FeedCity

I genuinely think I've nailed the IoT door lock situation! Well, Ubiquiti has, but I think I've worked out how to put it all into a residential house and have it make sense. There are a few basic tenets:

1. Main power (never have to rely on

On my icon gallery sites, I have metadata I’ve manually added over the years to tag certain icons as being predominantly “blue” or “orange” or some other color. Then I use this metadata to present icons of (roughly) the same color. It’s kinda neat to be able to browse a wall...

The matter is too important to be taken seriously.

Anthropic’s best AI model struggles to attract users as cheaper tools thrive A few interesting numbers in this FT story gathered from "people with knowledge of the matter": Anthropic's "annualized revenue" for July is up to $65bn - it was $47bn in May, and I collected more ...

Winter 2025 was the tipping point for coding agents. Summer 2026 is shaping up to be the same for open weights - and compute supply, not model quality, is now setting the price.

Prior to Fable, it felt silly to waste too much time improving your coding harness or context strategies. A new model would arrive at the same price (or cheaper!) and paper over most of your problems.

But then Fable landed. It was (and still is!) incredible. But the cost was so high and Opus was good enough (as was 5.6, K3, and even GLM) for most of the code we needed.

So we started to think about what work went where.

— Drew Breunig, Fable & The End of the Free Lunch

Tags: drew-breunig, anthropic, claude, llm-pricing, ai, llms, generative-ai, claude-mythos-fable

Special functions often have arcane names that not very helpful without some context. The previous post goes into some reasons for this. This post will expand on a point at the end of the post about “modified” functions. Things are given their names for a reason. Discovering that reason helps you understand their motivation and […]

The post What exactly is modified about a modified Bessel function? first appeared on John D. Cook.

Special functions are special because they’re useful. They can also be shrouded in arcane terminology. These two facts are related. The more widely useful a function is, the more likely it is that the function will be discovered independently multiple times. Independent discoveries lead to varying definitions and notations. For example, there are two widely […]

The post Why special function terminology is arcane first appeared on John D. Cook.

Sorry, this one is not about AI. But sometimes one must speak out.

Cheaper tools are thriving. What does this mean for the upcoming IPOs?

Pixels are a lie. Even if you think you're drawing something with "pixel perfect" accuracy, your monitor is lying to you. There is no grid of platonically perfect squares. In CSS, pixels are a double lie: Note that 1px doesn't necessarily equal one physical device pixel. On HD displays, it may span multiple physical pixels. Similarly, 1cm in CSS often doesn't correspond to one hundredth of SI…

Today, we welcome the 48th government onboarded to Have I Been Pwned’s free gov service: Sri Lanka. Sri Lanka CERT now has access to monitor Sri Lankan government domains against the data in HIBP, helping identify exposed government accounts and respond when they appear in new data breaches.

Suppose you wanted to find the distance between Earth and Mars over time. To first approximation, both planets orbit the sun in elliptic orbits in the same plane. If you wanted to be more accurate, you’d need to take into account the fact that the orbit of Mars is tilted about 1.85° relative to the […]

The post The difference orbit inclination makes first appeared on John D. Cook.

Looking back from the vantage point of today, it’s hard for even me to believe, but it’s true all the same: I used to be a full-blown car guy. I bought my first car, a 1966 Volkswagen Beetle, for $800 in 1989, when I was sixteen years old. The bad thing about a Beetle was […]

On the rename system call.

And this was a debug session from hell, enormously helped by an AI doing much of the grunt-work.

I'd like to call it my tireless helper, but the AI several times stated flat out that this was impossible and unsolvable and that we should just write a report about it.

I suspect those things have been trained by people who may not be quite as stubborn as I am.

But while the AI was ready to give up several times, it did keep adding debug code and analyzing it faithfully when I pushed. So credit where credit is due and I let the AI write the commit message above.

— Linus Torvalds, drm/xe: Don't hand out the flat CCS storage as usable VRAM

Tags: linus-torvalds, linux, generative-ai, ai-assisted-programming, ai, llms

What’s in an acronym? How to read between the lines.

One of the memes on Twitter is that “programming is solved now.” I’m not sure to what degree it is, but one thing is pretty clear: the act of familiarizing yourself with a language no longer matters and some of the friction that mattered for humans does not matter for agent...

Release: llm 0.33 My highlights from this release: Upgraded to the OpenAI Python library 3.x and switched the HTTP client dependency from httpx to httpx2. #1608, #1631 I shipped a quick 0.32.1 fix for this yesterday, but this is the more comprehensive fix. ll...

The key skill required to make productive use of coding agents is being able to confidently instruct them on how to make changes and then confidently verify that those changes have been applied in the correct way.

Sometimes this involves reviewing every line of code they have written, but there are other ways to achieve that goal. Eyeballing every line of code has never been the most effective way to validate a chance to a piece of software.

Tags: code-review, coding-agents, generative-ai, agentic-engineering, ai, llms