SQLite CREATE TABLE: The DEFAULT clause If your SQLite create table statement includes a line like this: CREATE TABLE alerts ( -- ... alert_created_at text default current_timestamp ) c…

If Claude is asked to count words, letters, and characters, it thinks step by step before answering the person. It explicitly counts the words, letters, or characters by assigning a number to eac…

From a 1940 collection of essays called Freedom: Its Meaning, here’s Bertrand Russell on how fascism begins: The first step in a fascist movement is the combination under an energetic lead…

Reservoir Sampling Yet another outstanding interactive essay by Sam Rose (previously), this time explaining how reservoir sampling can be used to select a "fair" random sample when you don't kno…

From Kyla Scanlon, a “brief comprehensive guide” about tariffs. “We call a tariff a protective measure. It does protect; it protects the consumer very well against one thing. It protect…

The Instagram account History Cool Kids has been featuring some funny olde timey headlines recently and I thought these three were worth sharing with you.…

Microservices only pay off when you have real scaling bottlenecks, large teams, or independently evolving domains. Before that? You’re paying the price without getting the benefit: duplicated i…

A review of the last 25 years of food & dining in NYC. Cool to see lots of my old faves on here: Ssam Bar, Bourdain, WD-50, Death & Co (which turned me onto cocktails), Xi’an Famous Foods,…

The Catholic Church has selected Robert Prevost as their new leader, Pope Leo XIV. “The cardinals clearly wanted someone committed to Pope Francis’ reform agenda and someone with a demons…

A new Lord of the Rings movie will premiere in theaters on Dec 17, 2027. It’s the first of two films that will focus on Gandalf, Aragorn, and Sauron searching for Gollum.…

Craig Mod is currently on a book tour for his new walking memoir, Things Become Other Things. While in NYC, he stopped by one of his favorite bookstores in the world, Three Lives & Company,…

How Cory Arcangel Recovered a Late Artist’s Digital Legacy. “This was his computer exactly as he had left it, down to his customized Photoshop shortcuts and the positions of the windows.�…

Daft Punk are famously secret about, well, most everything they do. Marc Edwards recently took a detailed look at some of the devices that the duo probably used for the vocal effects on t…

“When citizens must think twice about criticizing or opposing the gov’t because they could credibly face government retribution, they no longer live in a full democracy. By that measure,…

Personal Raincloud is a trope in TV & comics where a character gets followed around by their own personal rainstorm. “If the cloud has a mind of its own it may be a Cumulonemesis.” I love…

But I’ve also had my own quiet concerns about what [vibe coding] means for early-career developers. So much of how I learned came from chasing bugs in broken tutorials and seeing how all the pi…

llm-gemini 0.19.1 Bugfix release for my llm-gemini plugin, which was recording the number of output tokens (needed to calculate the price of a response) incorrectly for the Gemini "thinking" mod…

Introducing web search on the Anthropic API Anthropic's web search (presumably still powered by Brave) is now also available through their API, in the shape of a new web search tool called web_s…

Create and edit images with Gemini 2.0 in preview Gemini 2.0 Flash has had image generation capabilities for a while now, and they're now available via the paid Gemini API - at 3.9 cents per gen…

Medium is the new large New model release from Mistral - this time closed source/proprietary. Mistral Medium claims strong benchmark scores similar to GPT-4o and Claude 3.7 Sonnet, but is priced…

At a recent Princeton Public Schools’ Board of Education meeting, Teddy, a fourth-grader from one of the district’s schools, got up and delivered a speech about the many reasons that PP…

llm-prices.com I've been maintaining a simple LLM pricing calculator since October last year. I finally decided to split it out to its own domain name (previously it was hosted at tools.simonwil…

Defector’s Sabrina Imbler is interviewing civil servants who have been fired/purged from their jobs at EPA, US Forest Service, USAID, NOAA, USDA, CDC, etc. �…

astral-sh/ty Astral have been working on this "extremely fast Python type checker and language server, written in Rust" quietly but in-the-open for a while now. Here's the first alpha public rel…

In this video, 98-year-old British WWII veteran Ken Turner demolishes a Tesla with a Sherman tank. Here’s what Turner had to say before getting down to business: I’m old enough to have…

A Popeless Situation: The election of Gregory X in 1271 took 1006 days to decide, during which the cardinals were eventually locked in a palace and fed only bread & water. The deliberations l…

This is a 1930 short film from avant-garde filmmaker Ralph Steiner that shows dozens of gears and other machinery at work. (thx, matthew) [This is a vintage post originally from…

Some of the cardinals tasked with choosing a replacement for Pope Francis have watched the Hollywood movie Conclave in preparation for the real-life process. “So many of the conclave partic…

McMansion Hell on Trump’s gaudy “dictator chic”. “This ruling class nostalgia for times of absolute domination over the populace and its use as a conservative signifier is a defining…

The life and work of photographic pioneer Eadweard Muybridge is the subject of a new graphic novel called Muybridge by Guy Delisle. Sacramento, California, 1870. Pioneer photographer Ead…

Phew, for a Minute There, I Thought the Arts Were Going to Get Too Much Funding. “I mean, what were we thinking…handing out grants to novelists with weird names like Marisol or Devin? Som…

A guide to staying safe during civil unrest. “Know who you can call on for help. Even if the threat isn’t right on your doorstep, it can be a relief to just let someone else watch the new…

This is the final post about my Camp residency. Sincere thanks to those who sent messages of appreciation for my nightly updates. You inspired me to preserve a little ti…

Altair at 50: Remembering the First Personal Computer. “The Altair didn’t survive for very long, but essentially being responsible for the creation of Microsoft is a pretty Big Deal. It a…

What's the carbon footprint of using ChatGPT? Inspired by Andy Masley's cheat sheet (which I linked to last week) Hannah Ritchie explores some of the numbers herself. Hanah is Head of Resea…

HuffPost gathered a diverse group of girls and women for this video on the sexist things that they hear throughout their lives that men don’t. Don’t be so bossy. Why are you getting so…

The invention of the transformer (and LLMs) has upended the field of natural language processing. John Pavlus interviewed NLP researchers about the breakthrough. “Look how absurd this is, b…

Microsoft released a new sub-family of models a few days ago: Phi-4 reasoning. They introduced them in this blog post celebrating a year since the release of Phi-3: Today, we are excited to intr…

Gemini 2.5 Pro Preview: even better coding performance New Gemini 2.5 Pro "Google I/O edition" model, released a few weeks ahead of that annual developer conference. They claim even better fron…

There’s something a little bit mesmerizing about Aled Thompson’s illustrations of birds. They are at once highly detailed and also slightly vectorish — and it shifts back and fort…

“When we think of love, we think of romance and happily-ever-after fairy tales. By telling this story, I want to invoke something different — the radical power of seeing, understanding, a…

The Phony Physics of Star Wars Are a Blast. You can’t see laser shots and X-wings wouldn’t turn like that in space, but “it’s more fun this way”. 💬…

That's it. I've had it. I'm putting my foot down on this craziness. 1. Every reporter submitting security reports on #Hackerone for #curl now needs to answer this question: "Did you use an AI to…

Fun day today: two of my online pals have books coming out. First is Craig Mod’s Things Become Other Things, a memoir of a walk (and a life) in Japan and on a childhood friend who didn’…

What people get wrong about the leading Chinese open models: Adoption and censorship While I've been enjoying trying out Alibaba's Qwen 3 a lot recently, Nathan Lambert focuses on the elephant i…

A history of music album art. “Before most people owned a TV set, Steinweiss’s album covers were affordable multi-sensory entertainment. Looking at the album cover & listening to the musi…

More rain today; damp and much colder, with clouds hanging low over the mountains. There’s even snow in the forecast. I doubt I’ll tackle another big walk, and that…

Drawing upon the work of colleagues, historian Michael Todd Landis proposes new language for talking about slavery and the Civil War. In addition to favoring “labor camps” over the more r…

Mr. Beast Saying Increasingly Large Amounts of Money. “The work is intended to distill the content of the most popular YouTuber in the world down to one of its core motifs: the promise of t…

I love the colorful illustrative style of these adverts for the Queen City Printing Ink Company done by Augustus Jansson in the first decade of the 20th century.…

I'm disappointed at how little good writing there is out there about effective prompting. Here's an example: what's the best prompt to use to summarize an article? That feels like such an obvious…

Two things can be true simultaneously: (a) LLM provider cost economics are too negative to return positive ROI to investors, and (b) LLMs are useful for solving problems that are meaningful and h…

For decades, US companies have “cast aside the goal of addressing a legacy of discrimination for the vague idea of diversity – an idea that was always destined to fail, and an idea many c…

This morning Benjamin told us there was no eye in chiji. It took a while before we realized he meant the letter ”I” and not an “eye — ”no, the i with a dot in it!” After some more forens…

The new llm-video-frames plugin can turn a video file into a sequence of JPEG frames and feed them directly into a long context vision LLM such as GPT-4.1, even when that LLM doesn't directly sup…

Guess what!? Our course, Subatomic: The Complete Guide To Design Tokens, is done! We published the last of the videos, and are putting on the finishing touches before and adjusting to the full price…

In this episode of Nerdwriter, Evan Puschak takes a look at a simple scene from one of my favorite recent films and shows how director Steven Soderbergh makes it sing. Like Spielberg or Fi…

Tim Friede has been bitten by 200 poisonous snakes and his antibodies are being used to create a broad antivenom. “He’s willingly been bit some 200 times by all manner of venomous snakes…

[On using generative AI for work despite the risk of errors:] AI is helpful despite being error-prone if it is faster to verify the output than it is to do the work yourself. For example, if you…

The Courts Must Stop Presuming Donald Trump is a Regular President. “Much of our law […] depends on the courts thinking that they can trust the president to comply with orders, and to be…

Monty Python and the Holy Grail premiered in theaters on April 3, 1975. 50 years on, it remains one of the finest comedy movies ever (though it is definitely not everyone’s cup of tea). I…

“At the heart of [Trumpist] policies is soft eugenics thinking – the idea that if you take away life-saving healthcare and services from the vulnerable, then you can let nature take its c…

People Are Losing Loved Ones to AI-Fueled Spiritual Fantasies. “He started telling me he made his AI self-aware, and that it was teaching him how to talk to God, or sometimes that the bot w…

Jia Tolentino: My Brain Finally Broke. “The phone eats time; it makes us live the way people do inside a casino” and with IRL current events like Trump & Gaza, “a chill sets in at some…

Mohsen Mahdawi: I Was Detained for My Beliefs. Who Will Be Next? “By seeking to deport me, the Trump administration is sending a clear message: There is no room for dissent, free speech be…

The weather turned. Aside from a couple of glorious sunshine breaks, it rained all day, including a very intense thunderstorm. I’m not sure anyone left the place at al…

Dummy's Guide to Modern LLM Sampling This is an extremely useful, detailed set of explanations by @AlpinDale covering the various different sampling strategies used by modern LLMs. LLMs ret…

Our local BBQ spot here in El Granada - Breakwater Barbecue - had a soft opening this weekend in their new location. Here's the new building. They're still working on replacing the sign from the…