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Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow
Text • Cory Doctorow

Pluralistic: Post-American compute for a post-American Internet (04 Aug 2026)

Today's links Post-American compute for a post-American Internet: Building cooperative human rights computing infrastructure in Puerto Rico, the EU, Canada and Mexico. Hey look at this: Delights to delectate. Object permanence: Urine Luck; Germany v pornoscanners; Moorcock's ...

The Old New Thing
Text • Raymond Chen

Creating a fake agile wrapper that is technically agile but is not useful outside its home apartment, part 1

Looking for a COM reference that is between strong and weak.

The post Creating a fake agile wrapper that is technically agile but is not useful outside its home apartment, part 1 appeared first on The Old New Thing.

Eli Bendersky's website
Text • Eli Bendersky

Relative velocity and closing speed

In Physics simulations or game engines it’s sometimes useful to determine the speed with which two objects are approaching each other. This post will discuss the concept of closing speed, which is the normal component of the relative velocity of two objects.

Relative velocity and its components

Suppose we …

Simon Willison's Weblog Supports Webmention
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Quoting Steve Yegge

Gas Town was intended to be reusable, but I only ever wound up using it to build itself. Gas Town fell apart at the seams with Opus 4.7. Up through 4.6 it was working brilliantly. With 4.7 we saw the introduction of the "just two more things" tic, which prevented Opus from ever converging on being ready to do real work—it always wanted to fiddle with Gas Town itself. The Opus tic never went away, so Gas Town effectively burned down. It had other problems, too, but 4.7 was the final straw.

Steve Yegge, The Shape of Things to Come

Tags: steve-yegge, coding-agents, generative-ai, ai, llms

Simon Willison's Weblog Supports Webmention
Text

Quoting Steve Yegge

Gas Town was intended to be reusable, but I only ever wound up using it to build itself. Gas Town fell apart at the seams with Opus 4.7. Up through 4.6 it was working brilliantly. With 4.7 we saw the introduction of the "just two more things" tic, which prevented Opus from ever converging on being ready to do real work—it always wanted to fiddle with Gas Town itself. The Opus tic never went away, so Gas Town effectively burned down. It had other problems, too, but 4.7 was the final straw.

Steve Yegge, The Shape of Things to Come

Tags: steve-yegge, coding-agents, generative-ai, ai, llms

Simon Willison's Weblog Supports Webmention
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Don't be a meat proxy

Don't be a meat proxy

Niklas Gruhn coins an excellent new term - meat proxy - for people who blindly copy and paste the output of AI systems to their peers.

By all means, prompt AI. But don't just relay the output. Read it, understand it, validate it, and then write a response in your own words (a decent certificate that you've done the prior steps). Making that effort is value you can add.

Via Lobste.rs

Tags: definitions, ai, generative-ai, llms, ai-misuse

Simon Willison's Weblog Supports Webmention
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Devtools must be open source (exe.dev)

My comment on Devtools must be open source (exe.dev) — Hacker News. One of the arguments for open source software for end-users has always been the freedom to examine and modify how that software works. The reality for most people - even expert programmers - has been that th...

Dwarkesh Podcast
Audio • Dwarkesh Patel

Why smarter AI models could drive up compute prices 10x

The end of cheap compute?

DYNOMIGHT Valid
Text • dynomight

Indirect lessons from human alignment

On doing what evolution wants us to do

Marcus on AI
Text • Gary Marcus

Two critical updates re: Astra and mathematics

Two critical updates re: Astra and mathematics

First, abstracting from all the words in my long analysis on OpenAI Astra yesterday, the overall point was that Astra may not be the breakthrough that OpenAI wants you to think it was.

Simon Willison's Weblog Supports Webmention
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Quoting David Crawshaw

Set up a nightly cron job that executes the prompt: fetch upstream changes to the <software> and rebase all local changes on top of upstream. Check that the software works as intended and replace the current version.

David Crawshaw, Devtools must be open source

Tags: prompt-engineering, coding-agents, generative-ai, ai, llms, open-source

micahflee Supports Webmention
Text • Micah Lee

Agentic coding techniques

Agentic coding techniques

Since LLMs have been available, I've been doing a lot of coding using agents. Unlike shoving AI into every app, replacing customer support with chatbots, generating endless streams of slop, etc., agentic coding is actually useful. If used right – and, crucially, by someone who understands and reviews

Terence Eden’s Blog
Text • @edent

Book Review: The Field Guide to Understanding 'Human Error' by Sidney Dekker ★★★★☆

This is such a useful book. It makes the case that there's no such thing as "human error" - instead most catastrophes are caused by system issues, misaligned incentives, and unrealistic processes. You are not the custodian of an otherwise safe system that you need to protect from erratic human beings. By its nature it is a little repetitive. I suspect it's the sort of book students and…

The Silicon Underground
Text • Dave Farquhar

The Caldera-SCO merger of 2000

The Caldera-SCO merger of 2000
The Caldera-SCO merger of 2000

On August 2, 2000, a second-tier Linux vendor acquired a struggling Unix vendor. The merger received some press, but if you weren’t really following Linux at the time, it would have been easy enough to miss. But the merger of

The post The Caldera-SCO merger of 2000 appeared first on The Silicon Underground.

Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow
Text • Cory Doctorow

Pluralistic: Dualism (03 Aug 2026)

Today's links Dualism: Why not both? Hey look at this: Delights to delectate. Object permanence: UK's Great Firewall falls; Mint the coins; Virtual pets v DRM; Getty copyfrauds 47,000 photos; Net Mexico-US illegal migration is zero; Build a wall (around Trump Tower); Remote-h...

Troy Hunt Supports Webmention
Text • Troy Hunt

Welcoming the Nepalese Government to Have I Been Pwned

Welcoming the Nepalese Government to Have I Been Pwned

Today, we welcome the 47th government onboarded to Have I Been Pwned’s free gov service: Nepal. Their National Cyber Security Centre now has access to monitor Nepalese government domains against the data in HIBP. This gives the NCSC the ability to identify exposure across government email addresses and

Software and Tech stories from an Insider - iDiallo.com
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Invisible Problems

During the pandemic, we completed one of our largest projects at work. To celebrate, since we couldn't meet in person, we all ordered food on DoorDash and played an online escape room game together. We were on a Zoom call, helping each other out and having fun. The first cha...

Fernando Borretti
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Review: Job-Less Utopia

Review of Marcus Hutter's Job-Less Utopia.

Troy Hunt Supports Webmention
Text • Troy Hunt

Weekly Update 515

Weekly Update 515

Apparently, Aussies are so obsessed with coffee that it's referred to as the coffee capital of the world down here (some bits, at least). "But what about Italy?" people ask. Having spent a lot of time in a lot of Italy, no, it's just

Simon Willison's Weblog Supports Webmention
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condense-json 1.0

Release: condense-json 1.0 I'm trying to get braver at releasing 1.0 versions. This little library is a year and a half old now - I've applied some sensible and non-disruptive fixes and shipped the big 1.0 for it. Here's an example of what it can do, lifted from the ...