FeedCity

Although I try to keep navel-gazing to a minimum, I’m happy to report that this publication has crossed 7,000 email subscribers (plus an unknown number of RSS weirdos).

Although I try to keep navel-gazing to a minimum, I’m happy to report that this publication has crossed 7,000 email subscribers (plus an unknown number of RSS weirdos).

Release: llm 0.32

See my detailed blog post about this release.

Tags: llm

After writing the previous post about metallic ratios, I thought about the analogy to alchemy and the attempt to make precious metals out of base metals. When can you make one metallic ratio out of another? Can you make the golden ratio out of the lead ratio? Before we can make gold out of lead, […]

The post Metallic alchemy first appeared on John D. Cook.

Using Homebrew's tap machinery as a curated distribution layer for GitHub Actions.

The golden ratio is the first and best known of the metallic ratios. I’ve written about the silver ratio a few times, most recently here. And I’ve mentioned the bronze ratio a couple times. The metallic ratios after bronze don’t have standard names. The nth metallic ratio M(n) is the number whose continued fraction representation […]

The post Ratio of metallic ratios first appeared on John D. Cook.

It's 1998 and Doogie, the guy across the hall in our student accommodation, will not stop playing The Boy With The Arab Strap. Eventually I crack and ask him who the band are. He infodumps on me with all the authority of an 18 year our music snob about this cool new Scottish band called Belle & Sebastian. I slip him a tenner, a couple of Smirnoff Ice, and the promise of my help on the next…

When Radio Shack announced its TRS-80 Model 1 on Aug 3, 1977, designer Steve Leininger thought they could sell 50,000 units. Tandy executives didn’t believe him. But the response overwhelmed the company, and 250,000 people put their money where their

The post Radio Shack’s TRS-80: Introduced Aug 3, 1977 appeared first on The Silicon Underground.

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 ...

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.

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.

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

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

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

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...

The end of cheap compute?

On doing what evolution wants us to do

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.

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

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