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It's hard to write a whole book. So for now at least, I've turned the prologue of my book into a short video. I hope you enjoy it.

Human Agent in the loop

I dislike the phrase “human in the loop” because it cedes authority to the machines. Let’s flip the narrative. It’s our loop, we work the same way we always have, now we recruit agents to join the team. An agent-assisted process need not be a black box that takes in prompts and emits features. [...]

Let’s do agentic software development like that. Not as a loop we’ve been excluded from, instead as one we invite agents into.

— Jon Udell, “Doctor, it hurts when agents create unreviewable PRs.” “Don’t do that.”

Tags: jon-udell, coding-agents, generative-ai, agentic-engineering, ai, llms

Hack Your Summer I learned about this initiative from DJ Patil this morning: It’s a 4-week, high-velocity production sprint for undergraduate students, graduate students, and recent graduates who want to build something real this summer. You’ll learn how to identify a proje...

The Space Shuttle's five1 general-purpose computers played a critical role in each flight: controlling the engines, monitoring thousands of sensors, displaying data to the astronauts, and navigating the Shuttle. Each computer consisted of two 60-pound aluminum-alloy boxes: t...

Has the US been focused on the wrong things?

Despite vowing not to read sequels of books I love, I'm constantly surprised that regression to the mean is an iron-clad law of the universe. I thoroughly enjoyed the first book in the series, so eagerly gobbled up the second. What a burlap fool I am. What was charming and wry in The Satsuma Complex is now overdone and clichéd. The violence, which was an undercurrent in the first book, is now …

I don't understand why this generation can't afford a home. When my grandfather was 18, he had already saved enough money from his paper route and various odd jobs to buy his first home. By the time my father turned 26, he was already married, had his first child, and was mo...

Behold: the Guru of GNU! (Photo by Habib Mhenni, Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 3.0.) True enlightment only comes from a truly free computing experience, probably! And while there is no nerd who lacks an opinion on Richard Stallman personally, likewise let none claim he doe...

Here’s a crazy bash one-liner I found via an article by Peter Krumins: echo {w,t,}h{e{n{,ce{,forth}},re{,in,fore,with{,al}}},ither,at} This prints 30 English words: when, whence, whenceforth, where, wherein, wherefore, wherewith, wherewithal, whither, what, then, thence, thenceforth, there, therein, therefore, therewith, therewithal, thither, that, hen, hence, henceforth, here, herein, herefore, herewith, herewithal, hither, hat This post will explain how […]

The post Brace expansion tree first appeared on John D. Cook.

One keyboard bug three decades in the making. (New version of an essay originally posted in February 2015. 1,800 words.)

The previous post looked at how many digits are in the reduced fraction for the nth harmonic number. I was curious about how long the cycle of digits in a harmonic number might be. I wrote about the period length for the digits of fractions almost a decade ago. This post includes code so I can […]

The post When will the decimals in a/b repeat? first appeared on John D. Cook.

Who’s to blame for the memory crisis that turned Macs and Steam Boxes into unobtanium this week? The memory-makers have a convenient answer.

The previous post looked at writing the harmonic numbers as reduced fractions and estimating the number of digits in the numerator and denominator based on asymptotics. This is a follow up post with plots. We’ll choose our base b to be 2. And we’ll look at the total number of bits in both the numerator and […]

The post Height of harmonic numbers first appeared on John D. Cook.

Today's links Zuckerberg's increasingly bizarre war on whistleblowers: Under no circumstances should you rush out and read the book that prompted Mark Zuckerberg to demand $111m and eternal auctorial silence. Hey look at this: Delights to delectate. Object permanence: Flame w...

Trump refuses to sign a housing bill, the high cost of US-made doors, slow trucking, why we stopped making new land, and more.

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

This radio station gets many requests for treatises on formal logic.

This radio station gets many requests for treatises on formal logic.

The Washington Post reported that the US government will decide who can use state-of-the-art LLMs. After the ban of Fable and the limitations coming to ChatGPT 5.6, what's next? My bet is Chinese models. For all of Anthropic's doomsaying and propping up of their secret mod...