digests

Nine things, Space, Rust, Pi? Oh my!

An AI Hate Wave Is Here

Asked about backlash to AI, Superhuman Mail CEO Rahul Vohra — whose company makes an AI-powered email assistant — seemed unfamiliar with the premise of the question. After hearing about poor polling around AI, he responded: “We don’t really see that.”

Building Pi with Pi

Keep in mind that AI has not increased the number of people who need software, or the number of maintainers who can review it. It has mostly increased the amount of code and the number of projects competing for attention. Some of that is healthy, but a lot of it fragments effort that should be shared.

Replacing a 3 GB SQLite db with a 10 MB FST

I do wish to point out, of course, that the whole reason it was possible to experiment cheaply and come across this serendipity was because 9 months ago, faced with the choice to either do the bad easy thing or the good nothing, I chose to do the bad easy thing.5

Ask an Astronaut: 333 hours of Q&A footage with astronauts : I’m at a loss for words, just see it for yourself. Saving it for Lin Lin and myself.

Watch a neural net learn to play Snake : Mesmerising to watch, it does seem to abruptly stop occasionally. Refresh the page if it does.

Teaching Claude Why

Our final finding is straightforward but important: training on a broad set of safety-relevant environments improves alignment generalization. Capabilities-focused distributions of RL environment mixes are changing and increasing rapidly; it is not sufficient to assume that standard RLHF datasets will continue to generalize as well as they had in the past.

Idempotency is easy until the second request is different

Leave Me Behind : Adam McNeilly’s quiet end-of-an-era post ruminating about the good old days. While I understand their sentiments, and the human mentorship angle, I don’t agree with the overall negativity. You can certainly leverage AI tools to fast-track your learnings. Not everyone had access to great seniors and mentors. The job was never solely about writing code, although that was the allure. We were paid to collaborate and build to generate value for our users and employers. The need for that collaboration and thus human touch, has not gone away.

Torrix, self hosted LLM observability, no Postgres, no Redis

From skiplists to intergalactic probes.

DuckDB 1.5.2: SQL database that runs on laptop, server, in the browser

What are skiplists good for?

Later I discovered that a skiptree is closely related to a real data structure called a skip graph, a distributed data structure based on skiplists. Which just goes to show that there is nothing new under the sun. Whatever crazy idea you have, there’s a good chance some other crazy person has already done it. Moral of the story: you never know when an exotic data structure will save you a lot of time and money.

Three constraints before I build anything : I’m a big believer in that constraints are essential for innovation. This post is very well articulated, better than I could have expressed.

Website streamed live directly from a model : Ridiculously useful. I would love to see their system prompt. I guess whatever you type in search box is passed to one model to do lookup and generate detailed prompt for image generation model with their distinct “style”. You can type almost anything: Revelation Space Lighthugger, Raspberry PI 4, La Sagrada Familia, Harry Potter’s Room, it does a very competent job. Me and Lin Lin are having a lot of fun with this.

Game devs explain the tricks involved with letting you pause a game

Perhaps my favorite pause method involves devs freezing time and then taking a screenshot of the game which the game then uses as the background behind the pause menu UI, letting them get up to all sorts of nasty business behind that image, like not rendering enemies or even moving the player to an empty room.

Eternity in six hours: Intergalactic spreading of intelligent life (2013)

It would be ruinously difficult to send over a large colonisation fleet; a much more efficient idea is to send over a small payload that then builds what is required in situ. This is the concept of von Neumann probes: entities capable of constructing copies of themselves from the resources they find [15, 7]. More specifically, we would want them to be universal constructors: capable of constructing many things, including other universal constructors (which need not be identical).

Three things.

WebMCP is available for early preview : The browser-as-MCP-host idea. Tools that pages can offer, sandboxed, gated.

As the agentic web evolves, we want to help websites play an active role in how AI agents interact with them. WebMCP aims to provide a standard way for exposing structured tools, ensuring AI agents can perform actions on your site with increased speed, reliability, and precision.

A Japanese glossary of chopsticks faux pas (2022) : Hashi-watashi, neburi-bashi, yoko-bashi. Each one named, with the reason. Should have learned about these before our trip.

Profiling Hacker News users based on their comments : Mostly a tool note. But also an uncomfortable reminder that profiling tools are accessible to masses now.