I’m sort of reminded of how back in the day windows was swiss cheese and people kept saying “it is because they’re the biggest”, and then microsoft started caring about windows security and it improved enormously. When will microsoft start caring about npm security?

Why is npm the only package ecosystem that has so many problems? What are the other package system owners doing better? Let’s start there, instead of blaming the victims.

They’ve dropped all the mac studio configs higher than 96 gb, as well as the base mac mini. They’re also rumored to be considering taking the Neo base config off the market.

This seems to be how they’re dealing with supply constraints for fab capacity and RAM.

Why has no one tackled the Young Lady’s Illustrated Primer? We know what AI-enhanced education should be, and we finally have the tech to build it.

So in reality, the tax payer is on the hook twice: once for paying the tariffs through increased prices, and once for the debt created by the people disbursing refunds to themselves.

Meanwhile the french Mistral is partnering with Nvidia to build an AI data center near Paris on which their LLMs will run.

But I agree this is not enough to make the EU a contender in the race with the US and China. The EU still has not seriously considered decoupling from American big tech.

I think this is because the whole web dev knowledge ecosystem of youtubers and tutorial platforms is oriented around big frameworks and big tooling. People think it is much harder than it actually is to build without frameworks or build tools, or that the resulting web app will perform much worse than it actually will. A typical react codebase ported to a fully vanilla codebase ends up just as modular and around 1.5x the number of lines of code, and is tiny in total footprint due to the lack of dependencies so typically performs well.

To be clear though: I’m not arguing the dependencies are bad or don’t have any benefits at all or that vanilla coding is a superior way. Coding this way takes longer and the resulting codebase has more lines of code, and web components are “uglier” than framework components. What I’m saying is that most web developers are trapped in a mindset that these dependencies must be used when in reality they are optional and not always the best choice.

Long term there is the European hydrogen strategy which aims to convert a lot of the current natural gas storage and transportation grid to hydrogen and use that in places that currently use LNG, but this requires inventing new technologies so is not a quick fix.

I switched not because I thought Claude was better at doing the things I want. I switched because I have come to believe OpenAI are a bad actor and I do not want to support them in any way. I’m pretty sure they would allow AGI to be used for truly evil purposes, and the events of this week have only convinced me further.

But… why are LLMs not worthy of any moral consideration? That question is a bit of a rabbit hole with a lot of motivated reasoning on either side of the argument, but the outcome is definitely not settled.

For me this story became even more relevant since the LLM revolution, because we could be making the exact mistake humanity made in the story.

- valuable humans in transit by qntm

- the old axolotl by Jacek Dukaj (skip the tv show, it is very different from the book)

- the Agent Cormac series by Neal Asher

- the night’s dawn trilogy by peter f hamilton (his books are borderline fantasy, but he writes such deliciously monstrous villains)

Another reason why feed ranking algorithms should be published. If we can see the algorithm we can stop playing these yes/no games. The real enemies are social media companies, not the other side of politics.