Do I still have my first mouse mat from 36 years ago? Yes! (I'm now a full-time trackpad user, though.)

Tell me it's not just me. I ask CarPlay or Alexa: "Play $SONG by $ARTIST". For many songs it then replies: "Playing $SONG live, dubstep acapella remix by $ARTIST". If I just say the name of a song, always play the original!

There's an AirBnB in Scotland where instead of relaxing, you get to run a real-life bookshop for one or two weeks during your stay: www.airbnb.co.uk/rooms/7908227 .. I kinda wanna do this!

What the heck are these kids learning in school nowadays that requires a 76TB NAS? 😅

"The Pitt" is one of the best TV shows I've seen in years. I only just discovered it as Virgin had it on the flight, but it's not available in the UK at all (unless you sail the 🏴‍☠️). I love me a good medical show, but talk about turning it up to 11.

I've been reading Ruby Weekly since - let me check my inbox - *SPITS OUT WATER* - 2013?!? And that was already the 126th edition 😱 @cooperx86.bsky.social you are a machine!! It's always been one of my top Ruby resources, so it's extra fun to be included in it! rubyweekly.com/issues/762

I was tired of LLM clients having context, "chats", etc. Often I just want to fire off a quick prompt and get a quick response. So I built this for me, but you can use it too: peterc.org/zerocontext/ .. all client-side, you can save the HTML and use it locally if you like. Uses OpenRouter.

The meaning of this post is quite guessable if you check out the www.avibagla.com/blueskydicti...

I dunno what they're up to, but this British made computer is kinda neat looking, as is the weird Linux variant they're building for it: caligra.com

BTW, if you need to message me, go to my homepage peterc.org and email me. Bluesky doesn't allow DMs anymore and I'm not submitting my personal info to them 😂

Thundercat is the modern day Michael McDonald. Any time he turns up on a song, he instantly elevates it far beyond it'd be on its own.

Discovered it's "weird" to use your last name in takeout situations, but I always have. First name is too personal for something like that IMO, it just feels inappropriate to me.

I remember when 10+GB hard drives first came out and I was like.. nah, I can't trust that, that's just way too much data in one place. Meanwhile, Seagate's newest drive is 30TB, some 3000 bigger 😄

Amazon S3 Vectors is interesting but it feels like they couldn't be bothered to launch a new AWS service with a new name, and awkwardly shoehorned a concept into a place it doesn't quite belong? aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/in...

This is the best decade for popular music since the 90s.

I was looking at this map of the world 105 million years ago (with present land overlaid) and noticed all the oil producing regions of the world were shallow seas then (light blue). That's no coincidence, but I'd never seen it before and I never listened in science class 😏

The past few days I've noticed many (but not all) Web pages are taking longer to begin rendering – just a second or so. Then I remembered Cloudflare has turned on that anti-AI crawling stuff. Just making a note in case it turns out to be a story and not my imagination.

🎙️ New #TalkingPostgres #podcast episode! Peter Cooper joined to talk about 12 years of Postgres Weekly—with QBASIC Usenet fanzines, the BBC big tent, lots of #PostgreSQL, weekly newsletters for 460K devs, & 1 very cheesy story 🧀 🎧 talkingpostgres.com/episodes/12-... 📺 youtu.be/F1eWSAVKxdY?...

@justinjackson.ca Links in justinjackson.ca/ai-coding are pointing to ConvertKit preview links

Many people seem to be bothered by demographic change, but I think I have more in common with modern day Brits of different ethnicities and religions than I would with my great-great-great grandparents. It's surely a personal thing, but zeitgeist seems more important than heritage to me.

Watching a driving school dashcam video and I'd love to know how a full self-driving system would tackle this situation. Improperly placed roadworks sign. The driver in question followed the sign (stricti iuris) and nearly had a head-on collision.

@robmanuelyeah.bsky.social Oh, /here/ you are. Someone just mentioned Fesshole on HN and I was thinking.. yeah I haven't seen Rob post in a while 😂

Found a weird Chrome bug. If I right click in one Chrome window, it triggers hover effects on a background window that isn't in focus.

Was excited to see AliExpress pop up in my inbox with some fashion suggestions. Apparently oil combustion stoves are the look for Summer 2025.

Early in my career I shared an office with a graphic designer who refused to use computers and had his own personal assistant who he directed to use the computer to lay out his designs. I wonder what the parallel of this is today.

My goal as an old person is to be as equally happy and sassy as William Shatner seems to be. What a legend.

Hot take: Apple realizes that upsetting a few nerds is cheaper than rolling out an LLM-powered Siri to everyone too early and getting a flood of "Little Johnny tricked Siri into writing a racist/highly sexual poem" stories in the press.

Anyone got any strong recommendations for a Thunderbolt 4/5 SSD hard drive? Ordered a Mac Studio but cheaped out on the storage as I suspect I can get a baller TB 2TB+ drive for under the £600(!) extra it'd cost.

I was trying to think of "Wicked Game" by Chris Isaak, but couldn't. But I remembered "the guy in The Mask" kissed its performer at the MTV Movie Awards. So I ponder, remember Jim Carrey, Google "Jim Carrey kisses man", remember it's Chris Isaak, then once I see him the song comes rushing back.

The "gold card" for $5m is an interesting idea and certainly cheaper than November 2024's $277m platinum card for becoming co-president.

Fun bit of drama in the piano community. Piano YouTubers caught out using AI to render their fingerings when their fingers push through their opposing hand to play keys (like the F in this screengrab) 😂

The LLM era may well validate the oft-scorned university approach to teaching programming through broad concepts, math and systematic thinking, even if they do use tools and languages rarely encountered in the industry.

Yay, I'm going to Google I/O this year for the first time ever! Looking forward to lots of Gemini and Web platform goodness.

My MLX-based LLM inference thing has come a long way today. It's now a package you can install with `pip install infermlx` AND it'll run DeepSeek Llama 8B AND you can do cool stuff like extend DeepSeek's thinking process by suppressing </think> tokens.. Enjoy! github.com/peterc/infer...

Do you have Python and a Mac? Would you like to see how the entire LLM inference process works in a *single* heavily commented but easy to follow Python file? Would you like to tinker and make good models say weird things? I've made just that: github.com/peterc/infer...

Wondering if the idea of the "personal brand" will come back in a big way in an AI-heavy world. You can't as easily trust a regular brand won't go sloppy for efficiency, but perhaps you would an individual? If companies might be machines, people will, hopefully, still be people? Just a thought.

Not that I have a reputation for being unhealthy, but this is the spam folder on one of my oldest email addresses:

Bought a 'SQFMI Watchy' watch. It's an ESP32-powered EInk-screened watch that's entirely open source and you can program from scratch in C. Really fun to program! Not using it as a watch but as an automated way to wake me up by vibrating when I'm not in a deep sleep, etc.

Very impressed how good software instruments are on the iPad now. I have a Nord Stage 4 which is fantastic on its own (except having a pathetic 2GB of piano sample memory), but just plug it into my iPad and I have like hundreds more pianos and synths ready to go..

I was holding out on upgrading to Sonoma for so long, but I gotta admit.. iPhone Mirroring makes it worth it. I no longer have a good excuse for missing WhatsApp messages while working though 😅

I use my MacBook around the house a lot and I've been struggling with where to put YouTube, ChatGPT, etc. when working on other stuff. External screen? Get a dual screen Lenovo? Then it hit me. Two MacBooks and use Universal Control..?! 😀

This is the water and this is the well. Drink full and descend. The horse is the white of the eyes and dark within.

The British Secretary of State for Science, Innovation and Technology has "told the BBC there was no reason why the UK could not create tech companies on the same scale as Google, Amazon, and Apple." A real lack of situational awareness. There are so many reasons.

No proof yet, but I suspect you can get similar results to OpenAI's O1 with GPT-4o if you indulge in enough prompt work and automated feedback loops, as I assume that's all they're doing at their end anyway? With O1 being *six times* the price of GPT-4o, it's worth trying.. 😅

Winning 1st place in a programming competition must feel terrible. You were so close.

Inspired by EDB. They submitted a corporate blog post to Hacker News yesterday and a bunch of people signed up to write their first ever comment in praise of EDB's "remarkable improvements":

Engineers at EDB / EnterpriseDB put in the hard work of writing a good blog post for their employer and a month later it still looks like a pile of unformatted gloop. It's almost like no-one at EDB looks at their own blog 😔

Always done Advent of Code "properly" but this year I want to experiment with some LLM techniques (I'm never up early so don't get on the leaderboard!) Writing psuedocode in English then asking Claude to turn it into other languages works *very* well. Done Kotlin, SQL, Java & Bash no problems.

Amazon Aurora Serverless 2 now supports scaling down to zero: aws.amazon.com/about-aws/wh... .. so I figured I'd test it out to see if it could fit the bill for dirt cheap, sporadic Postgres hosting.

@simonwillison.net It's very rough (but works!) but I put together a bash script that abstracts the "GitHub repo to docs" idea a little bit: gist.github.com/peterc/3f608... It leans on the README more than your approach as-is, but just because that's what I needed ATM 😅