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I have this sense that we've passed the point where "vibe coding" is a derogatory term. I have no empirical evidence for this; it's more a feeling that those weaponising the term have now accepted the inevitability and are just getting with the program.

Today's links The technopolitics of ad-tech: Spying is good for tech, context is good for publishers. Hey look at this: Delights to delectate. Object permanence: PNH x Mike Ford; Singapore v Far East Economic Review; Publishing v bestsellers; Architecture v security; Vista v ...

The joys and perils of talking about philosophy.

When designing software, the requirements you don’t have are as important as the requirements you do. Identifying what you can compromise on — what can be slow, or stale, or inflexible — is usually the key to an elegant design. Elegant systems drop some requirements For ins...

Release: llm-tools-datasette 0.1.1

When I switched LLM over to httpx2 in LLM 0.33 I forget that this would break any plugins which used httpx without directly depending on it. llm-tools-datasette was one of those plugins, now fixed.

Tags: datasette, llm

Release: llm-echo 0.5

I'm working towards a new LLM release, and testing PRs caused me to revisit the llm-echo debug plugin. This plugin provides a "model" which doesn't involve an LLM at all - it just repeats back the prompts that have been fed to it. The new release now updates the simulated token usage counts to take tool calls, system prompts, and reasoning tokens into account.

Example usage:

uvx --with llm-echo llm -m echo 'hi there' -o thinking 1 --usage

Outputs:

First I consider the prompt, then I decide what to say.
{
  "prompt": "hi there",
  "system": "",
  "attachments": [],
  "stream": true,
  "previous": []
}
Token usage: 2 input, 24 output

Tags: llm

Release: web-edit 0.1a2

web-edit (previously) is my tiny web app for browsing and editing files in a folder. I mainly built it for editing files on different machines via Tailscale.

I added a "copy to clipboard" option for both text and image data. I needed this because I was running pelican prompts on a laptop from my phone (here's DeepSeek 4.1 Flash 1017) and I wanted an easy way to copy the resulting logs into a Gist.

Tags: projects, pelican-riding-a-bicycle, deepseek

In 1980, Intel introduced the 8087, a chip that made floating-point operations much faster in the IBM PC and other systems. Although the 8087 supports advanced operations such as tangents, square roots, and logarithms, this article focuses on basic arithmetic operations: add...

Let's get this out of the way first - this is a terrible idea! I want my two-factor authentication codes to be easily accessible to me, so I've built a watch app which will display them. That's really convenient for me - but makes for a terrible security posture. Anyone who steals my watch will be able to see my one-time code. If they're clever, they can decompile the app and find the secret…

When researching the 1600 VICmodem, I found an assertion that the 1600 was the first modem to sell a million units. And I’ve repeated that claim myself at least once. But I never felt quite right about that. I am

The post How many VICmodems Commodore sold appeared first on The Silicon Underground.

Opus 6: The Taming of the Shrew

One of the most wonderful aspects of math is how deep we can get by studying seemingly trivial questions. Consider the roots of unity, where "unity" simply means the number 1.

With chip stocks on their longest losing streak since 2008 and Anthropic heading for IPO, five ways the AI boom could end - and why I think the value is real but may not flow to the people putting the money in.

Inline rendering with document​.currentScript

Lean Rada describes a neat trick that takes advantage of the document.currentScript property. You can use that to drop in a tiny inline <script> element that replaces itself when the page loads:

The year is <script>
document.currentScript.replaceWith(
  new Date().getFullYear())</script>

If you define a shortcut function like this:

$=(...n)=>document.currentScript.replaceWith(...n)

You get a tiny template language:

The year is <script>$(new Date().getFullYear())</script>

Tags: javascript

Tech companies structurally depend on writing to serve as evidence, in the same way that Bitcoin depends on proof-of-work hashing. However, in the last few years, LLMs have started to undermine this practice. How can writing be like proof-of-work? When I’m writing something ...

Join us for another round of breaking news from the blogosphere

NIST published a set of elliptic curves for cryptography in 2000. The seeds for the curves were supplied by the NSA, and cryptographers suspected the agency may have installed backdoors in the curves. And not without reason: the NSA did insert a backdoor in the Dual_EC_DRBG random number generator. Two days ago researchers at Anthropic […]

The post Cloud of suspicion lifted from NIST curves first appeared on John D. Cook.

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

Icon’s fundraising, employment in China’s solar industry, grid-scale battery reliability, Tesla’s flying roadster, and more.

Today's links Israeli ad-tech company was a delivery system for "mercenary spyware": And they used Google, Facebook and every other major ad platform to do it. Hey look at this: Delights to delectate. Object permanence: Big Mouth Billy Bass x Linux; No-Fly lists v common sens...