llm-gguf 0.2, now with embeddings This new release of my llm-gguf plugin - which provides support for locally hosted GGUF LLMs - adds a new feature: it now supports embedding models distributed…

A warning about tiktoken, BPE, and OpenAI models Tom MacWright warns that OpenAI's tiktoken Python library has a surprising performance profile: it's superlinear with the length of input, meanin…

How some of the world's most brilliant computer scientists got password policies so wrong Stuart Schechter blames Robert Morris and Ken Thompson for the dire state of passwords today: The…

TextSynth Server I'd missed this: Fabrice Bellard (yes, that Fabrice Bellard) has a project called TextSynth Server which he describes like this: ts_server is a web server proposing a REST API…

When we started working on what became NotebookLM in the summer of 2022, we could fit about 1,500 words in the context window. Now we can fit up to 1.5 million words. (And using various other tri…

One of my favorite memories of working at InVision was my conversations with Kristin Hillery, a creative director leading brand and content. We talked about ideas for content and events that…

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People like stealing fontina fortunes worth of cheese because it’s easy to sell on the black market and is hard to track. The mascarpone market probably doesn’t even have to be super dark…

Cher has a book coming out, Cher, The Memoir, Part One, and Vulture has an excerpt about meeting Sonny Bono. In my mind I was thinking, Yeah, OK, this old line. But I must have had a look…

A report from the European championship of tram drivers. This was one of the tests: “Drivers had to come to a stop so gently that water did not slosh out of a bowl that was filled to the br…

Photos by Noah Kalina of the oldest forest in the world (a 385-million-year-old forest in Cairo, New York) and the paleobotanist who discovered it. “Holy cats! These were roots and that’s…

Oh wow, this is cool: an article in Scientific American about the Arecibo message, the first message purposely sent by humanity out into interstellar space. The piece is written by science wr…

“Dental care supplier Henry Schein advanced in Monday trading as investors bet that RFK, Jr., Trump’s pick for HHS secretary, could recommend removing fluoride from the U.S. water system,…

A few months ago, I posted about Lane 8’s seasonal mixes and I’m happy to report that the Fall 2024 Mixtape is now out. You can find it on Soundcloud, YouTube, and Apple Music. I’ve b…

The work of Swiss graphic designer Anna Monika Jost for Olivetti from around 1966 is amazing! Reply via Email…

Google & the US Forest Service are partnering to use machine learning to detect forest fires. “[FireSat] will provide global high resolution imagery that is updated every 20 minutes, enabli…

Rafael Nadal has officially retired from professional tennis. One of the greatest to ever do it. “I’m not tired of playing tennis but my body doesn’t want to play anymore and you have t…

Foursquare Open Source Places: A new foundational dataset for the geospatial community I did not expect this! [...] we are announcing today the general availability of a foundational open data…

Bluesky WebSocket Firehose Very quick (10 seconds of Claude hacking) prototype of a web page that attaches to the public Bluesky WebSocket firehose and displays the results directly in your brow…

For the love of god, quit calling your newsletter “my Substack”. “You can talk about your work as *your work*. It’s your newsletter, or your email, or your blog. Or just your writing.…

OpenStreetMap vector tiles demo Long-time OpenStreetMap developer Paul Norman has been working on adding vector tile support to OpenStreetMap for quite a while. Paul recently announced that vect…

Using uv with PyTorch PyTorch is a notoriously tricky piece of Python software to install, due to the need to provide separate wheels for different combinations of Python version and GPU acceler…

Understanding the BM25 full text search algorithm Evan Schwartz provides a deep dive explanation of how the classic BM25 search relevance scoring function works, including a very useful breakdow…

The oarfish is a very long fish people don’t normally see on account of it living deep, deep in the deep water, though three have washed up on the shores of Southern California in the las…

I participated in an Ars Live conversation with Benj Edwards of Ars Technica today, talking about that wild period of LLM history last year when Microsoft launched Bing Chat and it instantly star…

25 years after the much maligned DK Rap premiered to scorn in Nintendo’s Donkey Kong 64, the composer, Grant Kirkhope, has released a remix with the rapper Substantial that whips.…

Every day, people go out and do the kind of stuff you’ve never imagined being possible, but they imagined it, and that’s what’s important. 💬 Join the d…

You still have a couple of days left to back Kelli Anderson’s pop-up book about typography on Kickstarter. It looks incredible. 💬 Join the discussion on kot…

So we all know the color purple has always been associated with royalty because the dye used to make it was extremely limited because you could only get it from the Phoenician city of Tyre wh…

Preview: Gemini API Additional Terms of Service Google sent out an email last week linking to this preview of upcoming changes to the Gemini API terms. Key paragraph from that email: To maintai…

Asheville, NC has lifted its boil water notice after 53 days. Hurricane Helene left high sediment levels contaminating 80% of the city’s drinking water. 💬 J…

Emoji Rain is a visualization of emoji use on Bluesky. “Emojis from longer messages fall more slowly!” 🦋 💧 🌧️ ☔️ 🌈 🦄 💬 Join the discu…

For The Observer, Carole Cadwalladr published a list of pointers on how to survive in Trumpist America, inspired by Timothy Snyder’s Fighting Authoritarianism: 20 Lessons from the 20th Ce…

Premiering this Friday (Nov 22) on FX is a short documentary from The New York Times called Weight of the World about GLP-1 drugs. Here’s the synopsis: As GLP-1 drugs like Ozempic soar i…

Wow! This is magical: a map of the Reddit. Each dot represents a subreddit. Two dots within the same cluster are close to each other if multiple users frequently leave comments on both subreddits. Cre…

View this post on Instagram A post shared by David Szauder (@davidszauder) Wow. This. is absolutely magical. Hat tip to David Szauder for dreaming this up. (Yes, it’s generated with AI tools.)…

“On Saturday, more than 50 Jeremy Allen White lookalikes descended on the sledding hill at Humboldt Park to compete for $50 and a pack of Marlboro Red cigarettes.”…

Something I still think about is the “Can a plane take off on a treadmill,” so imagine my glee at discovering these superheroes trying to flip a bike on a moving train. Yes, it’s glee I…

Security means securing people where they are William Woodruff is an Engineering Director at Trail of Bits who worked on the recent PyPI digital attestations project. That feature is based aroun…

Christian Right Lobbies To Overturn Second Law Of Thermodynamics. “What do these scientists want us teaching our children? That the universe will continue to expand until it reaches eventua…

The trailer for Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning. Tom Cruise…still running. I can’t wait to see what he falls off of, clings to, leaps onto, or is thrown from this time!…

In the MIT Technology Review, Mat Honan makes two points about changes in the world of social media with both Bluesky and Threads seeing massive growth in November accelerated by the election…

90 seconds of Miss Piggy absolutely roasting Martha Stewart. “Oh, how obsessive!” 💬 Join the discussion on kottke.org →…

If you need a refresher, here’s the official 2-minute recap of Severance season one from Apple TV+. 💬 Join the discussion on kottke.org →…

OK, I see you have your hand up with an answer, but I’m going to take this one, alright? Killer whales hunt moose. Right? That’s the most surprising. It is not terribly common, but in t…

“In 2018, Nerds products brought in $40 million in sales. In the past calendar year, the company said, that number jumped to $800 million.” NERDS Gummy Clusters are good as hell and every…

What does it say about the state of the internet when the migration of people from one platform to another generates so many headlines and excitement? And more importantly, why does this matter? I don…

Roxane Gay: “To suggest we should yield even a little to Mr. Trump’s odious politics, to suggest we should compromise on the rights of trans people, for instance, […] is unacceptable. I…

Pixtral Large New today from Mistral: Today we announce Pixtral Large, a 124B open-weights multimodal model built on top of Mistral Large 2. Pixtral Large is the second model in our multimodal…

I honestly did not read most of this article, but I wanted to draw your attention to some facts about the recent presidential election that you might find surprising: While Mr. Trump won the…

Qwen: Extending the Context Length to 1M Tokens The new Qwen2.5-Turbo boasts a million token context window (up from 128,000 for Qwen 2.5) and faster performance: Using sparse attention mechani…

The use of the word integrity is in decline.…

The main innovation here is just using more data. Specifically, Qwen2.5 Coder is a continuation of an earlier Qwen 2.5 model. The original Qwen 2.5 model was trained on 18 trillion tokens spread…

This poster over on Drool caught my eye.…

Hello there everybody. I’m working on some programming stuff to enable some future new features for the site this week, so I’m going to be around a little less than usual. My pal Aaron Co…

You might be able to fit an entire orange in your mouth. But can you get it out again? “Temporarily blind and gasping in my own private world of consequences, I was unaware of the cone of d…

“A talent for speaking differently, rather than for arguing well, is the chief instrument of cultural change.” ― Richard Rorty (via Casper)…

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Writing for technical audiences often means sharing code in one form or another. If the code is only for illustration purposes, then it can be included in the article for observation. But if the code…

llm-gemini 0.4 New release of my llm-gemini plugin, adding support for asynchronous models (see LLM 0.18), plus the new gemini-exp-1114 model (currently at the top of the Chatbot Arena) and a -o…

LLM 0.18 New release of LLM. The big new feature is asynchronous model support - you can now use supported models in async Python code like this: import llm model = llm.get_async_model("gpt-4o"…

The second coming of Alt News, dead dinosaurs, a geo-morphing type system, Hunter’s knew all along, Un-Batman, The Art of Doing Dumb Shit, and Kill Your Television.…

On these downhill skateboarding things, I’m always wondering why there aren’t any cars, but uh, there are cars in this one. Josh Neuman skateboarding down a mountain road while cars come…

Iterate. Iterate. Iterate.…

I interviewed Philip James about Civic Band, his "slowly growing collection of databases of the minutes from civic governments". Philip demonstrated the site and talked through his pipeline for s…

NuExtract 1.5 Structured extraction - where an LLM helps turn unstructured text (or image content) into structured data - remains one of the most directly useful applications of LLMs. NuExtract…