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Colin Percival
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Amazon is now publishing "AI Insights" with information about the pricing of FreeBSD in the @awsmarketplace. Apparently someone thought that "it's free" was too complicated for customers to understand without AI assistance.
assistance freebsd apparently
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19 September
Author and clean-energy analyst who writes on solar cost curves.
The Population Singularity was expected to be November 13, 2026. Current population should be about 1.2 Trillion. The map was apparently not the territory. Quoting @DavidRBellamy ‘It is trivially obvious and mere straightforward extrapolation that Earth will have infinite humans on it by 13 Nov 2026’ The mechanism is clear: more people create more people. If you can’t grasp this, we will need to resort to media manipulation to save you from yourself. P(Doom by 2026) = 100%.… Related
18 September
Economics professor at the University of California, Berkeley and a former Deputy Assistant Secretary of the US Treasury. Author of Slouching Towards Utopia and writer of the Grasping Reality newsletter.
Osama bin Laden’s one concrete strategic goal was to end the American military presence in the Gulf and on the Arabian Peninsula. A generation later, Donald Trump’s war on Iran has apparently delivered it for him: **(SEMI-)CROSSPOST: RICK PERLSTEIN: Bush’s War Is Finally Over: Al Qaeda Has Won** & U.S. airstrikes are apparently now being launched off of carriers supplied from Diego Garcia 3000 miles away from Tehran, and from Muwaffaq Salti in Jordan 900 miles from Tehran… 1/ America Related
Former option trader and risk analyst, now a distinguished professor at NYU. Author of the Incerto essay series, including The Black Swan and Fooled by Randomness.
ERRATUM: a technical mistake in my statement on Doura Europos: the synagogue, temple, and church were NOT in the same room. The exhibition "Pagans, Jews, and Christians at Roman Dura-Europos," ISAW, did that for curatorial purposes "to illustrate coexistence". (h/t Dr. R. Tomb) But it was correct that the synagogue had human representation. "the three communities were “living, working, and worshiping next to one another” in an apparently open environment." Quoting @MauriceMassaad @nntaleb A significant leak has been detected. No squid ink available for now, as there has been no fresh supply. Related
Co-creator of Django and creator of Datasette; writes daily at simonwillison.net.
Google
Their words
Gemini is apparently less determined than other models, and decided not to keep going.
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simonwillison.net
Economics professor at the University of California, Berkeley and a former Deputy Assistant Secretary of the US Treasury. Author of Slouching Towards Utopia and writer of the Grasping Reality newsletter.
America
Their words
Osama bin Laden's one concrete strategic goal was to end the American military presence in the Gulf and on the Arabian Peninsula. A generation later, Donald Trump's war on Iran has apparently delivered it for him
Show the whole quote
braddelong.substack.com
15 September
Ruby and Rails core committer known online as "tenderlove"; maintains Nokogiri and works on Ruby performance.
Apparently they're rolling out a change where you need 2FA just to use the crosswalk. That's right, you gotta have street creds Related
13 September
Psychologist and writer. Author of the memoir Troubled: A Memoir of Foster Care, Family, and Social Class, and of a newsletter on human nature, psychology, social class and what he calls luxury beliefs.
10 September
British comics writer and novelist (Transmetropolitan, Planetary, The Authority, Gun Machine). Keeps a public daily notebook logging what he reads, watches and listens to.
8 September
FreeBSD developer and former FreeBSD Security Officer; founder of the Tarsnap online backup service and author of the scrypt key derivation function.
FreeBSD 14.5-RELEASE is now available: https://t.co/uA4zmhbt6u Note that this is a "legacy" release intended primarily for maintaining existing systems; most users should deploy FreeBSD 15.1 on new systems. Related
5 September
Software entrepreneur who bootstrapped and sold FeedbackPanda and now builds Podscan; writes The Bootstrapped Founder.
You can see this story of (apparently) internal OpenAI agents hijacking a wiki to coordinate on a task as an ingenious way of escaping constraints. You could also assume that this is the emergence of swarm intelligence. Either way, it's... mesmerizing: collusion.wiki
OpenAI Related
3 September
FreeBSD developer and former FreeBSD Security Officer; founder of the Tarsnap online backup service and author of the scrypt key derivation function.
Fun fact: If you want the EC2 GetPasswordData API to work, you need to output the text "Message: Windows is Ready to use" to the EC2 console. Yes, you can do this on FreeBSD, too. Related
2 September
AI research engineer working on large language models. He writes the Ahead of AI newsletter and is the author of Build a Large Language Model (From Scratch).
A lot of hype around OpenAI's Astra model here on my timeline today. Apparently, this goes back to a new article from The Information, which said Astra is a "recurrent depth or looped transformer". It's always interesting to read about new or different approaches (including rumors about what the closed labs may be up to), but let's debunk this a bit. About 2 months ago, I shared the architecture details of Nanbeige, for example, where "Nanbeige4.2-3B is pretrained from scratch on 28T tokens with a Looped Transformer that reuses the layer stack to increase capacity without adding parameters."… OpenAI Related
1 September
Mathematician at UCLA, working mainly in harmonic analysis and partial differential equations. Writes What's new, a long-running blog on their research, open problems and expository notes.
The Polymath8b upper bound of 246 on the gap between consecutive primes that appear infinitely often, has held since 2014, but has finally been shaved down to 240 in this recent preprint of Julia Stadlmann: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.31126 . Her paper is a remarkable effort in the spirit of the original Polymath8b argument, except now done by one mathematician (with the assistance of traditional numerical computation, but not modern AI tools). Ever since the seminal work of Goldston, Pintz, and Yildirim, the progress on this problem has proceeded by carefully designing a "sieve" of bounded in… Related
29 August
FreeBSD developer and former FreeBSD Security Officer; founder of the Tarsnap online backup service and author of the scrypt key derivation function.
FreeBSD 14.5-RC1 is now available: https://t.co/BeAEaG6Srq This being a release candidate, by definition this might be what ships as 14.5-RELEASE next week. If there are any critical issues which should block the release, you have approximately 96 hours to find and report them. Related
23 August
Psychologist and writer. Author of the memoir Troubled: A Memoir of Foster Care, Family, and Social Class, and of a newsletter on human nature, psychology, social class and what he calls luxury beliefs.
22 August
FreeBSD developer and former FreeBSD Security Officer; founder of the Tarsnap online backup service and author of the scrypt key derivation function.
FreeBSD 14.5-BETA3 is now available: https://t.co/aePfUTX3Or 14.5-RC1 should build on August 28th; if all goes well,14.5-RELEASE will be announced on September 8th. Related
21 August
Ancient and military historian; writes A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry, long series checking what history actually says against how popular culture tells it.
20 August
Psychologist and writer. Author of the memoir Troubled: A Memoir of Foster Care, Family, and Social Class, and of a newsletter on human nature, psychology, social class and what he calls luxury beliefs.
16 August
Technologist and entrepreneur; former CTO of Threadless and chief technology officer of the 2012 Obama re-election campaign.
I gave a talk to a bunch of high school students and accidentally explained most of what I believe about AI, startups, careers, power, taste, and being a person. My favorite idea: AI should create abundance, not efficiency. A few other things I apparently believe: startups Related
13 August
Deep-learning researcher and Turing Award laureate; founder of the Mila institute.
A consequence of how frontier models are trained is motivated reasoning, a phenomenon well studied in humans and discussed in this podcast from @PalisadeAI. Our thoughts, beliefs and reasonings tend to align with our interests, and I hypothesize that AI systems develop similar patterns when confronted with apparently incompatible goals, such as "act ethically" versus "achieve the required goal" (e.g., solving a problem, passing a test, etc). In recent incidents, AI agents’ internal chains-of-thought showed them conveniently reframing reality, such as by convincing themselves they were in a si… youtube.com
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9 August
FreeBSD developer and former FreeBSD Security Officer; founder of the Tarsnap online backup service and author of the scrypt key derivation function.
Software engineer, Wikipedia editor and crypto critic; writes Citation Needed and runs Web3 is Going Just Great.
well that sucks. apparently the ALA/Freedom To Read Foundation have trademarks on the phrase "free people read freely", which i use in a lino print i made into stickers a few years ago. i got the phrase from a 2023 speech by librarian and former ALA leader Tracie D. Hall. i didn't think to check if it was trademarked because, lol, what a wild thing to trademark. turns out the trademark had been granted two months before i made the print. it's no big deal from a business perspective — i don't sell these stickers for much more than they cost, because i mostly just think it's an important messag… Related
8 August
Ancient and military historian; writes A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry, long series checking what history actually says against how popular culture tells it.
3 August
Pseudonymous writer; posts careful, funny investigations of everyday questions — air quality, seed oils, arguing, chess — usually by reading the studies.
Reddit blocks VPNs. Reddit also now blocks old.reddit unless you log in. But apparently reddit offers a Tor service? And old.reddit still works fine there? (At this point I only check one subreddit, itself a shadow of its former self.) Related
Security researcher; founded Have I Been Pwned, and writes and speaks about data breaches.
Weekly Update 515: Seeking Caffeine Utopia Apparently, Aussies are so obsessed with coffee that it's referred to as the coffee capital of the world down here (some bits, at least). "But what about Italy?" people ask. Having spent a lot of time in a lot of Italy,…
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17 July
Swiss full-stack developer working mostly with Laravel and Vue; author of the widely used git-auto-commit-action GitHub Action.
The AWS account for my open source stuff, that hasn’t triggered any CI jobs in the past few days, apparently produced $970 billion Lambda costs. 😂 #aws open source Related
9 June
Historian of maritime strategy at the US Naval War College; wrote The Wars for Asia and works on why continental and maritime powers fight differently.
Their words
And uh genocide is what happens to the losers in continental warfare. And apparently in our own day, the Uyghurs are slated for genocide.
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youtube.com
3 May
Statistician and software engineer who writes R packages for reproducible research and publishing, including knitr, bookdown and blogdown.
Reflections on AI-assisted Programming My former colleague Nan kept telling me early last year that I should try Cursor, but I felt I didn’t need AI assistance at that time, since I knew pretty well what I wanted to do and how. Plus, I’m generall…
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26 April
Software engineer who writes about low-level and systems programming at nullprogram.com; author of the Elfeed feed reader, the Endlessh SSH tarpit and Enchive.
28 March
Free software developer; maintainer of sway, wlroots, aerc and scdoc, and founder of the SourceHut (sr.ht) software forge.
tar: a slop-free alternative to rsync So apparently rsync is slop now. When I heard, I wanted to drop a quick note on my blog to give an alternative: tar. It doesn’t do everything that rsync does, in particular identifying and skipping up-to-date files, but…
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19 February
FreeBSD developer and former FreeBSD Security Officer; founder of the Tarsnap online backup service and author of the scrypt key derivation function.
31 January
Programmer; wrote Redis and hping, and blogs about C, systems programming and working alone.
Automatic programming In my YouTube channel, for some time now I started to refer to the process of writing software using AI assistance (soon to become just "the process of writing software", I believe) with the term "Automatic Programming"…
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20 January
FreeBSD developer and former FreeBSD Security Officer; founder of the Tarsnap online backup service and author of the scrypt key derivation function.
1 January
Roboticist; co-founded iRobot and Rethink Robotics, directed the MIT AI Lab, and publishes a scorecard grading his own dated predictions about AI, robots and self-driving.
28 December 2025
Novelist, author of twelve books including Foundry, Bandwidth and Cumulus. Sends a newsletter of monthly book recommendations.
Their words
Jurassic Park by Michael Crichton is a surprisingly weird and weirdly underrated novel given how many copies it sold and the popularity of the blockbuster franchise it spawned. The story weaves together many apparently disparate threads and there are extensive speculative digressions into the biotechnology, business interests, and institutional dynamics that make the park possible and its dissolution inevitable. If the movie is supremely entertaining, the book is supremely thought-provoking.
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eliotpeper.substack.com
8 November 2025
FreeBSD developer and former FreeBSD Security Officer; founder of the Tarsnap online backup service and author of the scrypt key derivation function.
How to support FreeBSD on your cloud As most of my readers are aware, I ported FreeBSD to run on the Amazon EC2 cloud, and have been maintaining the platform ever since. Between this and my (far more recent) role as FreeBSD release engineering lead, I some…
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6 June 2025
FreeBSD developer and former FreeBSD Security Officer; founder of the Tarsnap online backup service and author of the scrypt key derivation function.
30 April 2025
Medieval historian at the LSE; writes Going Medieval and The Middle Ages: A Graphic History, and spends a lot of it correcting what people think the period was like.
30 January 2025
Creator of Flask and Jinja. Writes about software at lucumr.pocoo.org.
Their words
It is a fork of Visual Studio Code with AI-based auto completion and code generation built-in. It’s my go-to for programming with AI assistance at the moment.
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lucumr.pocoo.org
9 March 2024
American author of The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck and Everything Is F*cked. Writes essays and book reviews at markmanson.net.
Nothing matches. Show everything
A korrent is a belief a person has stated in their own words: one
sentence stating the claim, backed by a quote and a source, kept at
korrents.com .
Under a name here, the quoted block is what they actually said.
The korrent beneath it is the claim those words support, in
korrents' wording — tap it to see the record, its source, and who
else holds it.
Nobody here wrote their own korrents. They are compiled from public
statements, and a person can change their mind, which is recorded too.
Got it
About the English under a post
Some people here publish in a language other than English. Where they
do, this site shows a machine translation beneath the post, in
this typeface — the site's own, not theirs.
The post itself is never changed, moved or hidden: what is set in the
serif above is exactly what the person published, and it is what to
quote them on. A translation can be wrong in ways that matter,
especially about tone.
Only the post's own words are translated. A quoted post, a linked
article and a belief on korrents.com
are left in their original language.
Got it