icons are undeniably consistent visually: rounded r...

Over the years, I've worked for organisations with various levels of risk tolerance for business travellers. Some have been (rightly) paranoid and others have been (wrongly) placid about the threats their employees face. The fact is, individuals are often targeted for espionage, blackmail, or other state-sponsored attacks. Here's a list of some of the different advice I've received, roughly…

- "If you talk to me, I'll punch you in the face, are you ok with talking with me?" - "Nods in agreement." - "Proceeds to punch the man in the face." That's how I feel whenever I hear the Miranda rights being read. It was designed specifically to scare anyone being read to...

I am a father of twin boys. There is a question I often think about. It often appears as a midlife crisis where I am not sure when I became a man responsible for a family.

It looked so easy for my father. It was as if he was born into it. He was a leader, a strong man, one that an entire community could rely on. When does that kick in for me? When do I become this leader? Or have I already become?

That's what I was thinking when I wrote this short story about my father 10 years ago. I couldn't find a way to describe him, without mentioning clocks. It was fitting since he loved them so much.

I hope you enjoy this "Ode to my Father". Happy Father's day to you all.

PS: please excuse the AI generated images, I'm still trying to find the best way to present it. The text was entirely written by me in 2016-2017.

The n queens problem is to place on an n × n chessboard n queens so that none attacks any other. This means there is only one queen on every horizontal, vertical, and diagonal line. When n is a prime number ≥ 5, it is sufficient to place the queens on a line that has slope 2, 3, 4, …, […]

The post Queens on a prime order board first appeared on John D. Cook.

sqlite-utils is my combined Python library and CLI tool for working with SQLite databases. It provides an extensive set of higher-level operations on top of Python's default sqlite3 package, including support for complex table transformations, automatic table creation from J...

Release: sqlite-utils 4.0rc1

See sqlite-utils 4.0rc1 adds migrations and nested transactions.

Tags: sqlite-utils

Profiling a MoE model to find which experts matter for a specific task, then quantising the cold ones hard. The result: near-Q4 quality at near-Q2 size for local models.

Temporary Cloudflare Accounts for AI agents The announcement says this is "for AI agents" but (as is pretty common these days) the AI hook isn't really necessary, this is an interesting feature for everyone else as well. Short version: you can now create a Cloudflare Workers...

I’ve been in Berkeley for the last 2 weeks. I haven’t really been back here for a while, and it’s worse than you can believe. This is a cult of atheistic hedonists needing AI doom to be true to justify their life choices. Or acceleration. Or something. They need to make impact. I mean, narcissism of small differences to an extent, but I stopped long before these people did. If San Francisco was nuked tomorrow, the world would feel a weight off their shoulders. 内卷

One of the most painful arguments I keep having with fellow techies is the question of whether you can distinguish between human-written and AI-generated text.

One of the most painful arguments I keep having with fellow techies is the question of whether you can distinguish between human-written and AI-generated text.

Or, sufficiently advanced cynicism is indistinguishable from naïveté.

I’ve written a couple posts lately on getting an LLM to generate code to solve chess problems. The first used Claude to generate Prolog and the second used ChatGPT to generate Prolog. This post will use Claude to generate Z3/Python code. The puzzle is one I’ve written about before: Place all the pieces—king, queen, two […]

The post All pieces on a 6 by 5 board first appeared on John D. Cook.

Today's links How the Epstein Class recruits: Oh wait, THAT'S what this was?! Hey look at this: Delights to delectate. Object permanence: MPAA blasted in WSJ; RFID skimmers; Post-Soviet inventions; "Farthing"; "Dirty, Drunk and Punk"; Dweb v founders' frailty; Tax cheating ma...

A new housing bill, General Motors joining the grid-scale battery game, skepticism about data center delays, solid-state air conditioning, and more.

The Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG) format is amazing. It allows you to precisely define how an image should look. Written in XML, it uses various mathematical operations to display an image which looks crisp and clear at any size. Here's a trivial example: <svg height="100" viewBox="0 0 100 100" width="100" xmlns="http://www.w3.org/2000/svg"> <circle cx="50" cy="50" fill="#f00" r="50"/>…

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

Remember that scene in the Matrix where Neo is strapped into the chair and Link uploads all sorts of martial arts into his mind? When Neo wakes up, he says "I know Kung-fu," then proceeds to demonstrate his skill in a battle with Morpheus. That was a pretty amazing scene. Bu...