(date: 2025-04-07 14:10:52)
date: 2025-04-07, updated: 2025-04-07, from: Tedium site
At Tedium, we sometimes bury the lede intentionally, and it may seem strange, but sometimes it works.
https://feed.tedium.co/link/15204/17000897/bury-the-lede-sometimes
date: 2025-04-07, from: 404 Media Group
The manufacturer says it would now have to sell its laptops at a loss.
https://www.404media.co/framework-stops-selling-some-of-its-laptops-in-the-u-s-due-to-tariffs/
date: 2025-04-07, from: Liliputing
The AOOSTAR GT37 is a mini PC with an AMD Ryzen AI 9 HX 370 processor, OcuLink and USB4 ports, two 2.5 GbE LAN ports, support for up to three 4K displays, and support for WiFi 7. First introduced last year as the AOOSTAR GEM10 370, the computer is designed to pack a lot of performance into […]
The post AOOSTAR GT37 mini PC with Ryzen AI 9 HX 370 now available appeared first on Liliputing.
https://liliputing.com/aoostar-gt37-mini-pc-with-ryzen-ai-9-hx-370-now-available/
date: 2025-04-07, from: Tina Brown
Before Ruination Day, as The Economist called Trump’s volcanic tariff effusion, everyone I met in public life was adopting the crouch position.
https://tinabrown.substack.com/p/buyers-remorse-and-a-postscript-to
date: 2025-04-07, from: Michael Tsai
Tim Hardwick: In Apple’s iOS 18.4 software update, there’s a new Ambient Music feature available in the Control Center options on iPhone. It’s free to use, and does not require an Apple Music subscription. It’s also more customizable than most users probably realize. This is accessed via Control Center and seems to be iOS-only, unlike […]
https://mjtsai.com/blog/2025/04/07/ios-18-4-ambient-music/
date: 2025-04-07, from: Michael Tsai
Joe Rossignol: Apple today updated its iWork apps Keynote, Numbers, and Pages with new features that require iOS 18.4, iPadOS 18.4, or macOS 15.4.For example, in the latest version of each app, you can now make text edits using Writing Tools directly in a presentation, spreadsheet, or document.[…]Each app also received a few other enhancements […]
https://mjtsai.com/blog/2025/04/07/numbers-14-4/
date: 2025-04-07, from: Michael Tsai
Bruce Schneier (March 31, Hacker News): “I didn’t see this loser in the group,” Waltz told Fox News about Atlantic editor in chief Jeffrey Goldberg, whom Waltz invited to the chat. “Whether he did it deliberately or it happened in some other technical mean, is something we’re trying to figure out.”Waltz’s implication that Goldberg may […]
https://mjtsai.com/blog/2025/04/07/the-signal-chat-leak-and-the-nsa/
date: 2025-04-07, updated: 2025-04-07, from: Simon Willison’s Weblog
My first games involved hand assembling machine code and turning graph paper characters into hex digits. Software progress has made that work as irrelevant as chariot wheel maintenance. […]
AI tools will allow the best to reach even greater heights, while enabling smaller teams to accomplish more, and bring in some completely new creator demographics.
Yes, we will get to a world where you can get an interactive game (or novel, or movie) out of a prompt, but there will be far better exemplars of the medium still created by dedicated teams of passionate developers.
The world will be vastly wealthier in terms of the content available at any given cost.
Will there be more or less game developer jobs? That is an open question. It could go the way of farming, where labor saving technology allow a tiny fraction of the previous workforce to satisfy everyone, or it could be like social media, where creative entrepreneurship has flourished at many different scales. Regardless, “don’t use power tools because they take people’s jobs” is not a winning strategy.
<p>Tags: <a href="https://simonwillison.net/tags/ai-ethics">ai-ethics</a>, <a href="https://simonwillison.net/tags/game-design">game-design</a>, <a href="https://simonwillison.net/tags/ai">ai</a>, <a href="https://simonwillison.net/tags/john-carmack">john-carmack</a></p> https://simonwillison.net/2025/Apr/7/john-carmack/#atom-everything
@Dave Winer’s linkblog (date: 2025-04-07, from: Dave Winer’s linkblog)
This isn’t just for immigrants.
date: 2025-04-07, from: Paul Krugman
A recording from Paul Krugman and Mehdi Hasan’s live video
https://paulkrugman.substack.com/p/paul-krugman-on-tariffs
date: 2025-04-07, updated: 2025-04-07, from: Simon Willison’s Weblog
If you’re a startup running your own crawlers to gather data for whatever purpose, you should try really hard not to make the world a worse place by driving up costs for the sites you are scraping.
There’s really no excuse for crawling Wikipedia (“65% of our most expensive traffic comes from bots”) when they offer a comprehensive collection of bulk download options.
Do better!
<p>Tags: <a href="https://simonwillison.net/tags/crawling">crawling</a>, <a href="https://simonwillison.net/tags/jeremy-keith">jeremy-keith</a>, <a href="https://simonwillison.net/tags/wikipedia">wikipedia</a>, <a href="https://simonwillison.net/tags/ai-ethics">ai-ethics</a>, <a href="https://simonwillison.net/tags/ai">ai</a></p> https://simonwillison.net/2025/Apr/7/crawlers/#atom-everything
date: 2025-04-07, from: Liliputing
Some of the most interesting gadgets-with-keyboards I’ve seen over the past few years have been distraction-free writing devices, or WriterDecks. These devices, which are basically the modern version of the word processors of yesteryear, include purpose-built hardware from companies focused on a niche market as well as DIY solutions. But if you’ve already got an […]
The post Tinker WriterDeck OS turns nearly any old laptop into a distraction-free writing machine appeared first on Liliputing.
date: 2025-04-07, from: Gary Marcus blog
Some of the big tech giants may be playing fast and loose with AI
https://garymarcus.substack.com/p/deep-learning-deep-scandal
date: 2025-04-07, updated: 2025-04-07, from: Simon Willison’s Weblog
Using Al effectively is now a fundamental expectation of everyone at Shopify. It’s a tool of all trades today, and will only grow in importance. Frankly, I don’t think it’s feasible to opt out of learning the skill of applying Al in your craft; you are welcome to try, but I want to be honest I cannot see this working out today, and definitely not tomorrow. Stagnation is almost certain, and stagnation is slow-motion failure. If you’re not climbing, you’re sliding […]
We will add Al usage questions to our performance and peer review questionnaire. Learning to use Al well is an unobvious skill. My sense is that a lot of people give up after writing a prompt and not getting the ideal thing back immediately. Learning to prompt and load context is important, and getting peers to provide feedback on how this is going will be valuable.
— Tobias Lütke, CEO of Shopify, self-leaked memo
<p>Tags: <a href="https://simonwillison.net/tags/careers">careers</a>, <a href="https://simonwillison.net/tags/ai">ai</a>, <a href="https://simonwillison.net/tags/ai-ethics">ai-ethics</a></p> https://simonwillison.net/2025/Apr/7/tobias/#atom-everything
@Dave Winer’s linkblog (date: 2025-04-07, from: Dave Winer’s linkblog)
Trump pollster finds Medicaid cuts unpopular among Trump voters.
@Dave Winer’s linkblog (date: 2025-04-07, from: Dave Winer’s linkblog)
Ego Nwodim's SNL Weekend Update Sketch Censor Explained.
https://www.comingsoon.net/guides/news/1950881-ego-nwodim-snl-weekend-update-censor-explained
date: 2025-04-07, from: 404 Media Group
The comments falsely attributed to a Trump advisor were repeated by multiple outlets and caused the stock market to briefly jump up.
date: 2025-04-07, updated: 2025-04-07, from: Simon Willison’s Weblog
LLM 0.24 is now available with new features to help take advantage of the increasingly long input context supported by modern LLMs.
(LLM is my command-line tool and Python library for interacting with LLMs, supported by 20+ plugins adding support for both local and remote models from a bunch of different providers.)
To install LLM with uv (there are several other options):
uv tool install llm
You’ll need to either provide an OpenAI API key or install a plugin to use local models or models from other providers:
llm keys set openai
# Paste OpenAI API key here
To upgrade LLM from a previous version:
llm install -U llm
The biggest new feature is
fragments.
You can now use -f filename or -f url to add
one or more fragments to your prompt, which means you can do things like
this:
llm -f https://simonwillison.net/2025/Apr/5/llama-4-notes/ 'bullet point summary'
Here’s
the
output from that prompt, exported using llm logs -c –expand
–usage. Token cost was 5,372 input, 374 output which works out as
0.103 cents (around 1/10th of a cent) using the default GPT-4o mini
model.
Plugins can implement custom fragment loaders with a prefix. The
llm-fragments-github
plugin adds a github: prefix that can be used to load every
text file in a GitHub repository as a list of fragments:
llm install llm-fragments-github
llm -f github:simonw/s3-credentials 'Suggest new features for this tool'
Here’s the output. That took 49,856 input tokens for a total cost of 0.7843 cents - nearly a whole cent!
Long context is one of the most exciting trends in LLMs over the past eighteen months. Saturday’s Llama 4 Scout release gave us the first model with a full 10 million token context. Google’s Gemini family has several 1-2 million token models, and the baseline for recent models from both OpenAI and Anthropic is 100 or 200 thousand.
Two years ago most models capped out at 8,000 tokens of input. Long context opens up many new interesting ways to apply this class of technology.
I’ve been using long context models via my files-to-prompt tool to summarize large codebases, explain how they work and even to debug gnarly bugs. As demonstrated above, it’s surprisingly inexpensive to drop tens of thousands of tokens into models like GPT-4o mini or most of the Google Gemini series, and the results are often very impressive.
One of LLM’s most useful features is that it logs every prompt and response to a SQLite database. This is great for comparing the same prompt against different models and tracking experiments over time - my own database contained thousands of responses from hundreds of different models accumulated over the past couple of years.
This is where long context prompts were starting to be a problem. Since LLM stores the full prompt and response in the database, asking five questions of the same source code could result in five duplicate copies of that text in the database!
The new fragments feature targets this problem head on. Each fragment is stored once in a fragments table, then de-duplicated in the future using a SHA256 hash of its content.
This saves on storage, and also enables features like llm logs -f
X for seeing all logged responses
that
use a particular fragment.
Fragments can be specified in several different ways:
prefix:argument to specify fragments from a plugin
Wouldn’t it be neat if LLM could anser questions about its own documentation?
The new llm-docs plugin (built with the new register_fragment_loaders() plugin hook) enables exactly that:
llm install llm-docs
llm -f docs: "How do I embed a binary file?"
The output starts like this:
To embed a binary file using the LLM command-line interface, you can use the
llm embedcommand with the–binaryoption. Here’s how you can do it:
- Make sure you have the appropriate embedding model installed that supports binary input.
- Use the following command syntax:
llm embed -m <model_id> --binary -i <path_to_your_binary_file>Replace
<model_id>with the identifier for the embedding model you want to use (e.g.,clipfor the CLIP model) and<path_to_your_binary_file>with the path to your actual binary file.
(74,570 input, 240 output = 1.1329 cents with GPT-4o mini)
Using -f docs: with just the prefix is the same as using
-f docs:llm. The plugin fetches the documentation for your
current version of LLM from my new
simonw/docs-for-llms
repo, which also provides packaged documentation files for my
datasette, s3-credentials,
shot-scraper and sqlite-utils projects.
Datasette’s documentation has got pretty long, so you might need to run that through a Gemini model instead (using the llm-gemini plugin):
llm -f docs:datasette -m gemini-2.0-flash \
'Build a render_cell plugin that detects and renders markdown'
Here’s the output. 132,042 input, 1,129 output with Gemini 2.0 Flash = 1.3656 cents.
You can browse the combined documentation files this uses in docs-for-llm. They’re built using GitHub Actions.
llms-txt is a project lead by Jeremy Howard that encourages projects to publish similar files to help LLMs ingest a succinct copy of their documentation.
The new
register_template_loaders()
plugin hook allows plugins to register prefix:value
custom template loaders, for use with the llm -t option.
llm-templates-github and llm-templates-fabric are two new plugins that make use of that hook.
llm-templates-github lets you share and use templates via a
public GitHub repository. Here’s how to run my
Pelican
riding a bicycle benchmark against a specific model:
llm install llm-templates-github
llm -t gh:simonw/pelican-svg -m o3-mini
This executes this pelican-svg.yaml template stored in my simonw/llm-templates repository, using a new repository naming convention.
llm -t gh:simonw/pelican-svg will load that
pelican-svg.yaml file from the
simonw/llm-templates repo. You can also use llm -t
gh:simonw/name-of-repo/name-of-template to load a template from a
repository that doesn’t follow that convention.
To share your own templates, create a repository on GitHub under your
user account called llm-templates and start saving
.yaml files to it.
llm-templates-fabric provides a similar mechanism for loading templates from Daniel Miessler’s extensive fabric collection:
llm install llm-templates-fabric
curl https://simonwillison.net/2025/Apr/6/only-miffy/ | \
llm -t f:extract_main_idea
A conversation with Daniel was the inspiration for this new plugin hook.
LLM 0.24 is a big release, spanning 51 commits. The release notes cover everything that’s new in full - here are a few of my highlights:
- The new llm-openai plugin provides support for o1-pro (which is not supported by the OpenAI mechanism used by LLM core). Future OpenAI features will migrate to this plugin instead of LLM core itself.
The problem with OpenAI models being handled by LLM core is that I have to release a whole new version of LLM every time OpenAI releases a new model or feature. Migrating this stuff out to a plugin means I can release new version of that plugin independently of LLM itself - something I frequently do for llm-anthropic and llm-gemini and others.
The new llm-openai plugin uses their Responses API, a new
shape of API which
I
covered last month.
llm -t $URLoption can now take a URL to a YAML template. #856
The new custom template loaders are fun, but being able to paste in a URL to a YAML file somewhere provides a simpler way to share templates.
The quickest way to create your own template is with the llm
prompt … –save name-of-template command. This now works with
attachments, fragments and default model options, each of which is
persisted in
the
template YAML file.
- New llm models options family of commands for setting default options for particular models. #829
I built this when I learned that Qwen’s QwQ-32b model works best with temperature 0.7 and top p 0.95.
llm prompt -d path-to-sqlite.dboption can now be used to write logs to a custom SQLite database. #858
This proved extremely useful for testing fragments - it meant I could run a prompt and save the full response to a separate SQLite database which I could then upload to S3 and share as a link to Datasette Lite.
llm similar -p/–plainoption providing more human-readable output than the default JSON. #853
I’d like this to be the default output, but I’m holding off on changing
that until LLM 1.0 since it’s a breaking change for people building
automations against the JSON from llm similar.
- Set the
LLM_RAISE_ERRORS=1environment variable to raise errors during prompts rather than suppressing them, which means you can runpython -i -m llm ‘prompt’and then drop into a debugger on errors withimport pdb; pdb.pm(). #817
Really useful for debugging new model plugins.
llm prompt -q gpt -q 4ooption - pass-q searchtermone or more times to execute a prompt against the first model that matches all of those strings - useful for if you can’t remember the full model ID. #841
Pretty obscure but I found myself needing this. Vendors love releasing
models with names like gemini-2.5-pro-exp-03-25, now I can
run llm -q gem -q 2.5 -q exp ‘say hi’ to save me from
looking up the model ID.
- OpenAI compatible models configured using
extra-openai-models.yamlnow supportsupports_schema: true,vision: trueandaudio: trueoptions. Thanks @adaitche and @giuli007. #819, #843
I don’t use this feature myself but it’s clearly popular, this isn’t the first time I’e had PRs with improvements from the wider community.
<p>Tags: <a href="https://simonwillison.net/tags/plugins">plugins</a>, <a href="https://simonwillison.net/tags/projects">projects</a>, <a href="https://simonwillison.net/tags/ai">ai</a>, <a href="https://simonwillison.net/tags/annotated-release-notes">annotated-release-notes</a>, <a href="https://simonwillison.net/tags/openai">openai</a>, <a href="https://simonwillison.net/tags/generative-ai">generative-ai</a>, <a href="https://simonwillison.net/tags/llms">llms</a>, <a href="https://simonwillison.net/tags/llm">llm</a>, <a href="https://simonwillison.net/tags/gemini">gemini</a>, <a href="https://simonwillison.net/tags/long-context">long-context</a>, <a href="https://simonwillison.net/tags/files-to-prompt">files-to-prompt</a></p> https://simonwillison.net/2025/Apr/7/long-context-llm/#atom-everything
@Dave Winer’s linkblog (date: 2025-04-07, from: Dave Winer’s linkblog)
6 More GOP Senators Sign Onto Bill To Rein In Trump’s Tariff Powers.
@Dave Winer’s linkblog (date: 2025-04-07, from: Dave Winer’s linkblog)
Jay North, Child Star Who Played ‘Dennis the Menace,’ Dies at 73.
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/04/06/arts/television/jay-north-dennis-the-menance-dead.html
date: 2025-04-07, from: Liliputing
Phosh is a user interface designed for smartphones running Linux-based operating systems. First developed by Purism for the Librem 5 smartphone, it’s now available for a wide range of devices and works with most major Linux distributions. While Phosh has long had many of the core features you’d expect from a smartphone user interface, it’s […]
The post Phosh 0.46.0 brings customization, UI improvements to the mobile Linux user interface appeared first on Liliputing.
@Dave Winer’s linkblog (date: 2025-04-07, from: Dave Winer’s linkblog)
Trump asks Supreme Court to block order to return wrongly deported man to U.S.
@Dave Winer’s linkblog (date: 2025-04-07, from: Dave Winer’s linkblog)
Trump advisors struggle to defend, or even explain, his tariff strategy. The real strategy is exactly as it appears. They needed a depression to achieve their Reich.
https://reason.com/2025/04/07/trump-advisors-struggle-to-defend-or-even-explain-his-tariff-strategy/
@Dave Winer’s linkblog (date: 2025-04-07, from: Dave Winer’s linkblog)
The Fediforum, a developers event for ActivityPub has been cancelled. It had been scheduled for April 1 and 2. The story of why it was cancelled is explained in the linked post.
https://wedistribute.org/2025/03/fediforum-canceled/
@Dave Winer’s linkblog (date: 2025-04-07, from: Dave Winer’s linkblog)
The Right-Wing Media Machine Is What’s Saving Donald Trump.
date: 2025-04-07, from: Liliputing
The Mecha Comet is a phone-sized modular computer with a small touchscreen display positioned above a modular input area where you can place a QWERTY keyboard, game pad, or other devices. After making its debut at CES in January, the Mecha Comet has undergone some changes – in a recent live stream the company announced it […]
The post Mecha Comet modular Linux handheld gets pre-launch upgrade, coming to Kickstarter in Q3, 2025 appeared first on Liliputing.
date: 2025-04-07, from: Guy Kawasaki blog
Deborah Fuller, University of Washington and Patrick Mitchell, University of Washington.
https://guykawasaki.substack.com/p/cuts-to-science-cut-lifespans
@Robert’s feed at BlueSky (date: 2025-04-07, from: Robert’s feed at BlueSky)
Just to add something to the crazy side of the balance sheet 👇
https://garymarcus.substack.com/p/breaking-bill-that-would-have-blocked
https://bsky.app/profile/rsdoiel.bsky.social/post/3lmad7egxtc2u
date: 2025-04-07, from: 404 Media Group
‘YOU WILL ALWAYS FEEL INSECURE IT WILL NEVER GO AWAY,’ filled the screen of the richest man in the world.
https://www.404media.co/elon-musk-is-hounded-by-haters-in-path-of-exile-2-chat/
@Robert’s feed at BlueSky (date: 2025-04-07, from: Robert’s feed at BlueSky)
Amid the chaos this relative gives me hope. 👇
https://thehusk.substack.com/p/21-year-old-remathau-entrepreneur
https://bsky.app/profile/rsdoiel.bsky.social/post/3lmaaw52c522u
date: 2025-04-07, from: Liliputing
For a long time it was pretty easy to tell the difference between a general-purpose tablet and an eReader. Devices with E Ink displays like Kindle or Kobo products were meant for reading eBooks, while devices with full-color displays and high-refresh rates like iPads and Samsung Galaxy tablets were general-purpose devices. But in recent years […]
The post Bigme B7 is a color E Ink tablet with 4G LTE, a camera, and a digital pen appeared first on Liliputing.
https://liliputing.com/bigme-b7-is-a-color-e-ink-tablet-with-4g-lte-a-camera-and-a-digital-pen/
@IIIF Mastodon feed (date: 2025-04-07, from: IIIF Mastodon feed)
We're delighted to announce that the National Library of Finland has joined the Consortium. The Library has recently begun a 2-year project to implement #IIIF across several of the Library’s systems.
You can learn more about the project on our website: https://iiif.io/news/2025/04/07/Finland/
https://glammr.us/@IIIF/114297280316226951
@Dave Winer’s linkblog (date: 2025-04-07, from: Dave Winer’s linkblog)
Social Security’s website keeps crashing, as DOGE demands cuts to IT staff.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2025/04/07/social-security-website-crashes-musk-trump/
date: 2025-04-07, from: 404 Media Group
While the title of the article can still change, for the moment Wikipedia editors have decided that Trump crashed the stock market.
https://www.404media.co/wikipedia-editors-call-it-its-the-2025-stock-market-crash/
date: 2025-04-07, from: ooh.directory blog
It's been over a year since the previous update. Last year was a difficult one here, but the site kept ticking over and I'm now getting back on top of things. As a result, here's the first new little feature for some time.
https://ooh.directory/blog/2025/most-linked-domains/
date: 2025-04-07, from: 404 Media Group
I’ve reported on Facebook for years and have always wondered: Does Facebook care what it is doing to society? Careless People makes clear it does not.
https://www.404media.co/careless-people-is-the-book-about-facebook-ive-wanted-for-a-decade/
date: 2025-04-07, updated: 2025-04-07, from: One Foot Tsunami
https://onefoottsunami.com/2025/04/07/theyre-interested/
@Dave Winer’s linkblog (date: 2025-04-07, from: Dave Winer’s linkblog)
Germany may pull gold reserves from New York amid Trump policy fears.
@Dave Winer’s linkblog (date: 2025-04-07, from: Dave Winer’s linkblog)
Ackman warns of "economic nuclear winter" from Trump's tariffs.
https://www.axios.com/2025/04/06/ackman-trump-tariffs-nuclear-winter
@Dave Winer’s linkblog (date: 2025-04-07, from: Dave Winer’s linkblog)
Donald Trump says foreign governments would have to pay ‘a lot of money’ to lift sweeping tariffs.
date: 2025-04-07, from: Libre News
Mozilla is launching Thundermail, their own mail provider and productivity suite, and it looks promising already.
https://thelibre.news/thunderbird-is-launching-its-own-mail-provider/
date: 2025-04-07, from: Libre News
Turns out – GNOME is just a tiny bit better than KDE on most things, in my opinion.
https://thelibre.news/how-kde-and-gnome-do-design/
date: 2025-04-07, from: Libre News
So far he hasn’t been successful, but it might simply be a matter of time.
https://thelibre.news/trump-cuts-funding-to-foss-projects/
date: 2025-04-07, from: Paul Krugman
There are none so blind as those that will not see
https://paulkrugman.substack.com/p/political-styles-of-the-rich-and
@Dave Winer’s linkblog (date: 2025-04-07, from: Dave Winer’s linkblog)
Trump says he’s not backing down on tariffs, calls them ‘medicine’ as markets reel.
@Dave Winer’s linkblog (date: 2025-04-07, from: Dave Winer’s linkblog)
Global markets nosedive and China accuses US of bullying with tariffs.
https://apnews.com/article/stocks-markets-nikkei-tariffs-trump-76d0de278a6cad291ace624a74a6a1b6
date: 2025-04-07, from: Raspberry Pi News (.com)
Our best PSU yet: power your Raspberry Pi or charge your laptop with our new $15 45W USB-C Power Supply.
The post Raspberry Pi 45W USB-C Power Supply on sale now at $15 appeared first on Raspberry Pi.
https://www.raspberrypi.com/news/raspberry-pi-45w-usb-c-power-supply-on-sale-now-at-15/
@Feed for Alt USDS (date: 2025-04-07, from: Feed for Alt USDS)
The last few weeks have been … a lot. Whether you’re a current federal worker, someone who’s been illegally fired, or a supporter of the #altgov movement, know that you’re not alone.
Our community is growing, and we’ve received dozens of supportive messages. We’ll be sharing them here this week!
https://bsky.app/profile/altusds.bsky.social/post/3lm74sm5ecz2k
date: 2025-04-07, from: Gary Marcus blog
I hope the media will look into this
https://garymarcus.substack.com/p/breaking-bill-that-would-have-blocked
@Feed for Alt USDS (date: 2025-04-07, from: Feed for Alt USDS)
🧱 We’re building something bold and we need YOUR help.
WTB is launching nonprofit newsroom + civic tech hub to defend public service, preserve federal knowledge, and fight back against disinformation.
If you believe in facts, public service, and accountability, join us! givebutter.com/WTB https://givebutter.com/WTB
https://bsky.app/profile/altusds.bsky.social/post/3lm6qg3c5pk2r
@Dave Winer’s linkblog (date: 2025-04-07, from: Dave Winer’s linkblog)
‘Adolescence’ Creator ‘Went Very, Very Deep’ in the Manosphere. Its Appeal Scared Him.
@Dave Winer’s linkblog (date: 2025-04-07, from: Dave Winer’s linkblog)
The Cabinet Secretary Who Wants His Cookies Freshly Baked.
@Dave Winer’s linkblog (date: 2025-04-06, from: Dave Winer’s linkblog)
Kennedy shutters several FOIA offices at HHS.
https://www.politico.com/news/2025/04/03/kennedy-shutters-several-foia-offices-at-hhs-00268646
date: 2025-04-06, from: This is history podcast
Why is 1066 the most important year in English history? Who were the three main candidates vying for the English throne on the eve of Edward the Confessor’s death? And how did the coronation of one of them on the 14th of October 1066 trigger one of the most famous invasions of all time? Join […]
The post 554. 1066: The Shadows of War (Part 1) appeared first on The Rest is History.
https://therestishistory.com/554-1066-the-shadows-of-war-part-1/
date: 2025-04-06, from: Geoffrey Hunntley’s blog
It’s an old joke in the DJ community about upcoming artists having a bad reputation for pushing the audio signal into the red. Red is bad because it results in the audio signal being clipped and the mix sounding muddy.
It’s a good analogy that applies
https://ghuntley.com/redlining/
date: 2025-04-06, updated: 2025-04-06, from: Simon Willison’s Weblog
[…] The disappointing releases of both GPT-4.5 and Llama 4 have shown that if you don’t train a model to reason with reinforcement learning, increasing its size no longer provides benefits.
Reinforcement learning is limited only to domains where a reward can be assigned to the generation result. Until recently, these domains were math, logic, and code. Recently, these domains have also included factual question answering, where, to find an answer, the model must learn to execute several searches. This is how these “deep search” models have likely been trained.
If your business idea isn’t in these domains, now is the time to start building your business-specific dataset. The potential increase in generalist models’ skills will no longer be a threat.
<p>Tags: <a href="https://simonwillison.net/tags/generative-ai">generative-ai</a>, <a href="https://simonwillison.net/tags/llama">llama</a>, <a href="https://simonwillison.net/tags/openai">openai</a>, <a href="https://simonwillison.net/tags/ai">ai</a>, <a href="https://simonwillison.net/tags/llms">llms</a></p> https://simonwillison.net/2025/Apr/6/andriy-burkov/#atom-everything
date: 2025-04-06, updated: 2025-04-06, from: Simon Willison’s Weblog
Some friends are traveling to Japan, and in bombarding them with unsolicited tips to try to convince them to visit Huis Ten Bosch - the Dutch theme park near Nagasaki - I was reminded of my all-time favorite piece of travel writing, by Richard Hendy: Huis ten Bosch: Only Miffy can save us now - also part two and part three.
Monumental in its conception, extravagant in its execution, and epic in its failure, Huis ten Bosch is the greatest by far of all of the progeny of Japan’s Bubble era dreams.
There is so much good stuff in these essays, including a delightful divergence to cover the psychic toad that ended up responsible for more than $10 billion:
[…] late at night scores of black limousines would park up outside one of her restaurants, Egawa, disgorging bankers for séances, inspired by esoteric mikkyo Buddhism, on the fourth floor, overseen by a giant ceramic toad standing a meter tall.
Richard’s essays convinced us to visit Huis Ten Bosch in 2014 and it was a highlight of our trip to Japan. Here are my photos on Flickr.
<p>Tags: <a href="https://simonwillison.net/tags/travel">travel</a>, <a href="https://simonwillison.net/tags/japan">japan</a></p> https://simonwillison.net/2025/Apr/6/only-miffy/#atom-everything
@Dave Winer’s linkblog (date: 2025-04-06, from: Dave Winer’s linkblog)
Elon Musk took a chainsaw to the US government. Tesla is taking the hit.
date: 2025-04-06, updated: 2025-04-06, from: Tedium site
The creator-economy service Gumroad decided to open-source its platform at a suspiciously convenient time. (And even “open source” might be stretching it.)
https://feed.tedium.co/link/15204/17000123/gumroad-open-source-doge-drama
@Dave Winer’s linkblog (date: 2025-04-06, from: Dave Winer’s linkblog)
An idea I developed with Claude.ai – new approach to what Wikipedia does. It could even be a project Wikipedia itself does. A real upgrade, imho, is possible.
date: 2025-04-06, from: Our Future.org
Una ola de resistencia se levanta. ¿Qué hará falta para que ganemos? Dondequiera que miremos, una ola de resistencia se levanta. Mi corazón se llena de alegría cuando pienso en cada uno de ustedes que está tomando acción en este momento para reclamar nuestra democracia. Desde el senador Cory Booker, que habló toda la noche […]https://ourfuture.org/20250406/que-hara-falta-para-que-gane-la-resistencia
date: 2025-04-06, from: Our Future.org
Everywhere we look, a wave of resistance is rising. What will it take to win? Everywhere we look, a wave of resistance is rising. My heart is full as I think of every one of you who is standing up right now to reclaim our democracy. From Senator Cory Booker, who spoke through the night […]https://ourfuture.org/20250406/what-will-it-take-for-the-resistance-to-win
date: 2025-04-06, from: Curious about everything blog
The many interesting things I read in March 2025
https://jodiettenberg.substack.com/p/forty-nine
date: 2025-04-06, from: Gary Marcus blog
New evidence that confirms so much of what I have been saying
https://garymarcus.substack.com/p/scaling-is-over-the-bubble-may-be
date: 2025-04-06, updated: 2025-04-06, from: Russell Graves, Syonyk’s Project Blog
https://www.sevarg.net/2025/04/06/ural-notes-part-6-more-electrical/
date: 2025-04-06, from: Michael Moore’s blog
Plus — 36 More Devastatingly Perfect Portraits of Donald Trump…
https://www.michaelmoore.com/p/massive-crowds-everywhere-and-everywhere
@Feed for Alt USDS (date: 2025-04-06, from: Feed for Alt USDS)
The real cost of firing employees? It’s not just a paycheck—it’s up to HALF A BILLION dollars to re-onboard 24,000 probationary workers. 💸 Learn how the government’s costly mistake is impacting taxpayers: http://wethebuilders.org/posts/cost-of-reinstating-federal-workers
#altUSDS #CostO
https://bsky.app/profile/altusds.bsky.social/post/3lm5jfhmsk42h
date: 2025-04-06, from: Paul Krugman
Why they happen, and why they’re bad
https://paulkrugman.substack.com/p/a-primer-on-trade-wars
@Dave Winer’s linkblog (date: 2025-04-06, from: Dave Winer’s linkblog)
Playbook for Law Firms and Colleges to Stand Up to President Trump.
@Dave Winer’s linkblog (date: 2025-04-06, from: Dave Winer’s linkblog)
You Can Stop Asking Where the Mass Opposition Is. It’s Everywhere.
https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2025/04/hands-off-donald-trump-fear-new-york-city/
@Feed for Alt USDS (date: 2025-04-06, from: Feed for Alt USDS)
What a day! Here are some of our favorite signs from the @50501movement.bsky.social protests, with a little shoutout to penguins, and of course @corybooker.com. Show us your favorite signs and videos in the comments!
https://bsky.app/profile/altusds.bsky.social/post/3lm4ddzkcvs2c