I recently gave some bad advice in this essay : Luckily, LLMs significantly reduce the effort/cost of therapy experiments. Consider trying the following prompt: Please guide me through a round of ERP therapy. Start by listing universal sources of fear/discomfort/anxiety. If you find this process useful, consider trying it with a licensed human professional. I think this advice is dangerous if taken too seriously/literally, which is why I removed it. This is...

Twelve weeks. No vehicle dynamics simulator. One successful flight campaign. In an industry where integration often drags on for a year or more, we set out to prove that deploying cutting-edge autonomy can happen on a radically shorter timeline. Our challenge: integrate Hivemind autonomy onto General Atomics’ (GA) MQ-20 Avenger in just mere weeks, faster than most teams plan a kickoff meeting.    Starting the day before Thanksgiving 2024, my team and I found ourselves locked in a sprint...

Digging deeper into YouTube's view count discrepancy For a great many tech YouTube channels, views have been markedly down from desktop ("computer") users since August 10th (or so). This month-long event has kicked up some dust—enough that two British YouTubers, Spiffing Brit and Josh Strife Hayes are having a very British argument 1 over who's right about the root cause. Spiffing Brit argued it's a mix of YouTube's seasonality (it's back to school season) and chann...

Tantek, in celebration of 8-Bit Day (the 265th day of the year) , published a blog post with the following challenge: […] build an entire website where each resource fits into at most 8-bits worth of bytes. 255 bytes maximum size HTML, and maximum size of any linked external stylesheet, image, or even script file. Alongside the challenge, Tantek has a demo showing a web page whose HTML is under 255 bytes , with an external CSS stylesheet that is also under 255 bytes. This inspired me to try ...

Space just desolate… and yet humans launch hope to explore some more Image: Xinhua | See the first note at the end On our Moon from where the Sun never shines, a new era will dawn. The rim of the 10-kilometer-wide Erlanger crater on the Moon’s north pole. The crater floor is in permanent darkness. Image: NASA / GSFC / ASU / LRO | See the second note below Notes: There’s nothing quite as bold and beautiful as committing to venturing the brutal colossal desolation that is space. Every (civ...

Name: Rohit Saini Location: Arizona, United States Occupation: E-Commerce and YouTube Cost of setup: $2,1K Social media: YouTube SPONSORED ...

Across many countries, resistance to immigration is rising — even places with little immigration, like Japan, now see rallies against it . I’m not going to take a side here. I want to examine a simpler question: who do we mean when we say “foreigner”? I would argue there isn’t a universal answer. Laws differ, but so do social definitions. In Vienna, where I live, immigration is visible: roughly half of primary school children don’t speak German at home . Austria makes citizens...

Last week I happened to be in a discussion that involved getting an LLM to generate JSON reliably. A major frustration expressed was that no matter how much they tried the model would often fail to follow instructions during generation. I pointed out that most major vendors support some variant of "Structured Output" parsing which allows the user to provide an output schema. That happened to be a good solution to the problem but I wanted to take a moment to write up some notes about how and why ...

Today’s #SciArtSeptember prompt for visual artists was the word vector , which I’m shamelessly using as a writing prompt here instead. Vector to me takes me in the direction of vector graphics, and my early adventures trying to write my own WMFs on Windows. That lead me to that infamous WMF payload attack , and security more broadly. Hey, that’s an attack vector! Which, while we’re on the subject, let’s talk about gift cards. Gift cards inhabit this weird grey area in Weste...

When announcing Open-AI's latest release last month, Sam Altman said "GPT-5 is the first time that it really feels like talking to an expert in any topic, like a PhD-level expert." Before we discuss whether GPT-5 got there, what does "PhD-Level intelligence" even mean? We could just dismiss the idea but I'd rather try to formulate a reasonable definition, which I would expect from a good PhD student. It's not about knowing stuff, which we can always look up, but the ability to talk and engage ...

https://austinhenley.com/blog/startingacompany.html https://austinhenley.com/blog/startingacompany.html https://austinhenley.com/blog/startingacompany.html

As you probably know by now, thanks to the infinite supply of news on the subject, today new OS versions came out for Apple gadgets. Yes, it’s the one with that idiot Liquid Glass. Yes, I hate it. No, I don’t hate it because it’s different from what I was used to before. And you know why? Because I was hating the previous one as well. «Why are you still using it then?» I hear you say. Because I have no good alternatives. Most of the tools I use are developed exclusively for this ecosys...

I’m a pretty humble guy, so most people don’t know this extremely impressive fact about me: Raymond Chen once mentioned me on The Old New Thing , the classic Windows development blog. No, he didn’t mention me by name nor did he provide any way to identify me, but I still deserve credit for how little I boast about this stunning achievement. In 2009, Raymond Chen mentioned me in an issue of The Old New Thing . ...

Sometimes I get asked questions that would be more fun to answer in public. All letters are treated as anonymous unless permission is otherwise granted. Hey [Redacted]! It's great to hear from you. I'm very glad you joined the coffee club and met some good folks. :) You asked how to learn about systems. A great question! I think I need to start first with what I mean when I say systems. My definition of systems is all of the underlying software we developers use but are taught not to ...

With the advent of LLMs, the temptation to churn out a flood of unit tests for a false veneer of productivity and protection is stronger than ever. My colleague Matthias Doepmann recently fired a shot at AI-generated tests that don’t validate the behavior of the subject under test (SUT) but instead create needless ceremony around internal implementations. At best, these tests give a shallow illusion of confidence in the system’s correctness while breaking at the smallest change. At worst...

Earlier this week, an npm supply chain attack . It’s turn for crates.io , the main public repository for Rust crates (packages). The phishing e-mail looks like this: Andrew Gallant on BlueSky And it leads to a GitHub login page that looks like this: Barre on GitHub Several maintainers received it — the issue is being discussed on GitHub . The crates.io team has acknowledged the attack and said they’d see if they can do something about it. Earlier this week, an ...

The Orbital Index Issue No. 336  | Sep 17, 2025 🚀 🌍 🛰   ...

Having looked at MCP , Models , and RAG , I realised that I’ve been mentally skirting around something that I don’t really understand, so I’m going to expose myself to some ridicule here and try to understand better: what’s the difference between AI and ML? Aren’t they just the same? What’s the difference between AI and ML? OK we’re doing this are we? I thought AI was just ✨magic✨? And ML was the thing that got data scientists mad stacks ten years ago bef...

Let's write a super simply query engine using the iterator model. Something like this is conceptually what the compilation target for something like SQL generally looks like. Our iterators will be next able, and return None when they're exhausted. We can construct an iterator over some fixed set of values easily: class ConstIter : def __init__ ( self , rows ): self . i = 0 self . rows = rows def next ( self ): if self . i >= ...

Climate science is the most significant scientific collaboration in history. This series from Quanta Magazine guides you through basic climate science — from quantum effects to ancient hothouses, from the math of tipping points to the audacity of climate models. The post How We Came To Know Earth first appeared on Quanta Magazine Climate science is the most significant scientific collaboration in history. This series from Quanta Magazine guides you through basic climate science...

The Wild Cards series goes back a ways.  All the way to 1987, when Bantam Spectra released WILD CARDS , volume one of our original triad, which introduced the world to Jetboy, Dr. Tachyon, Golden Boy, Mark Meadows, Gregg Hartmann, the Great and Powerful Turtle, Yeoman, Sewer Jack, Bagabond, and a host of other aces, jokers, deuces and nats. There have been thirty-four volumes published to date — that’s not counting the various games, comic books, graphic novels, audiobooks, and similar s...

Happy # 8bitday yesterday! It was the 256th day of the year. See last year’s post for why the 256th day is 8-Bit Day: https://tantek.com/2024/256/t1/happy-8bitday-binary-byte Since last year, the related Wikipedia article on “Programmer’s Day” ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Programmer%27s_Day ) was updated to finally acknowledge worldwide observation of the day. This year, inspired by the old 5k (bytes) competition ( https://the5k.org/about.php ), I suggested to a few friends that it ...

Siemens 1100 kilovolt HVDC transformer, via @sci_fi_infra . Welcome to the reading list, a weekly roundup of news and links related to buildings, infrastructure and industrial technology. This week we look at 3D printing company Icon, transporting wind turbine blades on the largest airplane in the world, insurers funding cloud seeding, earthquakes in the Atlantic Ocean, and more. Roughly 2/rds of the reading list is paywalled, so for full access become a paid subscriber. Manhattan Project readi...