[...] 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)…

This is a good piece about third places (“settings a person frequents beyond their home & work”), their benefits, how to find/make your own, and the challenges people face in finding them…

“Just 27% of civilian workers in the U.S. get paid family leave. Workers who can least afford to take unpaid time off are also the least likely to have access to paid leave.” Happy Mother…

Hello GPT-4o OpenAI announced a new model today: GPT-4o, where the o stands for "omni". It looks like this is the gpt2-chatbot we've been seeing in the Chat Arena the past few weeks. GPT-4o does…

Osita Nwanevu on the recent US campus protests: The student left is the most reliably correct constituency in America. Over the past 60 years, it has passed every great moral test American f…

Lauren Groff has opened a bookstore called The Lynx. “As book bans surged across Florida, they decided that their town needed an independent bookstore where titles that had been purged from…

Currently listening to Atavista, a “new” album from Childish Gambino (which he says is the “finished version” of an album he released in 2020 called 3.15.20).…

Incredible fact: none of the Big Three US automakers makes a sedan anymore. “That decision is bad news for road users, the environment, and budget-conscious consumers — and it may ultimat…

Oh man, I screwed up big-time you guys and owe you an apology. The great Erik Larson (The Devil in the White City, The Splendid and the Vile, In the Garden of Beasts) came out with a new bo…

I’m no developer, but I got the AI part working in about an hour.What took longer was the other stuff: identifying the problem, designing and building the UI, setting up the templating, routes…

Geologist finds setting for Leonardo’s Mona Lisa. “Art historians said Leonardo always used his imagination, but you can give this picture to any geologist in the world and they’ll say…

A few weeks ago I had to have a conversation with a vendor about credentials. Despite some push back from our side, they insisted that their Bearer Token style authentication key for HTTP requests was…

A new LoTR movie is coming: Andy Serkis is starring and directing in Lord of the Rings: The Hunt for Gollum. Peter Jackson is producing and Fran Walsh & Philippa Boyens are writing the script…

GPUs Go Brrr Fascinating, detailed low-level notes on how to get the most out of NVIDIA's H100 GPUs (currently selling for around $40,000 a piece) from the research team at Stanford who created…

There was a big solar storm this weekend and photos of the aurora borealis took over social media; it was delightful. For round-ups, check out the NY Times, the Guardian, @itsjackcohen, P…

Parsing PNG images in Mojo It’s still very early days for Mojo, the new systems programming language from Chris Lattner that imitates large portions of Python and can execute Python code direc…

400 titles to get one……

About ARDC (Amateur Radio Digital Communications) In ham radio adjacent news, here's a foundation that it's worth knowing about: ARDC makes grants to projects and organizations that are experim…

“Link In Bio” is a slow knife Anil Dash writing in 2019 about how Instagram’s “link in bio” thing (where users cannot post links to things in Instagram posts or comments, just a single…

Ham radio general exam question pool as JSON I scraped a pass of my Ham radio general exam this morning. One of the tools I used to help me pass was a Datasette instance with all 429 questions f…