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August 17, 2000 was a major milestone for the Internet. You could argue it’s the day the Internet went mainstream, completing the transition from something computer science students used in college to something their parents would use to buy books

The post When the Internet reached half of US households appeared first on The Silicon Underground.

Today's links Jennifer Jenkins' 'Music Copyright, Creativity, and Culture': The definitive textbook (with comics!). Hey look at this: Delights to delectate. Object permanence: Hair-gel bombers v bras; Hair-gel bombers v chemistry; AOL digs for spammer's platinum; Stross on in...

Gordon Brander writes: The thing about computers is that they can do anything you wish, so long as you specify your wish in exacting detail. However, LLMs relieve this constraint. An LLM can extrapolate what you mean (more or less) from just a few words. So computers can do...

The first post in the recent series of posts on Hadamard matrices describes a way of constructing new Hadamard matrices from two other Hadamard matrices by taking their Kronecker product. Starting with a Hadamard matrix H0 and a Hadamard matrix G, you can construct a sequence of Hadamard matrices by Hn+1 = G ⊗ Hn for  […]

The post Proportion of 1s in a Hadamard matrix first appeared on John D. Cook.

I started building my markdown-svg-renderer tool in May, but I've since added enough features to it that it's worth talking about here again. It's evolved into my ideal tool for sharing Markdown transcripts that include SVG documents. Given my proclivity for drawing pelicans...

Friday's big release was Qwen 3.8 27B, an Apache 2 licensed 27B parameter vision-capable LLM from Alibaba's Qwen research lab. I've been looking forward to this one: 27B is an excellent size for running a model on a reasonably specced laptop, and its predecessor Qwen 3.6 27B...

A practical framework for reducing AI costs - auditing token spend, killing legacy models, moving workloads to open weights providers, and fixing the agent and tool inefficiencies that quietly burn tokens.

Some strong claims, dissected

I do agree that the public has a negative view of AI (and that this is a big problem), but I don’t think it is primarily caused by me or any other AI leader warning about AI’s risks.  I think it is fundamentally a crisis of trust.  I think that ordinary people don’...

This was my first ever time at The Fringe™. Here are some scattered thoughts looking at the good, the bad, and the annoying aspects of this madly extravagant exhibition of talent. We saw 23 shows together, and one separate show each. There were more hits than misses, but the frustration of wasting your time on a bad show is rather heavy when there are literally hundreds of other shows on offer. P…

People are pretty unhappy about Anthropic’s recent announcement that they’re planning to include a hidden watermark in Claude model outputs. Will this lead to a mass exodus from Anthropic models? Will the introduction of watermarking be a meaningful change for users? No. AI ...

Tool: CORS Chat

I built this today (with GPT-5.6-Sol xhigh) to help test Qwen 3.8 27B running in LM Studio on both my M5 MacBook Pro and an NVIDIA DGX Spark.

It provides a web UI for exercising an OpenAI-Responses-compatible chat endpoint. I've tried it against LM Studio with the --cors option and OpenRouter, and both work fine.

Conversations are persisted in the browser and can be exported as copy-pasted JSON. One fun detail is that it notices SVG images that are being generated and progressively renders them in the chat while the tokens are still streaming in.

Tags: svg, ai, generative-ai, llms, cors, openrouter, lm-studio

The IBM PC Compact Printer is a bit of a misnomer, as it was really intended for the PCjr. But it ended up working with a bunch of other computers as well as part of its second act. Here’s the

The post IBM PC Compact Printer model 5181 appeared first on The Silicon Underground.

TL;DR: hospital drugs are some shit, man

This is part 7 in a series of posts on writing concurrent network servers. In this part, we discuss how the challenges described in earlier parts are tackled in the Rust programming language.

All posts in the series:

• Part 1 - Introduction
• Part 2 - Threads
• Part 3 - Event-driven
• Part 4 - libuv …

Error correcting codes are most simply described in terms of the errors they can certainly correct. For example, the Hadamard code used for the Mariner 9 probe to Mars encoded each 6-bit pixel to a 32-bit codeword in such a way that the original pixel could be recovered if no more than 7 bits were […]

The post Probability of correcting errors first appeared on John D. Cook.

Dissecting a web game to re implement the physics engine and train a neural network on it.

Hadamard matrices are in the news following the recent announcement of a newly discovered Hadamard matrix. I’ve written three posts on Hadamard matrices recently, one as a sort of introduction and two on applications: the error correcting code used in the Mariner 9 probe and constructing sphere packings. A Hadamard matrix is an orthogonal matrix […]

The post Compressing a Hadamard matrix first appeared on John D. Cook.

Home price declines, the Strategic Petroleum Reserve, The Boring Company fundraising, and more.

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