Nice graphic tricks when the hardware was harder to work with. It's amazing how much we could fit back then out of sheer motivation.

Our craft is based on shifting sands. This brings interesting philosophical questions, like why do it at all? I think the answer proposed in this short article is spot on. It can help bring new ideas on how to be in the world. This is more important than the code itself.

Definitely a funny hack. Not usable for compute workloads though.

I tend to side on the "boring tech" side, but indeed this is a good reminder that what we want is finding the right balance.

This is too often overlooked, but table lookups can help with performance if done well.

It's a very important project, it's really concerning that this attack went through. The service is still partly disrupted but they're showing signs of recovery. Let's wish them luck and good health. This archival service is essential for knowledge and history preservation on the web.

A good reminder that this is not the Google Chrome alternative you're looking for. It's the same privacy invading mindset with some bigotry on top.

People have to realize that tycoons like the ones from big tech companies can both be rich and mediocre. They were smart enough to seize opportunities at the right time but they are not exceptional. In fact, they're even boring and spineless.

The best quote in this paper I think is: "There is nothing special about Elon Musk, Sam Altman, or Mark Zuckerberg. Accepting that requires you to also accept that the world itself is not one that rewards the remarkable, or the brilliant, or the truly incredible, but those who are able to take advantage of opportunities, which in turn leads to the horrible truth that those who often have the most opportunities are some of the most boring and privileged people alive."

The real problem is that lots of journalists can't come to term with the fairy tale and so fall prey to all their publicity stunts as if it had any hidden meaning. This is dangerous because of all the political power they try to seize for their own gains.

Meanwhile, "the most powerful companies enjoy a level of impunity, with their founders asked only the most superficial, softball of questions — and deflecting anything tougher by throwing out dead cats when the situation demands."

Now you can go and read this long piece.

Now the impact seems clear and this is mostly bad news. This reduces the production of public knowledge so everyone looses. Ironically it also means less public knowledge available to train new models. At some point their only venue to fine tune their models will be user profiling which will be private... I've a hard time seeing how we won't end up stuck with another surveillance apparatus providing access to models running on outdated knowledge. This will lock so many behaviors and decisions in place.

Finally a path forward for logic programming? An opportunity to evolve beyond Prolog and its variants? Good food for thought.

Of course I recommend reading the actual research paper. This article is a good summary of the consequences though. LLMs definitely can't be trusted with formal reasoning including basic maths. This is a flaw in the way they are built, the bath forward is likely merging symbolic and sub-symbolic approaches.

Nice paper which debunks the choice of the language as an important factor for energy efficiency. The previous papers had a too simple model, this one puts forth a more complete causal model. There are many factors at play regarding energy efficiency, the programming language itself is not really one of them.

Neat little introduction on color manipulation using matrices. Mentions the things to pay attention to.

Data layout is essential for performance reasons. It is too often overlooked. If you want real speed you need to help the memory subsystem.

Nice intro for regular people who want to get into publishing a web site. Good way to bring some democracy back to the web.

Looks like we properly live by the "simple by default, powerful when needed" tagline. Now there are also challenges, this article gives a nice balanced view.

The latest Nobel prizes indeed say something about the presence of computer scientists in other fields. Do we risk to delve too much on theoretical model? For sure using computers helps a lot, we have to be careful about not loosing empirical validation in the process.

This is a neat broad introduction about the problems you will encounter when multiple threads are involved and how to approach them.

Nice post, and indeed it's not about Python if you read until the end. It shows that it's important to be able to make informed choices and not just pick your tech stack based on knee-jerk reactions.

I don't think I would side with the conclusion. It's a worthwhile article to get a better idea of the pain points around htmx.