To borrow a programming lang analogy the failure mode I see a lot is it invents its own jargon that is effectively like a compiler intermediate representation of the high level natural language you actually want a human to look at and then inserts it directly into what the human has to read.

It needs to stop doing that but it doesn't seem to do a good job at differentiating from what is or isn't chain of thought slop. I'm sure the jargon is useful during its reasoning but it's very unhelpful and not very nice to deliver it to a human.

prompting it to be concise ("250 words or less") seems to help somewhat but theres only so much you can do esp in cases where the details matter and don't compress well

There’s this sort of local optima all these models pick which is instantly recognizable and hardly digestible for human consumption. Perhaps too much internal RL against benchmarks during chain of thought? The older non reasoning models had they’re own problems but at this point I can’t get an LLM to summarize data for humans, which is troubling.

As much as I’d like to read this piece it follows suit and I don’t have the patience to try and extract anything valuable from it.

Another cool corollary to this ethos is the portability of their portage, pkgsrc. I’ve personally used it as the basis of my user space packaging system on a Linux From Scratch distribution I made during the pandemic and the results were awesome. I could be wrong but it is the only package ecosystem I’m aware of that currently supports MacOS, Linux and the BSDS.

As far as the health of the ecosystem pkgsrc uses a rolling quarterly release process, has built in mechanisms for identifying vulnerable packages and a dedicated (volunteer?) security team and packages are about as up-to-date in many cases as, say, arch or gentoo.

Additionally pkgsrc can run rootless and my understanding is it finds itself used in a lot of high performance scientific computation settings as a result.

What I am curious about as someone who has been kind of cheering off on the sidelines is if there's any way that folks could get involved still in the future or if this is in practice permanently a closed project?

BSDs are more cathedral style and getting maintainer status is usually pretty onerous from what I understand but there are at least routes to it available to people willing to make an appropriate level of investment.

I'm not at a point in my life where I can meaningfully provide that kind of time and energy into serenity or ladybird but if my circumstances changed it's the kind of open source project that I would love to dedicate my time and energy towards in the future and I'm sure I'm not alone in feeling that way.

I've built custom firmware for a DIY OLED ESP-32 watch that is made by a few vendors before. In some ways we're emerging into that reality now but I'd admit that what Core Devices is trying to do and the general level of polish of the Pebble ecosystem is a lot further than something like what I'm describing.

One of my high school teachers impressed the same caution upon my cohort but was missing the end of a finger.

Just weeks before he passed, we were trading long Twitter DMs late into the evening—deep, technical conversations spanning topics that were hard to get good information on elsewhere.

After his passing, as I began sharing these stories, I found that so many others had experienced the exact same generosity from him. He had a remarkable way of making people feel seen and supported.

Alpine linux uses musl as its libc, which contrary to the articles' claims (unless I'm missing new information?) can have severe performance implications in many production settings.

update: I found this April 2025 blog post where someone performed some benchmarks and found that musl runtime performance is still pretty far behind glibc: https://edu.chainguard.dev/chainguard/chainguard-images/abou...

One of my top StackOverflow questions for years was around the viability of ECMAscript 6. It's now essentially irrelevant because it's found wide adoption in browsers etc. but at the time a lot of people appreciated the question because they wanted to adopt the technology but weren't sure what its maturity was.

It's also true that some technology stacks mature to a point where there isn't much more to be asked but I think there will continue to be a place for forums of discussion where you can ask and get answers around newer, bleeding edge technologies, use cases etc.

At some point, for me, ‘find