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By my count there are at least three "Heated Rivalry" musical parodies on at the Fringe this year. The zeitgeist skates to where the puck was six months ago, I guess! There's also a live version of a HR podcast if you just can't get enough of their wacky ice-capades. Just how much sexy-hockey can one city take? Produced by Quick and Funny Musicals, an American company specialising in cash-ins …

GitHub Models is now retired I missed this news until today, when the GitHub Actions run for my simonw/research repository failed with this error message: GitHub Models is temporarily unavailable as part of a scheduled retirement brownout. That message is already stale, be...

Research: SQLite compressed text-history prototypes I'm perennially interested in options for storing revision histories in relational databases. While out on a dog walk I had a new idea: how about taking the full text of every prior version in a big JSON array of st...

I was reading a book on the history of the discovery of the structure of DNA [1] and was surprised by a few passing references to Bessel functions. According to Claude, When X-rays are diffracted by a helical structure, the resulting diffraction pattern breaks into a series of horizontal “layer lines.” Cochran, Crick, and Vand […]

The post DNA and Bessel functions first appeared on John D. Cook.

At the end of my post on how not to calculate cosine I said that the first step in calculating cosine, particularly cosine of a large number, would be to do range reduction. This post will present a simple range reduction method by Cody and Waite that is adequate for moderately large arguments. If you […]

The post A simple range reduction method first appeared on John D. Cook.

Our first show at the Fringe! Caught by a rainstorm (in Scotland?!?!?) the app said this was the nearest comedy show to our sodden carcasses and it was free! This is bang-average stand-up. That isn't to disparage it at all. Four Australian blokes each doing 15 minutes of material - nothing particularly avant-garde or challenging. Just some decently funny (albeit well worn) observations about…

There's a certain strain of commentator who is just sure that nothing can ever get better. In amongst all the hullaballoo about the UK potentially banning under 16s from social media, I saw a prominent historian say: i assume banning kids from social media will be accompanied by a huge investment in teen-friendly communtiy [sic] spaces (like youth clubs) and social activities? No? Huh. But,…

Everyone knows that AI sycophancy is when the model tells you how smart you are. Wow, you’re absolutely right. That’s not just a new idea — it’s genuinely groundbreaking. You’re a very special user. Easy to spot, isn’t it? The discussion around AI sycophancy peaked last year...

For many years, I sometimes discovered that commands I was sure I had run were no longer present in my Z shell history file (~/.zsh_history). In this article, I will show you how I tracked down the bug. Spoiler: ultimately, patching Zsh to make it crash loudly and analyzing ...

This will be kind of an unusual post. I got a recent email about my writing that I thought was such a good articulation of one common criticism that I’d like to share it (and my response) in full. Here’s the email, from William Murray1: Hey Sean, I have enjoyed your writing...

Auto mode is now the default in Claude Code for Pro, Max, and Team plans Anthropic are really confident in Claude Code's auto mode, to the point that they are making it the default setting for new sessions in most Claude Code plans starting on August 14th. This was one of th...

Anubis v1.27.0 (Moenbryda Wilfsunnwyn) is now available via Docker and direct download from GitHub releases. This release adds Windows Server support, automatically renames cookies based on settings to avoid infinite challenge loops, adds two new localizations, and ...

Auto mode is now the default in Claude Code for Pro, Max, and Team plans Anthropic are really confident in Claude Code's auto mode, to the point that they are making it the default setting for new sessions in most Claude Code plans starting on August 14th. This was one of th...

This article tells part of the story of Maxis Software. I don’t think people realize how much tactical and strategic forethought goes into their daily lives. There’s a whole subconscious time-efficiency layer in our lives. In essence, real-time strategy is our lives. — Will Wright On the morning of October 19, 1991, two weeks after […]

My comment on Now we have a timeline of the OpenAI accidental attack against Hugging Face — Hacker News. I think one of the most interesting details here might be tucked away in that first bulletin point: May 7: OpenAI starts a new training run for an experimental, unreleas...

My comment on Now we have a timeline of the OpenAI accidental attack against Hugging Face — Hacker News. I think one of the most interesting details here might be tucked away in that first bulletin point: May 7: OpenAI starts a new training run for an experimental, unreleas...

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

The Endangered Species Act and housing production, why it’s hard for LEGO to use 3D printing, robotic welding and shipbuilding, modular data centers, and more.

Pssst! This post is only available to RSS/Atom subscribers. Tell your friends to subscribe 😊. Just a quick one today, a more detailed blog coming soon - but I thought I'd give RSS Club Members (you!) a sneak peek. A few months ago I saw a post on Mastodon from NLnet - they were looking for Open Source projects to apply for grant funding. The deadline was less than 24 hours away, so I rushed in …

Today's links Digital sewer socialism: Mamdani's Public Interest Technologists are what DOGE should have been. Hey look at this: Delights to delectate. Object permanence: Robot garage takes hostages; Thermostat ransomware; Correlate audience exhalations; Judges x TOR; Expecta...