Side by side, the wharfs drifted to the event horizon. Two pier into the abyss. Forever a pair of docks. - Old Klingon Proverb

In a nation of great wealth and income inequality that needs so much more affordable housing, we are prepared to construct temporary "man-camps" to extract labor to build data centers...and then tear them down. wsj.com/us-news/wyomings-dat…

New for Apple developers: Foundation Models support for Claude lets developers use Apple's Foundation Models framework to call Claude for multi-step reasoning, code generation, and longer context.

The autistic experience of bending 80% while others bend 0%, and then being labelled rigid, difficult and demanding for not bending the other 20%.

My official job title at Shiny is Chief Metaphor Officer. People ask me what it's like being the Chief Metaphor Officer. I tell them nope.

Morocco, in 1777, was the first county in the world to recognize the United States as a sovereign nation.

“The real surprise from the OECD’s subsidy numbers is that it cost China less than $18bn in sectoral support over 15 years to build an industry that can now provide more clean power than the world can readily absorb.”

A few times I've seen people say "LLMs have bad taste... for now." But while intelligence has very obviously shot up, current LLMs are just as cringe as they were two years ago. They're just better at expressing correct inferences in their cringe prose.

Students are failing UC Berkeley CS classes at an alarming rate. More than 35% of students failed CS 10, a course described as “a gentle but thorough introduction to computer science.” In the past few semesters, less than 10% of students failed the class.

In response to someone claiming COVID only impacted the elderly, I just whipped up these chart. Deaths from natural causes, per-100K population, ages 25-54 & year-over-year percent change. Speak for themselves, I think.

By eyeball seating density has actually increased versus what it had previously, which is not how it feels unless you actually count. That is a *nice trick* in any real estate dependent business.

Friendly neighborhood Starbucks got an interior design upgrade whose brief is clearly “Make this look like a cozy third place for discerning professionals and not like a fast food restaurant. All surfaces wood; all padding at least pretends to be leather.” It’s quite nice.

People who don't follow cancer research often ask me why we haven't cured cancer. That perception masks a wonderful reality: We make amazing, stepwise progress every year, and the result is that many people live much longer today than they would have previously. Right now we're in the thick of the annual meeting of the American Society of Clinical Oncology, the biggest research meeting on new cancer medicines, and this morning a bunch of really important studies dropped. I'm going to review them here. This first image is the result for daraxonrasib, a treatment for pancreatic cancer that is generating consdirable excitement. The green line is the probability of living for patients who got the new drug; the gray one is the chemo control group. If you follow cancer drugs, a chart like this will make your breath hitch a little. I'm going to review these and some other data here.

Everyone seems fixated on the models, but I think there's so much low-hanging fruit in the control layer above the model. "Agent" and "harness" sell that layer short. There's so much more that we can do beyond "read input, send to model, run commands it returns."

I see that "types and tests do the same thing" has once again reared its head, so here's Ideology again: destroyallsoftware.com/talks…

I did a cliche thing that developers do. And I have some thoughts about it. andtherestof.it/posts/affirm…

Just take a minute to think about why the thought of drinking contaminated water is disgusting, but the thought of breathing contaminated air is not. It hardly even registers with most people. Air in public indoor spaces should be cleaned, as public water is

BURGUM: When the sun goes down, solar produces zero electricity HUFFMAN: I want to enter into the record this amazing new technology that apparently the secretary is unaware of -- it's a battery

Do not be angry with the rain; it simply does not know how to fall upwards. — Vladimir Nabokov

"Hardening TanStack After the npm Compromise", a followup to yesterday's post-mortem. tanstack.com/blog/incident-f…

More people lived in Manhattan when this photo was taken than live there today. Island population peaked in the 1910s.