AI Has No Wisdom and Neither Will You

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The industry is transforming, but relying on AI for coding can lead to unmaintainable code and a loss of human expertise. Experts rely on intuition built from experience, which cannot be replicated by AI or rigid rules.

Can gzip be a language model?

A compressor like gzip can be used for language modeling without neural networks by scoring continuations based on their compressed length. Gzip's DEFLATE algorithm uses a sliding window to find matches and compresses them, allowing it to predict the next bytes in a text prompt.

MiMo v2.6

Introducing the MiMo-V2.6 series: frontier intelligence, all the modalities, built in public.

Video games inspire great UX (2019)

A UX designer was inspired by game design principles to create more engaging mobile apps, realizing that games' use of narrative, feedback loops, and hinting can lead to a more immersive experience. By applying these principles, designers can craft a clear learning path for users.

Spymarks, Not Watermarks

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Google's SynthID embeds secret signals into images, audio, and video to track users without consent. This technology is part of a growing trend of "spymarks" that can be used to monitor and control individuals' online activities.

AMD's random number generator can't generate a 0?

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The author has discovered a bug in AMD's RDRAND and RDSEED instructions, which can't generate the number 0 at a given size.

9 Ads per Minute: FIFA Cup 26 – "the price of the beautiful game"

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Research found over 93,000 brand appearances during the largest FIFA World Cup, with unhealthy food and drink brands dominating. The tournament's sponsorship heavily promoted products linked to health harms, raising concerns about exposure to these products among billions of viewers worldwide.

I said no and Apple said yes

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The author discovered a feature in macOS 15.3 that phoned home with personal data and was unable to turn it off, highlighting the lack of consent in AI technology. The author expresses frustration with Apple's handling of their concerns and criticizes the AI industry for prioritizing profit over user privacy.

Attention is all you have

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The Tetris effect shows how focused attention shapes thoughts, but modern technology often takes control of what we see and hear. Intentional internet browsing is still available, requiring a slower pace to find quality content.

Transformers Explained Visually

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Transformer is a neural network architecture that has revolutionized AI, used in text-generative models like GPT and Llama, and applied to various domains such as audio generation and image recognition. It operates on next-token prediction, using self-attention mechanism to process entire sequences and capture long-range dependencies.

What Sun got wrong

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The Oxide team is gathering in Emeryville for their annual meetup, wearing t-shirts that pay homage to past computer companies like Sun. The nostalgia for Sun has sparked a discussion about what the company got right and wrong, with lessons learned from both serving as inspiration and warning for Oxide's own approach.

A font that reads what you wrote

Semfont is a library that automatically sets typography for easier reading, analyzing text with four scores per word: valence, salience, surprise and certainty. It uses heuristics to improve readability without perfect classification or slowing down streaming components.

MiMo-v2.6-Pro: Intelligence, Performance and Price Analysis

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MiMo-V2.6-Pro is a high-intelligence model with fast processing and multimodal capabilities, scoring 46 on the Artificial Analysis Intelligence Index, above average among open weight models of similar size. It costs $0.43 per 1M input tokens and $0.87 per 1M output tokens, making it moderately priced for its performance level.

Type Punning in C and C++

The author encountered a bug in C due to type punning, where a pointer cast from float* to uint32_t* worked at -O0 but broke at -O2.

Verda (Finland) raises $189M in Series B

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Verda, a European AI startup, raised $189 million in funding to build its full-stack infrastructure for compute capacity. The company aims to meet the growing demand for AI workloads with faster provisioning, platform updates and enterprise readiness features.

I don't want to read what you didn't write

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The author expresses frustration with the increasing use of AI to generate writing, citing its inability to convey nuance and context. They argue that this approach can lead to unreadable documents and a loss of human connection in communication.

AI coding has made CI a bottleneck, so we reworked ours to keep up

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The author optimized Linear's Continuous Integration (CI) process, reducing PR wait time and runner time by 34% and 52%, respectively. These changes improved the overall performance of CI, allowing for faster code shipping and reduced infrastructure costs.

Engineering Memory: On learning to memorize first 100 digits of pi (2024)

The author memorized 100 digits of pi using a person-action-object (PAO) system, which associates each digit with a unique image. This process converted memorization into engineering, allowing for efficient recall and minimal errors.

NASA’s Mars Sample Return mission is dead

Divide by depth for instant 3D

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The article explains that cameras in 3D graphics work by applying perspective projection, a simple math-based technique to project 3D coordinates onto a 2D screen. This involves dividing x and y coordinates by z, which represents depth, resulting in normalized device coordinates (NDC).

Looking forward to Git 2.56 – and 3.0

Git 2.56 has been released in release-candidate form, featuring over 700 non-merge commits and several improvements, including a new drop subcommand to remove offending commits from history. The next release is expected to be Git 3.0, which may include significant changes such as the switch to SHA-256 hash function by default and support for reftables.

What It's Like to Work in One of America's Data Centers

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A build graph that rolls dice

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The author is exploring dynamic derivations in Nix, a build system that allows the build graph to be defined as it progresses, rather than being known up front. This change enables more flexible and adaptive builds.

World Wide Words

World Wide Words has documented English language changes over 30 years, featuring articles on word histories and idioms. The website relies on donations to cover costs and offers ad-free reading pleasure.

The Advisory Group on Mathematics and Artificial Intelligence

The Advisory Group on Mathematics and Artificial Intelligence aims to advise AI companies on their interactions with mathematical research, promoting transparency and accountability. The group seeks input from the mathematical community to inform recommendations for OpenAI's release of significant results in mathematics produced by its internal model.

Claude Status – Elevated errors for multiple models

Claude's Status Page - Elevated errors for multiple models.

HERMES radio enables voice and data communication over vast distances

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Peter Bloom's nonprofit Rhizomatica builds shortwave radios with better data rates and encryption, connecting remote communities worldwide. Their open-sourced HERMES system uses the ionosphere for long-distance communication and can send various files over high-frequency radio waves.

Socrates vs. the Written Word (2011)

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The author discusses how humans have a universal dislike for change and progress, often feeling disconnected from those who adopt new technologies or ways of life. This sentiment is reflected throughout history, with examples including ancient Greek philosopher Socrates' critique of written language in Plato's Phaedrus dialogue.

Python Workers are now generally available

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Cloudflare Workers now supports Python as a first-class language, allowing developers to run Python applications in the Cloudflare Workers runtime. This enables seamless integration with existing Python packages and frameworks.

How do traffic signals work? (2019)

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Traffic management in dense urban areas is a complex problem with conflicting goals and challenges, requiring careful analysis of space, cost, approach speed, cycle time, sight distance, types and volumes of traffic. Traffic signals are a common solution to control the right-of-way at intersections.