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Wait, that's not him.

The post Sneaking into the auditorium for the Windows 2000 launch rehearsal appeared first on The Old New Thing.

In my newsletter I give an introduction to the latest few posts and occasionally give some additional commentary. In my latest newsletter I wrote Projective space and homogeneous coordinates seemed like arbitrary abstractions when I was a student because they were presented without any motivation. Much later I came to realize that they’re natural, almost […]

The post Making peace with the projective plane first appeared on John D. Cook.

There’s two basic ways AI can play out, one is order, the other is chaos.

I was reminded today of AI Adoption Rate Trending Down for Large Companies, a chart produced by Apollo Global Management in September 2025, which appeared to show a slowdown in U.S. corporate AI adoption based on numbers collected by the U.S. Census Bureau. At the time I use...

I love testing in production. The thrill of accidentally publishing some dummy data - or taking down an entire website - is similar to skydiving without a parachute. Exquisite excitement followed by heart-stopping terror. Before going live with a new website or service, it's sensible to test how text looks on it. Most people don't test with readable text - it's too easy for management to start…

So it’s November 1997. The Internet is catching on and you want to start an online business. You just need a big idea. How about selling toys on the Internet? That could be big, right? Hence etoys.com, a short-lived Internet

The post Etoys.com and its rapid rise and fall appeared first on The Silicon Underground.

Today's links Autodoxing: The road to hell is paved with badly thought-through tech policy. Hey look at this: Delights to delectate. Object permanence: Shakespeare programming language; DeCSS is "pure speech"; Blue Coat sold surveillance tools to Syrian secret police; "Extrao...

Powerful AI is unpredictable. Your robotic butler may suddenly decide to kill you1 for no comprehensible reason, in the same way that Bing’s helpful chat AI would sometimes try to blackmail or seduce its users. “Solving alignment” means understanding even superintelligent AI...

I've been getting the occasional confusing Python dependency error since switching over to Python 3.15 and the rule I'm having to remember is: If in doubt, delete the uv.lock file Most of my projects are libraries which don't include a uv.lock file, since it's rude for a lib...

I wrote several posts on poles and polars a few days ago. First, I wrote about the dual of a spherical triangle, called the polar triangle. Then I wrote about poles and polars in plane geometry and briefly mentioned the extension to projective geometry. Poles and polars are a little awkward in the plane because […]

The post A unified view of poles and polars first appeared on John D. Cook.

More broadly, the use of LLMs erodes trust in documentation, in software, and in the organizations which produce them. Perhaps engineers will begin to treat any new software project with suspicion—the signals we used to rely on as markers of a mature system are now easier to counterfeit. [...]

In the age of LLMs, what can maintainers do to ensure correct software and accurate documentation? Having done that work, how can they demonstrate its quality to users?

— Kyle Kingsbury, Jepsen results for ParticleDB 1.1.4

Tags: kyle-kingsbury, llms, ai, generative-ai, ai-misuse

In short: I use iOS Shortcuts to run a Mastodon bot. I run a Mastodon bot that posts random quotes from The Legend of Zelda: Link’s Awakening. (The writing in that game is so charming!) I used to run it off a server, but for the past few days, it’s used an iOS Shortcut on my...

If you are working on an IBM PC/XT model 5160 and need to remove a floppy drive, you may find it difficult to remove after removing the two visible screws that hold them in. If your IBM disk drive is

The post IBM PC/XT drives stuck in the bay? How to free them appeared first on The Silicon Underground.

As of today, I've been on the Mastodon social network for 10 years. I think that deserves a little reflection and celebration. Post by @Edent@mastodon.social View on Mastodon Social networks often launch in a blaze of glory but limp out of existence within a year or so. How many services have you signed up to, only to gradually drift away from? If you're anything like me, your password…

By pure timing coincidence, the Proton CEO's AI @ Proton, Engineering Manifesto made headlines around the same time as this week's video. The guy's management style and choice of language have really rubbed a lot of people up the wrong way, and deservedly so, IMHO.

To get a good reputation in tech companies, you need to work on important projects. However, you need a good reputation first in order to get assigned important projects. Doesn’t that make it impossible to get started? I get a lot of emails from engineers who are struggling ...

How We Took Over ChatGPT Accounts Parameter Labs describe an exploit they found against ChatGPT's implementation of the artifacts pattern (OpenAI used to call this "Canvas" but it looks like the latest revision is called HTML previews), where interactive custom HTML apps are...

Release: datasette-llm 0.1a9

I have some big upgrades to Datasette Agent in the pipeline, but in the meantime here's a tiny user experience improvement to the underlying datasette-llm plugin.

It now picks up the default model used by LLM, which means you can start using Datasette Agent without needing to explicitly configure a default model:

uvx --with datasette-agent datasette content.db --internal internal.db

Previously you would also need to specify a model with -s plugins.datasette-agent.default_model gpt-6-astra.

Tags: datasette, llm, datasette-agent

Yesterday I had the singular honor of meeting His Holiness, Pope Leo XIV

Happy Halloween! Here’s a little of what I got up to in this spooky month. Things I did in October I moved this site from an Apache-powered VPS to CDN-frontend object storage. This means I pay less money, I do less maintenance, and my site loads faster in most parts of the...