AI counter app from my PyCon US keynote In my keynote at PyCon US this morning I ran a counter at the top of my screen that automatically incremented every time I said the words "AI" or "artific…

I rewrote it [the Oracle of Bacon] in Rust in January 2023 when I switched over to TMDB as a data source. The new data source was a deep change, and I didn’t want the headache of building it i…

Understand errors and warnings better with Gemini As part of Google's Gemini-in-everything strategy, Chrome DevTools now includes an opt-in feature for passing error messages in the JavaScript c…

Commit: Add a shared credentials relationship from twitter.com to x.com A commit to shared-credentials.json in Apple's password-manager-resources repository. Commit message: "Pour one out."…

I have seen the extremely restrictive off-boarding agreement that contains nondisclosure and non-disparagement provisions former OpenAI employees are subject to. It forbids them, for the rest of…

I know a lot of you probably aren’t going to take me up on this, but I recommend watching Summoning Salt’s feature-length documentary on the history of Tetris world records. I started w…

“A [2022] report adds to a growing line of research showing that police departments don’t solve serious or violent crimes with any regularity, and in fact, spend very little time on crime…

Here’s something that I believe without any evidence to back it up: chocolate cookies taste better without chocolate chips in them. (I do prefer CCCs with sparse chips though.)…

Whoa, classic console emulators work on Apple TV now? (In other words, you can play old school NES/SNES/N64 games on your Apple TV.) You can even connect a controller.…

Danny MacAskill is known ‘round these parts for his jaw-dropping trials riding (I first posted about him 15 years ago) but this ride is a little bit different. MacAskill and four friends…

PSF announces a new five year commitment from Fastly Fastly have been donating CDN resources to Python—most notably to the PyPI package index—for ten years now. The PSF just announced at Py…

This week in crossword history (1924): Cross-Word Puzzlers to Hold [10-Letter Word Meaning Meet]. “Enthusiastic followers of tiddley-winks, jackstraws, parchesi […] have not yet announced…

Programming mantras are proverbs I like this idea from Luke Plant that the best way to think about mantras like "Don’t Repeat Yourself" is to think of them as proverbs that can be accompanied…

Ex-Oxford resident Ben Werdmuller contacted me a couple of months ago, wondering if I'd be interested in creating an icon for his new personal project ShareOpenly. It's a very easy way to share conte…

In case anyone else is on a bedside lamp acquisition journey, I got some ideas out of this Strategist post, as well as from this Architectural Digest roundup. �…

The other day while singing to my daughter, I realized that I can, in fact, sing better than I used to. I think the sheer amount of “Wheels on the Bus” and “Row, Row, Row Your Boat” d…

If you don’t like exercise or are getting sick of your workout routine, a few recent essays will keep you in good company. Last fall, Aja Frost wrote I Was (Am?) Addicted to Exercise for t…

The 40-hour workweek isn’t “a biological necessity,” per a recent episode of History Unplugged. “In fact, for much of human history, 15 hours … was the standard.” I haven’t list…

It’s another Thursday Afternoon With Edith! In these comics from last winter, our baby was just born. (Previously.) Tags: diary comics 💬 Join the discu…

You may have heard that this year, for the first time since 1803, two different broods of cicadas will emerge at the same time. This year, though, will be a rare event. Two groups, or “bro…

The movies that influenced Star Wars, from Flash Gordon & Buck Rogers to The Hidden Fortress by Akira Kurosawa to The Searchers & Metropolis. 💬 Join the discu…

I am apparently one of the few people who really liked the first season of the Lord of the Rings prequel series, The Rings of Power. I mean, it had its rough spots and maybe there was a lit…

I Was Shot in Vermont. What if It Had Been in the West Bank? “Why did reporters…interview our mothers and take our portraits when young men my age have been shot at by snipers, detained i…

Scope of Work is holding a contest around the idea of “umarelling”, the act of pausing to observe construction work in progress. 💬 Join the discussion on…

[...] by default Heroku will spin up multiple dynos in different availability zones. It also has multiple routers in different zones so if one zone should go completely offline, having a second d…

Pulitzer Prize in Fiction juror Michael Chabon recommended three non-winning books that he “deeply dug”: The Ice Harp (Norman Lock), After World (Debbie Urbanski), and Dearborn (Ghassan Z…

But where the company once limited itself to gathering low-hanging fruit along the lines of “what time is the super bowl,” on Tuesday executives showcased generative AI tools that will someda…

I am a sports parent but have never been the type that lived through the achievements of their kids, but even so, there are parts of Rich Cohen’s The Sad Fate of the Sports Parent I identif…

PaliGemma model README One of the more over-looked announcements from Google I/O yesterday was PaliGemma, an openly licensed VLM (Vision Language Model) in the Gemma family of models. The model…

Tracing the history of emoji, surprisingly, back to the 80s. “Once you accept that emoji existed in the 1980s, more things come to light.” 💬 Join the disc…

Thanks to the Instagram account New American Paintings, I recently came across the work of Los Angeles-based artist Delia Brown, including the above portrait, “Jai Maa! (Justine II),” w…

OpenAI: Managing your work in the API platform with Projects New OpenAI API feature: you can now create API keys for "projects" that can have a monthly spending cap. The UI for that limit says:…

Paul Ford writing about AI is a treat. “AI is, very simply, a totally shameless technology. It does everything badly and confidently. And I want to be it.” �…

Monday's OpenAI announcement of their new GPT-4o model included some intriguing new features: Creepily good improvements to the ability to both understand and produce voice (Sam Altman simply tw…

“My love of farm-fresh frozen confections does not outweigh my distaste for food poisoning — or bird flu.” Interesting look at the interstate raw milk trade.…

Francis Ford Coppola has been making Megalopolis since 1983 and has self funded it “in part by the sale of a significant portion of the director’s wine empire”. But the trailer is fin…

TIL that some tiny bits of bitcoins are more valuable than others. “Those produced in the year bitcoin was created are considered vintage, like a fine wine. Other coveted sats were part of…

If we want LLMs to be less hype and more of a building block for creating useful everyday tools for people, AI companies' shift away from scaling and AGI dreams to acting like regular produc…

Whoa, a 5500-piece Lego set of the tower of Barad-dûr from LoTR. According to The Verge, the eye lights up, there’s a Shelob inside, and you can stack multiple sets to make your tower tall…

How to PyCon Glyph’s tips on making the most out of PyCon. I particularly like his suggestion that “dinners are for old friends, but lunches are for new ones”. I’m heading out to Pittsb…

Google is replacing their search results with AI answers. There’s a very simple explanation for this: it’s better/cheaper to provide potentially wrong answers to keep you clicking within…

Hey folks. I’ve posted a couple of times about Hot Frank Summer, the group read of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1831 edition) that some folks are doing on Bluesky. Well, it kicks off to…

Love this phrase: decanting groceries. “Do you really want to spend your one wild and precious life putting marshmallows in jars?” 💬 Join the discussion o…

But unlike the phone system, we can’t separate an LLM’s data from its commands. One of the enormously powerful features of an LLM is that the data affects the code. We want the system to modi…

The MacBook Airs are Apple’s best-selling laptops; the iPad Pros are Apple’s least-selling iPads. I think it’s as simple as this: the current MacBook Airs have the M3, not the M4, because t…

Hey, if you’re looking for a well-designed (and free!) ebook of Frankenstein for Hot Frank Summer (starting tomorrow!), check out this Standard Ebooks edition.…

Context caching for Google Gemini Another new Gemini feature announced today. Long context models enable answering questions against large chunks of text, but the price of those long prompts can…

llm-gemini 0.1a4 A new release of my llm-gemini plugin adding support for the Gemini 1.5 Flash model that was revealed this morning at Google I/O. I'm excited about this new model because of its…

How developers are using Gemini 1.5 Pro’s 1 million token context window I got to be a talking head for a few seconds in an intro video for today's Google I/O keynote, talking about how I used…

Why your voice assistant might be sexist Given OpenAI's demo yesterday of a vocal chat assistant with a flirty, giggly female voice - and the new ability to be interrupted! - it's worth revisiti…

Hey folks. I’ve been battling a wicked sore throat since Saturday; it keeps knocking me down and I keep getting back up but this morning it hissed STAY DOWN and I’m just going to listen…

LLM 0.14, with support for GPT-4o It's been a while since the last LLM release. This one adds support for OpenAI's new model: llm -m gpt-4o "fascinate me" Also a new llm logs -r (or --response)…