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export PIP_BREAK_SYSTEM_PACKAGES=1

Cats is so silly! In the olden days, after a wild animal was slaughtered, the tribe's shaman would wear the skin and re-enact the hunt. As he became one with the beast, the people slowly understood the ways of nature. Cats is a similarly spiritual experience wherein we watch androgynous sylphs gyrate across the stage and believe (if only for a moment) that the human has become feline, all in…

On August 25, 1991, Linus Torvalds wrote a message that changed the world. He didn’t expect that when he wrote it, that’s clear from the message and some of the replies. He had something he wanted to share with his

The post Linux first announced August 25, 1991 appeared first on The Silicon Underground.

I don't think it's going to work out the way everybody thinks it will. The current narrative, at least the one pushed by the companies selling the shovels, is that AI will become centralized. Anthropic and OpenAI will offer safe, vetted AI. Developers will become mere prompt...

I write code roughly the same way I did ten years ago: I make edits in my text editor, I switch over to a terminal window and I run a command to compile and execute the code. I look at the result, then switch back to my editor. If I am unsure of what happens, I either...

In the 1980s and 1990s, Columbia House could do no wrong—it was a great way to get 12 CDs for a penny. But its business model kind of set the stage for a lot of bad e-commerce.

Filling in with your imagination.

The post Comparing the two holograms on the Windows 95 box appeared first on The Old New Thing.

The previous post gave several examples of three-term recurrence relations for special functions. These relations can be computationally useful, but they have to be applied carefully. Several years ago I wrote a post on stable and unstable recurrences. In that post I show that the stability of the recurrence relation for Bessel functions produces depends […]

The post Numerical (in)stability of recurrece relations first appeared on John D. Cook.

In short: Vim has a joke autocmd called UserGettingBored that doesn’t do anything. Vim’s automatic commands feature, usually shortened to “autocmd”, lets you run code when various events occur. For example, you could implement an auto-save feature by binding the TextChanged ...

Today's links How Canada can save Americans and defeat America: True Carneyism has never been tried. Hey look at this: Delights to delectate. Object permanence: Brazil v AIDS drug patents; TSA v gel-bras; After the Siege (Russian); Names are hard; Layton's last message; Hospi...

Git makes it stupidly hard to change or hide your identity

Release: llm-anthropic 0.27

This release mainly provides compatibility with the recently released anthropic v1.0.0 Python library, which switches from httpx to httpx2. OpenAI made the same change in their v3.0.0 release two weeks ago.

Anthropic provide this migration guide for upgrading to 1.0, so I prompted Fable 5 in Claude Code with:

Upgrade to anthropic>=1 - read https://raw.githubusercontent.com/anthropics/anthropic-sdk-python/refs/heads/main/MIGRATION.md and get the tests passing

Here's the resulting PR.

Tags: python, httpx, llm, anthropic, claude

I’m no stranger to pushing hardware past its limits. For example, seven years ago, I tracked down an issue that prevented 16 GB of RAM being used in a motherboard that only supported 8. It ended up being a one-line GRUB hack to fix one of the ACPI tables that was mistakenly overlapping a PCI […]

Not mutually exclusive

There many examples of families of functions where each function can be computed as a linear combination of the two previous terms where a and b are functions of x but not on n. This is called a three-term recurrence formula. It’s amazing how often you can run into three-term recurrence formulas. There are theorems that give conditions […]

The post Three-term recurrences first appeared on John D. Cook.

Probability density function must integrate to 1, and so if you know a density function up to a constant, the constant is determined. When you’re looking at a probability density f(x) for the first time, it helps to ignore the normalizing constant. Concentrate on the part of the function involving x and know that the normalizing […]

The post The von Mises-Fisher distribution first appeared on John D. Cook.

Your executable is a SQLite database Farid Zakaria describes a neat Linux pattern for creating a SQLite database file that can be directly used as an executable binary. The trick sets the SQLite file format's 4-byte application ID (68 bytes into the file) to SELF, standing f...

On our recent trip to the Edinburgh Fringe, I was bemused by just how little effort performers put in to finding out why people had selected their show. Taking a show to the Edinburgh Fringe is ridiculously expensive with some performers paying tens of thousands of pounds. The way performers recoup the costs of performing is by getting people to pay to see a show. Acts are spending huge amounts…

It was on August 24, 1995 that Windows 95 was released, amidst much anticipation. It was the most widely anticipated Windows release of all time, and the runner up really isn’t close. The idea of people lining up for blocks

The post Windows 95 released August 24, 1995 appeared first on The Silicon Underground.

Sean Goedecke wrote a post arguing that you should never be angry at work — a post with which I strongly agree. Anger can be a useful signal, but being angry at work rarely improves the situation. More often, it makes life worse for the people around you, many of whom have...