@tomtaylor | FaveJet

undermanager@mastodon.social 27 days ago

I got offered a seat on the tube for the first time today.

At last.

Brand new package from David Montague and the Pydantic AI team which directly tackles what I consider to be the single hardest problem in AI engineering: building evals to determine if your LLM-based system is working correctly and getting better over time.

The...

Simon Willison's Weblog 3 months ago

OpenTimes

OpenTimes

Spectacular new open geospatial project by Dan Snow:

OpenTimes is a database of pre-computed, point-to-point travel times between United States Census geographies. It lets you download bulk travel time data for free and with no limits.

Here's what I get for travel...

intima@tldr.nettime.org 2 months ago

Is the „intersection of art and technology“ in the room with us right now?

A New Yorker-style cartoon set in a psychoanalytic room. A female psychoanalyst with short hair, glasses, and a professional blazer sits comfortably in an armchair, holding a notepad and pen. She has an attentive yet slightly skeptical expression. Across from her, lying on a classic psychoanalytic couch, is a digital artist dressed casually in jeans and a hoodie. He gestures vaguely with one hand, as if struggling to articulate a deep thought. Above them, a comic-style speech bubble from the psychoanalyst reads: »Is the „intersection of art and technology“ in the room with us right now?« The room is cozy, with bookshelves, framed abstract art on the walls, and a large window casting soft light. The overall tone of the drawing is witty and intellectual, blending humor with a nod to philosophical debate.

jonty@chaos.social 2 months ago

The man sat next to me on this train is watching videos of jets taking off at maximum volume. I am simultaneously furious and quite interested in the jets.

mattgemmell@mastodon.scot 3 months ago

This is the most helpfully packaged box of screws I've ever seen, by a large margin. I just wanted to take a moment to appreciate whomever was responsible for such a triumph of utility and empathy.

Box of screws, clearly showing dimensions in metric and imperial, contents count, 1:1 scale of size, materials, appropriate driver bit, and suitable drills bit types and sizes, and wall plug size range, for each type of surface.

Troggie@mendeddrum.org 3 months ago

Forgot to post these games I found in IKEA the other day.

A stack of video game boxes on a shelf with IKEA related versions as titles:
PLATSA GO
LEAGUE OF LAGKAPTEN
CALL OF KALLAX
WORLD OF MICKE
SUPER MALM
LEGEND OF BESTÅ
SMASTAD Man
FEKET
ROCKET LACK
BLÀHAJ Odyssey
IVAR Infinate
BILLY VS BILDS 2

More IKEA related game titles:
IKEA MODERN WARDROBE
THE LACK OF US
FIKA 24
RORTnite
PAXMAN

More images

Russell Davies 3 months ago

Elevator

Wonderful talk from James. Grist for this mill.

Simon Willison's Weblog: Blogmarks 4 months ago

Will the future of software development run on vibes?

Will the future of software development run on vibes?

I got a few quotes in this piece by Benj Edwards about vibe coding, the term Andrej Karpathy coined for when you prompt an LLM to write code, accept all changes and keep feeding it prompts and error messages and see what...

phae@status.fberriman.com 4 months ago

Level up.

Photo of my new ikebana card stating I'm now a 1st class instructor

Simon Willison's Weblog 4 months ago

Building a SNAP LLM eval: part 1

Building a SNAP LLM eval: part 1

Dave Guarino (previously) has been exploring using LLM-driven systems to help people apply for SNAP, the US Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (aka food stamps).

This is a domain which existing models know some things about, but which is...

Simon Willison's Weblog 5 months ago

Quoting Laurie Voss

Is what you're doing taking a large amount of text and asking the LLM to convert it into a smaller amount of text? Then it's probably going to be great at it. If you're asking it to convert into a roughly equal amount of text it will be so-so. If you're asking it to create...

undermanager@mastodon.social 4 months ago

I would see the hell out of The Golden Age of the Mug

Screengrab describing an exhibition at the V&A about ‘the golden age of the mug…’

thisemailfindsyou@mastodon.social 5 months ago

I hope this email finds you first, they won’t be able to complete the mission, right?

panic@panic.com 5 months ago

🦠 We program a lot of things in this office but none quite as frustrating as our new sinks. yes, sinks.

the sink settings (!) are set with an infrared remote, which you have to place in front of the faucet IR sensor — virtually guaranteeing it immediately gets drenched in a spray of water. anywayyyy

A hand holding a remote control is activating a faucet, with water flowing into a sink below. The faucet has a sleek, modern design. The remote is being soaked.

Phil Gyford’s website: Everything 5 months ago

[Link] Packaging a python library | ionel's codelog

Including benefits of an src layout, and lots of example configs/scripts.

Permalink

thisemailfindsyou@mastodon.social 5 months ago

I hope this email finds you before Julian or one of his men spots you.

philgyford@mastodon.social 5 months ago

STOP DOING DEV OPS ON PERSONAL SITES
• PERSONAL WEBSITES WERE NOT SUPPOSED TO BE IN CLOUDS
• YEARS OF BLOGGING yet NO REAL-WORLD USE FOUND for zero-downtime CI/CD PIPELINES
• Wanted to put your website on the net ? We had a tool for that: It was called "FTP"
• "Yes please orchestrate my deployment. Please provision horizontal scaling" - Statements dreamed up by the utterly Deranged
LOOK at what DevOps Engineers have been demanding your Respect
for all this time, with all the homepages & fan sites we built for them
(This is REAL Ops, done by REAL Engineers)
[Three images of network diagrams]
"Hello I would like to containerize the application layer please"
They have played us for absolute fools

NSHipster 6 months ago

op run

.env files. If you’ve worked on a web application, you’ve probably seen one.

While they certainly get the job done, .env files have shortcomings that can create friction in development workflows.

We’ve touched on .env files in past articles about xcconfig files and secret...

Simon Willison's Weblog 6 months ago

Finally, a replacement for BERT: Introducing ModernBERT

Finally, a replacement for BERT: Introducing ModernBERT

BERT was an early language model released by Google in October 2018. Unlike modern LLMs it wasn't designed for generating text. BERT was trained for masked token prediction and was generally applied to problems like Named...