FeedCity

A meditation on gaming, community, and the purpose of negative space

“System One” models like Jev are fast general classifiers. Classifiers have existed since 1958, but they have to be trained for specific tasks: if you build a classifier to identify images of dogs, it can’t be used to tell you if a streetlight is red, or if a letter is urgen...

This book, by The Times' former Architecture Correspondent, stands in direct opposition to A City on Mars. Whereas that book presented a (perhaps too) sceptical look at the realities of living on other planets, Jonathan Morrison's book goes (perhaps too far) in the opposite direction. How to Build a Space Station is a beautiful examination of just how important architecture will be to our…

An interactive explorer for a personal design/UX book library

This article tells the last part of the story of Lemmings. For a while there in the early 1990s, there seemed to be good reason to believe that Lemmings was on its way to becoming one of gaming’s perennial franchises. Developed by DMA Design of Dundee, Scotland, the original Lemmings game took the world by storm […]

Being good at building and being good at shipping are two separate skills. In the short term, they’re actually countervailing: if you have a gift for building, you’re likely to be worse at shipping. Ira Glass has a classic quote about this. All of us who do creative work, w...

Release: datasette-auth-github 1.0

I run this GitHub login plugin on the agent.datasette.io demo site and I noticed that my authenticated sessions weren't lasting very long. It turned out that the plugin was setting cookies without a Max-Age parameter, so they were expiring at the end of a browser session (which in Mobile Safari seems to happen pretty often, independently of how you are using the app.)

I fixed that in #80 and, since this plugin has been around for quite a while and is tested against both Datasette 0.65.x and Datasette 1.0ax, I decided to bump it up to a 1.0 release. I'm trying to get better at promoting stable plugins to 1.0.

Tags: github, plugins, datasette

Are generative (randomized) tests significantly more effective than example-based unit-tests at discovering bugs? There's an interesting discussion about this on lobste.rs. One argument in favor of unit tests is, paraphrasing

California Sea Lion, Brandt's Cormorant, in Pillar Point Harbor, CA, US I only noticed this after I had taken the photo: Morris the Northern Gannet is peeking out from behind the base of the sign. Tags: wildlife

The following are my notes on discrete-time Fourier series (DTFS), as well as the discrete-time Fourier transform (DTFT). These topics serve as an important theoretical underpinning to the digital processing of signals by computers using the DFT (which will be covered in a future post).

For discrete-time signals, we use …

Actions speak louder than words

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

AirBnB’s housing accelerator, rising steel prices, a resurgence of US coal power, low-head dams, and more.

Nothing grows exponentially forever. What appears to be an exponential curve often turns out to be some sort of S curve, such as a logistic curve. Suppose you’re collecting data on the left side of the curve. If there’s even a small amount of error in your data, you won’t be able to predict the […]

The post Why fitting a logistic is nearly impossible from early data first appeared on John D. Cook.

Gemini Hacked Three Companies in First Known Breakout by Google’s AI Gemini finally caught up on Felony Bench! The hacks, which the company confirmed on Friday, occurred in May as part of a test run by the company Irregular, which was also involved in similar incidents disc...

“Artificial” things can get a bad rap next to their counterparts, but they have their place. For example, artificial light (i.e. not from the sun)? Super useful, especially at night. And when it comes to skiing, I’ll take artificial snow if I have to. Beats no snow. Artific...

Being a computer scientist who refuses to find anything about LLMs interesting right now is a bit like being a geneticist who refuses to find anything interesting about the recently opened Jurassic Park.

Tags: llms, ai, generative-ai

We're adding support for AGENTS.md to Claude Code.

Starting today in version 2.1.277, if there is no CLAUDE.md in a folder, Claude will check for and use AGENTS.md.

AGENTS.md support is built off of Claude Code mods, our upcoming way to customize the Claude Code harness.

This is a built-in mod, but you’ll be able to build custom versions of project instructions yourself as you’d like too.

You can see the source for the mod here!

— Thariq Shihipar, there are more mods here

Tags: thariq-shihipar, coding-agents, anthropic, claude-code, generative-ai, ai, llms

More disconcerting updates 😱

Rome is burning and people are fantasizing about Skynet.