FeedCity

In software development, we collect anti-patterns to recognize common traits that lead to poor outcomes in our software. I thought it would be helpful to do the same for software blogging, so I’ve catalogued the most frequent mistakes I see from beginner bloggers.

• The meandering intro
  • Preamble still counts as meandering
• “The reader knows everything I know except this one thing”
• Overreliance on links
• The sequel injection bug
• Excessive formality
• Fumbling on the basics of rendering HTML
  • Page overflow on mobile
  • Unreadable font
• Summary

The meandering intro

The most common mistake in software blogging, by far, is meandering. I constantly find myself several paragraphs into a post with no idea what the author is trying to tell me.

Which package management specs exist and where do they live?

Commodore went through a revolving door of executives after Jack Tramiel resigned due to conflicts with Irving Gould. On October 6, 1987, it was Max Toy’s turn. On that day, Commodore hired him. And for a while, it seemed like

The post Max Toy, embattled Commodore president appeared first on The Silicon Underground.

I was a graph theory junkie long ago and even moved to Budapest for awhile to study among the greats. While I was there I started working on Barnette's Conjecture which came to occupy my thoughts over the next 24 years of my life, on and off as I worked in many different fields. Last summer I even thought for a few days that I had actually solved it.

But it's supposedly proven here - problem 180. I don't know what to think exactly. I spent thousands of hours on that problem. I really enjoyed it. Hearing that it is solved somehow makes me sad in a far-off way, like hearing an ex-girlfriend died suddenly in a car crash. I don't know, there's probably a lot of people feeling odd emotions tonight.

— Jake Boggan, Hacker News comment on openai/math

Tags: openai, mathematics, deep-blue, llms, ai, generative-ai

It shouldn't execute, but for different reasons.

The post Why does the compiler sometimes use <CODE>ud2</CODE> and sometimes <CODE>int 3</CODE> for code that shouldn’t execute? appeared first on The Old New Thing.

Everyone knows how to read a book. Beginning at the first page, you read each word in order1, stopping periodically to think, until you arrive at the last word on the last page. That’s how you read a newspaper article, or a poem, or an email. Why would reading code be any di...

I was skimming through David Well’s book The Penguin Dictionary of Curious and Interesting Geometry and was surprised by this entry: Lissajous figures or Bowditch curves First discussed by Nathaniel Bowditch in 1815, and later by Jules Antoine Lissajous in 1857 … I wrote a couple posts about Lissajous curves years ago, and recently I wrote […]

The post Lissajous and Bowditch first appeared on John D. Cook.

OpenAI “rogue” agent activities found on Wikimedia projects Given how tempting a target wikis are for rogue agent swarms, it's not a huge surprise that Wikipedia found evidence of that activity once they went looking: The Wikimedia Foundation conducted its own investigation...

Release: llm-openai-decisions 0.1a0 OpenAI released their new Jev-style Decisions API, as previously announced at last week's DevDay. Since I already have an llm-typesafe plugin for talking to Jev, I had GPT-6 Astra read the new OpenAI API documentation and build an ...

Since the Medicare breach, OpenAI has put in place additional monitoring to allow “immediate intervention” by staff to stop training if the company’s models access the internet in ways they’re not supposed to, Mr. Kwon [chief strategy officer at OpenAI] said.

— Victoria Kim, Reporting from the Australian parliament

Tags: accidental-cyberattacks, generative-ai, ai-security-research, openai, ai, llms

Release: llm-mistral 0.16

Adds support for reasoning models, such as the newly released Mistral Large 4.

Tags: llm, mistral, llm-reasoning

Release: datasette-atom 0.11a0

A minor fix for compatibility with the latest Datasette alphas. This meant we could upgrade the datasette.io site to Datasette 1.0a41.

Tags: atom, datasette

My comment on EmbeddingGemma 2 — Hacker News. I really appreciate that EmbeddingGemma 2 is under the Apache 2.0 license. For embedding models in particular, I don't think it makes sense to use a closed, proprietary, hosted-only model. Most applications of embedding models in...

Introducing Mistral Large 4: Le chonk Mistral are back in the game. Today they're releasing a preview of Mistral Large 4, a 1 trillion parameter, 49 billion active parameter model trained on their own cluster of 3,800 NVIDIA Grace Blackwell GPUs. The preview is available via...

My comment on Mistral Large 4 — Hacker News.

wren6991: The benchmark is saturated. Frontier models are tested with an armadillo in fishnet tights jaywalking on Mars.

OK well I couldn't resist this one:

llm -m claude-opus-5.5 'Generate an SVG of an armadillo in fishnet tights jaywalking on Mars'
llm -m gpt-6.1-sol 'Generate an SVG of an armadillo in fishnet tights jaywalking on Mars'
llm -m gemini-3.8-flash 'Generate an SVG of an armadillo in fishnet tights jaywalking on Mars'
llm -m mistral/mistral-large-4 'Generate an SVG of an armadillo in fishnet tights jaywalking on Mars'

Default reasoning levels for each: https://tools.simonwillison.net/markdown-svg-renderer?url=ht...

Gödel’s incompleteness theorem illustrated the need to distinguish between what is true and what is provable. There are true statements that cannot be proven. Let □p denote the assertion that p is provable in Peano arithmetic. The logic with this interpretation for the □ operator is the Gödel-Löb logic, also called provability logic. This is a […]

The post A topological model for provability logic first appeared on John D. Cook.

TIL: Using Parseable with Datasette for OpenTelemetry traces

I saw Parseable in a Show HN today - it's a new observability platform with both an open source (AGPL) Rust implementation (a single ~180MB binary), an "Enterprise" version with extra features and a cloud hosted option.

Since Datasette 1.0a41 added OpenTelemetry support (thanks, Alex Garcia), I decided to fire up Codex and have it figure out how to run Parseable and feed it traces from Datasette.

Here's my (human-written) TIL showing the patterns that worked, and here's a screenshot of a Datasette trace displayed within the Parseable localhost web application:

Tags: datasette, observability, opentelemetry

Tool: Scrimshaw Jukebox I wanted to see if Claude Opus 5.5 could compose music, so I tried this: I want you to write some computer game music for me. First design simple text based format for the music and build an artifact that can play it out loud - include some e...

Louie Mantia has a great post about how app icons are converging towards the squircle on iOS and macOS. His post reads like a history. If you’re wondering, “How did we get to a place where all app icons are becoming squircles?” Mantia’s post answers that question by starting...