So, how long until something at the quality of Opus 4.5 can run locally?

What a flex of savvy, good instincts. I can't imagine a better place to do it

This is what humanity gets for using computers and honestly, we had it coming

another robot highlight for 2025: man wearing humanoid mocap suit kicks himself in the balls

Happy 20th anniversary to "Samoyed and teddy bear" on Wikimedia Commons. "This is a picture of my samoyed with a teddy bear. I release all rights to it, it would just be nice if her image could survive forever." commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Sa...

Weird how The Free Press was able to publish all of these without comment from the Washigton University Transgender Center at St. Louis Children's Hospital.

Armin Ronacher: lucumr.pocoo.org/2025/12/22/a... This guy has impeccable taste in designing APIs (I consider Flask to be a real triumph). Worth your reading

I don't know who needs to hear this, but wow: recent speech recognition software like MacWhisper Pro is really very good. (And yes, I used MacWhisper Pro for this skeet with minimal edits)

I see a lot of complaints about untested AI slop in pull requests. Submitting those is a dereliction of duty as a software engineer: Your job is to deliver code you have proven to work simonwillison.net/2025/Dec/18/...

I read American Canto and I think it’s wonderful. haha jk

I haven’t been an ACM member in half a decade, and I’m seething about this. The naked disrespect for the people who wrote the papers, my god. They make you write an abstract! And then… they set it aside for their own shitty slop? This is worse than eg the NYT picking story titles!

Ok, I’m sorry, but Shyamalan’s Trap is parodying itself, right? What in god’s green earth is going on?

If I had to summarize the state of software in 2025, it is "I wish software engineers respected their audience" It's not just enshittification or AI everywhere. It's things like VS Code not letting me decide on a window layout because it thinks it knows better. It's so grating.

RIP Mitch Hedberg :(

I think it's the venality of the lies in Google's products that upset me the most. Just now, Google tells me my iPhone 14 iOS browser "doesn't support full-screen videos" AYAFKM?

Shrooms 2 just dropped

-7F out, -25F wind chill. It is technically what i signed up for, yes. But, for real? 😧

Billy Strings Tiny Desk!!! www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wgqa...

Y'all. Y'all. If you recently caught yourself saying "I'm sorry to report that this, too, is gender" —and let's be real, it's 2025, you better have!— READ THIS BOOK. Be warned though: you will never see our world the same again.

Ok, so The Substance is so much better than I expected. Wildest last act I’ve seen in a decade. I can’t believe it got made.

Here I am, once again, begging people to read Revelation Space

It's been zero days since homebrew completely fucked itself and my macos python environment with it. I didn't even install python through homebrew. Something did it through dependencies. Just incredible stuff.

“Why did you build the train then?” I didn’t build the train. “Talking about the train is doing marketing for the train” fine, can we get off the tracks now?

Just because it's being passed around a lot: NO, data centers in space do NOT benefit from space being cold. Space is cold in the formal sense we use to define temperature. But it is very bad at cooling. What would you rather have to cool hot metal: a lukewarm water tub or a giant cold atmosphere?

Incredible things are happening

I'm teaching Statistical Rethinking again starting Jan 2026. This time with live lectures, divided into Beginner and Experienced sections. Will be a lot more work for me, but I hope much better for students. I will record lectures & all will be found at this link: github.com/rmcelreath/s...

That's a very important observation. To turn it into something actionable, I think folks are better served spending less time on "what is it?", and more time working on "what does it do, how do _I_ tell apart the shitty output from the good output, and how do _I_ get better at controlling that?"

I'm wondering: is the median engineering manager at a software company better than the median engineering manager at a non-software company at navigating internal fights and turf wars? it is officially Interesting Times for software companies, I wonder how many people see the stuff about to happen.

Welp, this -20C business is now the coldest I’ve ever experienced. The feel of the wind is intense!

So much statistics discourse orbits around Bayes verses frequentist debates, but in practice Bayes verses frequentist is often a false dichotomy. Just as important as the inferential strategy is the underlying model, and how that model is specified. 🧵

Deno: “Man, bun is looking good real fast, kind of scary. Kinda wish they didn’t exist” *monkey paw curls*

People are entirely missing the point of the bun acquisition, I think.

Not the highest bar we've ever hoped to clear, but in this house we take the non-Ls that fate gives us

oh god, bitwarden updated their UI. RIP, all of my mouse muscle memory (incidentally acquired only because they refuse to do good keyboard shortcuts), gone. Chat, did the update actually fix said lack of good keyboard shortcuts?

This is actually quite brilliant, up to and including the final sentence 🔥

you would be well served to pay attention when paul says this and it's also worth noting that the shoddy elf tit machine and the coding assistant machine are _different machines_. you can very much have one and not the other.

This is inconvenient information, but there is not one kind of AI/ML technology that only does the good use cases and a different kind of AI/ML that only does the bad use cases

Literally a problem in my ML class, for the "computers in society" unit: "Is it possible to design a technical system that is only usable for good under your chosen notion of good? Hint: assume its existence and think through the consequences."

I hate them more than the antis because I actually know why they suck, because I know what people who work in technology believe and want and how deeply fraudulent people like them are in claiming leadership over technologists

Read the thread he refers to first, and then read his thread. The next 6-18 months will be dominated by this dichotomy. Pprogramming is a fundamentally easy form of writing (you can program against a hard spec or test suite), so LLMs are actually good at it.

Hello! Good morning, mr. spec writer, can I please ask you for your conformance test suite to not include behavior in direct contradiction of the spec? Ok, great, thank you, glad we could sort it out!

I bet I have an uncommonly low ratio of "amount of music I appreciate" vs "number of live shows I've attended", but: Rush Satch Bela Fleck Seu Jorge Alessandro Penezzi

Psychic Damage Report: I find myself in the position of having to fix a bug that changes the behavior of this tool from '"foo",' to '"foo,"'. I'm cursed to relive my favorite passage from Stephenson's Anathem, where the protagonist's tortured by being forced to memorize slightly wrong math proofs

I am begging, *begging* y'all to let actual software engineers in the room where specs are being written that software engineers will need to one day implement

Gotta love an XML standard whose conformance suite includes a JSON sub-format that has strings with embedded HTML, which implicitly have to be parsed in order to implement the "XML" standard correctly.

OpenAI says they aren't liable for the suicide of a user their chat bot urged to kill himself because suicide is a violation of the TOS

I am tremendously grateful for open source, as it’s had such a huge impact on my career. That’s one of the reasons I’m so happy that Posit has committed to the @opensourcepledge.com. Read about our contributions to non Posit projects at posit.co/blog/posit-o....

How good are Chinese CPUs? Benchmarking the Loongson 3A6000

this fuckin guy ...dropping allegations of journalistic malpractice and source betrayal in separate piece meal events like it’s delicious media gossip and then writing, “we haven’t reached the halfway point, and I haven’t yet described the most bizarre, consequential, and newsworthy events”