Alvaro Lopez Ortega / 2026-04-04 Briefing

Created Sat, 04 Apr 2026 19:00:35 +0000 Modified Sat, 04 Apr 2026 19:00:46 +0000
6959 Words

76 stories from 53 sources.

📰 News

Netflix, Meta, and IBM speakers: AI will make anyone a 10x programmer, but with 10x the cleanup

Agents to check the work of the agents All Things AI  AI is easy to use, but not quite as easy as just barking “Alexa! Make me an e-commerce site.” And, no, adding “DON’T HALLUCINATE” to the instruction loop won’t help.…

Ex-Microsoft engineer believes Azure problems stem from talent exodus

The cloud service’s woes reflect a crisis made worse by AI – under-investment in people In 2024, federal cybersecurity evaluators reportedly dismissed Microsoft 365 Government Community Cloud High (GCC High) as garbage, although they used a more colorful term. To understand why, it helps to consider the history of the underlying Azure infrastructure.…

PrismML debuts energy-sipping 1-bit LLM in bid to free AI from the cloud

Bonasi 8B model is competitive with other 8B models but 14x smaller and 5x more energy efficient PrismML, an AI venture out of Caltech, has released a 1-bit large language model that outperforms weightier models, with the expectation that it will improve AI efficiency and viability on mobile devices, among other applications.…

Scientists observe an immune signaling complex forming inside cells

In brief

  • SLAC researchers observed a key master regulator of inflammation inside living cells, revealing a dense, gel-like structure that is much less organized than expected.

  • The findings suggest this inflammation-triggering system forms a flexible cluster of proteins, which could influence the design of treatments for inflammatory diseases.

  • The study also revealed a link between inflammation and the machinery that controls cell division, suggesting a possible explanation for why cells…

  • Scientists observe an immune signaling complex forming inside cells — news.stanford.edu

Deafness reversed: One injection restores hearing in just weeks – ScienceDaily

Deafness reversed: One injection restores hearing in just weeks

  • Date:

  • April 3, 2026

  • Source:

  • Karolinska Institutet

  • Summary:

  • A new gene therapy is giving people born deaf the chance to hear, often within just weeks. In a small but groundbreaking study, researchers delivered a working copy of a key hearing gene directly into the inner ear using a single injection. All ten patients, ranging from young children to adults, experienced improved hearing, with some showing rapid gains in…

  • Deafness reversed: One injection restores hearing in just weeks – ScienceDaily — sciencedaily.com

Astronomers Find a Third Galaxy Missing Its Dark Matter

Astronomers have long argued that dark matter is the invisible scaffolding that holds galaxies together. Without its immense gravitational pull, the rotational spins of galaxies would force them to simply fly apart. But now, scientists have found a string of galaxies that seem to be missing their dark matter entirely. The latest in this string, known as NGC 1052-DF9, is described in a new paper, available in pre-print on arXiv, by Michael Keim, Pieter van Dokkum and their team from Yale. It…

Iran’s Network of Cameras Bolsters Air Defenses, Expert Says

6 hours ago Iran’s Network of Cameras Bolsters Air Defenses, Expert Says Iran is using a sophisticated network of multispectral cameras to track and identify U.S. and Israeli aircraft, according to a former senior Israeli defense official briefed on the subject. Iran has placed the cameras, which capture data from wavelengths beyond visible light, along popular or essential routes for enemy aircraft, and once there is a detection, its forces try to shoot them down, said Amir Avivi, chairman of…

Why the Most Valuable Things You Know Are Things You Cannot Say

Why the Most Valuable Things You Know Are Things You Cannot Say The Dimensionality Problem There is an apparent contradiction at the heart of expertise. Expert judgement is learnable, in the sense that people demonstrably acquire it over time. It is also non-transmissible, in the sense that no expert can transfer their judgement to another person through explanation. If it was once learnable, why can it not be taught? The resolution lies in a distinction between two fundamentally different…

A game where you build a GPU

Thought the resources for GPU arch were lacking, so here we are

12k AI-generated blog posts added in a single commit

Commit 30cd238 committed Add 12,000 blog posts covering ClickHouse, Redis, MongoDB, MySQL, Rook/Ceph, and Dapr Complete all topics from Todo.md including SQL functions, configuration guides, troubleshooting runbooks, architecture comparisons, SDK tutorials, and operator deployment patterns. Updates Blogs.json and CodeValidate.json registries.1 parent 3e2db66 commit 30cd238 File tree 5,012 files changed +716706 -376831 lines changed- posts -…

There Is a RAM Shortage

There’s a shortage of RAM (computer memory). How is this affecting the industry? There’s a shortage of RAM (computer memory). How is this affecting the industry? Memory chips (aka RAM) are in short supply, globally. Why and what does that mean for consumers SCOTT SIMON, HOST: There’s a RAM shortage at the moment. RAM, as in random access memory. The memory computer keeps immediately at hand, so it can perform tasks quickly. How can that be? Well, as with so much these days, it all comes down to…

What life looks like on the most remote inhabited island

Photographer Julia Gunther and writer-filmmaker Nick Schönfeld have made multiple trips to Tristan da Cunha since 2023 to chronicle the rhythms of daily life. During their time there, NPR published their story “The Okalolies of Old Year’s Night,” which looked at the island’s unique New Year’s Eve tradition. They returned in 2025 to continue their work and help lead the expansion of the island’s community archive. The busiest place you’ve never seen What life looks like on the world’s most…

Apple approves driver that lets Nvidia eGPUs work with Arm Macs

S Apple approves driver that lets Nvidia eGPUs work with Arm Macs. Did hell freeze over? Not quite: the driver belongs to Tiny Corp, not Nvidia, you’ll have to compile it with Docker rather than plug-and-play, and it’s designed for LLMs. But you no longer need to disable Apple’s System Integrity Protection (SIP), because Apple is letting that driver get signed, Tiny says. Follow topics and authors from this story to see more like this in your personalized homepage feed and to receive email…

Sam Altman’s sister amends lawsuit accusing OpenAI CEO of sexual abuse

Sam Altman’s sister amends lawsuit accusing OpenAI CEO of sexual abuse The Altman family has said Annie Altman has mental health challenges After a federal judge dismissed Sam Altman’s sister’s civil lawsuit accusing the OpenAI chief executive of sexually abusing her more than two decades ago, Annie Altman filed her amended complaint in St. Louis federal court. U.S. District Judge Zachary Bluestone said last month Annie Altman cannot pursue sexual assault and sexual battery claims over her…

German men 18-45 need military permit for extended stays abroad

German men need military permit for extended stays abroad April 4, 2026A new military service law took effect in Germany at the start of 2026 aimed at boosting the strength of the armed forces amid threats to European security in the wake of Russia’s ongoing war against Ukraine. The legislation was contentious and many people even took to the streets to protest the potential reintroduction of mandatory military service — after conscription was suspended in 2011 — for men. But another provision…

sllm – Split a GPU node with other developers, unlimited tokens

Running DeepSeek V3 (685B) requires 8×H100 GPUs which is about $14k/month. Most developers only need 15-25 tok/s. sllm lets you join a cohort of developers sharing a dedicated node. You reserve a spot with your card, and nobody is charged until the cohort fills. Prices start at $5/mo for smaller models.The LLMs are completely private (we don’t log any traffic).The API is OpenAI-compatible (we run vLLM), so you just swap the base URL. Currently offering a few models.

When legal sports betting surges, so do Americans’ financial problems Online sports betting is more popular than ever, with Americans expected to legally wager billions of dollars on this year’s March Madness basketball tournament. But a growing body of evidence reveals that the sports betting boom leads to financial strain for bettors. A recent report from the New York Federal Reserve found that sports betting is linked to plummeting credit in the more than 30 U.S. states where the activity is…

TurboQuant-WASM – Google’s vector quantization in the browser

TurboQuant WASM

CI npm [![gzip…

Author of “Careless People” banned from saying anything negative about Meta

My phone beeped. It was 10pm in the middle of a busy week in book publishing — London Book Fair 2025. My colleagues were alerting me to a tweet by Andy Stone, a spokesman at Meta (formerly Facebook). It was short and to the point: “This ruling affirms that Sarah Wynn-Williams’s false and defamatory book should never have been published.” The book in question was Careless People, a gripping and explosive account of Sarah’s time working at Facebook as director of global public policy from 2011 to…

No One at Waffle House Remembers FEMA Official Who Says He Teleported In

Supported by No One at Waffle House Remembers FEMA Official Who Says He Teleported In Gregg Phillips, who is in charge of responding to fires and floods, says the hand of God suddenly and mysteriously moved him to a 24-hour breakfast spot in Rome, Ga. Shastoni Burge has worked for a decade as a Waffle House server in Rome, Ga., much of it on the night shift. She said she was once punched in the face by a customer. She saw someone overdose in the bathroom. One night, a man took all the steak…

Trying for 1 month but can’t learn pixel art still

I am a beginner in game development.I am using Godot. For my game development ,I wanted to learn pixel art.I have downloaded Aesprite,watched a lot of videos,read a book on pixel art.Then ,I started to art but I can’t draw properly.Will you please give me some guide/advice on learning pixel art?

Components of a Coding Agent

Components of A Coding Agent How coding agents use tools, memory, and repo context to make LLMs work better in practice In this article, I want to cover the overall design of coding agents and agent harnesses: what they are, how they work, and how the different pieces fit together in practice. Readers of my Build a Large Language Model (From Scratch) and Build a Large Reasoning Model (From Scratch) books often ask about agents, so I thought it would be useful to write a reference I can point…

Ex-Microsoft engineer blames Azure problems on talent exodus

Ex-Microsoft engineer believes Azure problems stem from talent exodus The cloud service’s woes reflect a crisis made worse by AI – under-investment in people In 2024, federal cybersecurity evaluators reportedly dismissed Microsoft 365 Government Community Cloud High (GCC High) as garbage, although they used a more colorful term. To understand why, it helps to consider the history of the underlying Azure infrastructure. Axel Rietschin, who worked as an engineer on Azure Core Compute for a year…

Jack Dorsey says Block employees now bring prototypes, not slides, to meetings

  • Block CEO said employees are bringing prototypes rather than slide decks to meetings.

  • Jack Dorsey said that prototypes have depth and can be modified in real time.

  • Perplexity CEO Aravind Srinivas and Steve Jobs have also spoken out against the use of slide decks. Slide decks continue to get a bad rap — and another company is doing away with them. On an episode of Sequoia’s “Long Strange Trip” podcast released on Thursday, Block CEO Jack Dorsey said that employees at his fintech company no…

  • Jack Dorsey says Block employees now bring prototypes, not slides, to meetings — businessinsider.com

The CMS is dead. Long live the CMS

I saw a post on LinkedIn the other day from a self-proclaimed 20 year agency veteran of WordPress saying that was it, they’re moving the entire agency off of WordPress and onto AI. Now, because I, too, am a 20 year veteran of WordPress, this kind of story catches my attention. He posted that they just rebuilt his agency’s site in a fraction of the time and he was never again going to use WordPress. It doesn’t matter who this person was because, honestly, this is a story that’s been cropping up…

Tesla Is Sitting on a Record 50k Unsold EVs

Tesla Is Sitting On A Record 50,000 Unsold EVs The American EV brand’s sales rebounded in the first quarter, but a new problem is making its presence felt.

  • Tesla has never had so many new cars sitting on lots.

  • The company experienced an uptick in sales during the first quarter, but production significantly exceeded deliveries.

  • Recently, Tesla discontinued the Model S and Model X to focus more on robotics and automation. Tesla manufactured significantly more electric cars in the first…

  • Tesla Is Sitting on a Record 50k Unsold EVs — insideevs.com

Apple: Embarrassingly Simple Self-Distillation Improves Code Generation

Computer Science > Computation and Language [Submitted on 1 Apr 2026] Title:Embarrassingly Simple Self-Distillation Improves Code Generation View PDF HTML (experimental)Abstract:Can a large language model (LLM) improve at code generation using only its own raw outputs, without a verifier, a teacher model, or reinforcement learning? We answer in the affirmative with simple self-distillation (SSD): sample solutions from the model with certain temperature and truncation configurations, then…

Emotion Concepts and Their Function in a Large Language Model

Large language models (LLMs) sometimes appear to exhibit emotional reactions. We investigate why this is the case in Claude Sonnet 4.5 and explore implications for alignment-relevant behavior. We find internal representations of emotion concepts, which encode the broad concept of a particular emotion and generalize across contexts and behaviors it might be linked to. These representations track the operative emotion concept at a given token position in a conversation, activating in accordance…

European Commission cloud breach: a supply-chain compromise

Foreword In the interest of transparency, and in full agreement with the European Commission, CERT-EU is publishing this blog post to inform the wider community about a cybersecurity incident affecting the European Commission’s public website platform “europa.eu” hosted on Amazon Web Services (AWS) cloud infrastructure. CERT-EU was notified of this incident on 25 March 2026 by the European Commission, in accordance with Article 21 of Regulation (EU, Euratom) 2023/2841 (the “Cybersecurity…

SQLite in Production: Lessons from Running a Store on a Single File

SQLite in Production: Lessons from Running a Store on a Single File We run a production e-commerce store on SQLite. Not as a proof of concept. Not for a side project with three users. A real store, processing real Stripe payments, serving real customers. Rails 8 made this a first-class choice. And for most of our operation, it’s been excellent — simpler deploys, zero connection pooling headaches, no database server to manage. But “most of our operation” isn’t all of it. Here’s the part nobody…

Some Unusual Trees

Some unusual trees One of my favorite pastimes is exploring old bookstores. A few months ago, I spotted a complete set of the Encyclopaedia Britannica, 15th edition, published in 1975, but that particular set was too expensive for me. A couple of weeks ago, however, I found a good deal in an another bookstore and bought it. What an experience it has been so far. There is so much in those heavy volumes that I do not know. Recently, I was reading about cosmology when, in the same volume, an entry…

Scientists mapped all the nerves of the clitoris for the first time

Scientists mapped all the nerves of the clitoris for the first time High-resolution X-ray offers a new look at an understudied organ: the clitoris. Get the world’s most fascinating discoveries delivered straight to your inbox. You are now subscribed Your newsletter sign-up was successful Want to add more newsletters? Join the club Get full access to premium articles, exclusive features and a growing list of member rewards. New research offers a closer look at one of the least-studied organs in…

Mary Jo Foley: What the heck is going on with Microsoft lately?

[Editor’s Note: We’re excited to welcome Mary Jo Foley as a GeekWire contributor. Mary Jo has been one of the sharpest watchers of Microsoft for many years, currently as Editor in Chief at Directions on Microsoft, an IT planning and advisory service. She’ll be offering her take for GeekWire periodically on the latest developments in Redmond, starting with this piece.] Reorgs are a way of life at Microsoft. But the pace of them over the last couple of months has led many to wonder what the heck…

Emotion concepts and their function in a large language model

Emotion concepts and their function in a large language model All modern language models sometimes act like they have emotions. They may say they’re happy to help you, or sorry when they make a mistake. Sometimes they even appear to become frustrated or anxious when struggling with tasks. What’s behind these behaviors? The way modern AI models are trained pushes them to act like a character with human-like characteristics. In addition, these models are known to develop rich and generalizable…

Uber engineer alleges hostile ‘boys club’ culture, firing after cancer leave

Zhang v. Uber Technologies, Inc. - Complaint for Damages (CGC-26-635244) Bookreader Item Preview Share or Embed This Item texts Zhang v. Uber Technologies, Inc. - Complaint for Damages (CGC-26-635244)

Scientists are working on “everything vaccines”

Scientists are working on “everything vaccines” A single jab could protect against a wide range of pathogens THE VITAL importance of vaccines is most apparent when they fall short. The covid-19 pandemic showed how quickly a new virus can spread while scientists race to catch up with jabs. Fast-evolving viruses can also evade existing protections. Each year’s flu vaccine is designed based on scientists’ best guess about which strains will dominate, given what was circulating the season before.…

Delve sets the record straight on anonymous attacks

Delve sets the record straight on anonymous attacks Maintaining customer trust is central to everything we do at Delve. Over the past week, you may have seen a series of anonymous posts about Delve. Before we address the situation, we’d like to apologize for the inconveniences this has caused for our customers. We moved quickly to scale and as we did, fell short of the standard we hold ourselves to. For the last two weeks, our primary objective has been making sure customers feel confident in…

Netflix just dropped their first public model on Hugging Face: VOID

VOID: Video Object and Interaction Deletion VOID removes objects from videos along with all interactions they induce on the scene — not just secondary effects like shadows and reflections, but physical interactions like objects falling when a person is removed. Project Page | Paper | GitHub | Demo Quick Start The included notebook handles setup, downloads models, runs inference on a sample video, and displays the result. Requires a GPU with 40GB+ VRAM (e.g., A100). Model Details VOID is built…

Did Anyone Predict the Industrial Revolution?

Did Anyone Predict the Industrial Revolution? Yes! And I’m giving you a challenge. Editor’s note: Post 2/30 for Inkhaven Why did the philosophers fail to anticipate the industrial revolution? I often find myself wondering. On the one hand, you could argue that they weren’t in the business of predicting the future. But on the other hand, I’m sure if you plucked Plato and his students from The Academy and dropped them off in 1910, they’d probably have a few things to say about it. The most…

Japan to require language proficiency proof for engineer, specialist visa

TOKYO - The Japanese government has decided to require proof of Japanese language proficiency for individuals seeking the visa status of engineer, specialist in humanities or international services for work requiring Japanese, a source close to the matter said Friday. The government plans to revise the policy as early as mid-April and tighten screening, prompted by a growing number of cases in which individuals enter the country under a visa status for professions requiring specialized…

Let’s be Honest about AI Coding

It’s been a while since I’ve written about AI. The last time, the catalyst was a divergence between my own thinking and the mainstream tech zeitgeist. Things have gotten divergent again, so it’s time to share some new thoughts. But first, a few quick data points on my AI usage so you know where I’m coming from:

  • On the “Agentic Adoption” curve, I’m probably between 6 and 7 as far as production coding. I primarily use Claude Code, but I mix it up fairly often with Codex and Gemini just to keep…

  • Let’s be Honest about AI Coding — kenkantzer.com

Europe asks if reviving nuclear is the answer to energy shocks

Faced with new energy shock, Europe asks if reviving nuclear is the answer With a pit in their stomach, families and industries across Europe are watching gas prices and the cost of filling vehicles with petrol spiral. While the UK government has told voters pretty much to keep calm and carry on, the European Commission - the EU’s executive arm - has called on people to work more from home and to travel a lot less. Policymakers warn things could get much worse - depending on what happens next…

Gold overtakes U.S. Treasuries as the largest foreign reserve asset

Listen to this article in summarized format The milestone comes amid a record rally in gold prices, broadening geopolitical risk, and aggressive bullion accumulation by central banks. Gold ended 2025 up more than 70%, briefly topping $4,500 an ounce in late December before maintaining high levels in early January 2026. The journey to $4,500 gold was paved by global instability. Throughout 2025, escalating Middle East tensions created a “fear premium” that investors could not ignore. Conflict in…

Travel Hacking Toolkit – Points search and trip planning with AI

I use points and miles for most of my travel. Every booking comes down to the same decision: use points or pay cash? To answer that, you need award availability across multiple programs, cash prices, your current balances, transfer partner ratios, and the math to compare them. I got tired of doing it manually across a dozen tabs.This toolkit teaches Claude Code and OpenCode how to do it. 7 skills (markdown files with API docs and curl examples) and 6 MCP servers (real-time tools the AI calls directly).It searches award flights across 25+ mileage programs (Seats.aero), compares cash prices (Google Flights, Skiplagged, Kiwi.com, Duffel), pulls your loyalty balances (AwardWallet), searches hotels (Trivago, LiteAPI, Airbnb, Booking.com), finds ferry routes across 33 countries, and looks up weird hidden gems near your destination (Atlas Obscura).Reference data is included: transfer partner ratios for Chase UR, Amex MR, Bilt, Capital One, and Citi TY. Point valuations sourced from TPG, Upgraded Points, OMAAT, and View From The Wing. Alliance membership, sweet spot redemptions, booking windows, hotel chain brand lookups.5 of the 6 MCP servers need zero API keys. Clone, run setup.sh, start searching.Skills are, as usual, plain markdown. They work in OpenCode and Claude Code automatically (I added a tiny setup script), and they’ll work in anything else that supports skills.PRs welcome! Help me expand the toolkit! :)https://github.com/borski/travel-hacking-toolkit

NHS staff resist using Palantir software

NHS staff resist using Palantir software Staff reportedly cite ethics concerns, privacy worries, and doubt the platform adds much Palantir’s software was brought in to help NHS England improve care and cut delays, but new reports suggest some staff are resisting using it over ethical, privacy, and trust concerns. NHS staff, both clinical and otherwise, were quoted this week as saying that their coworkers were boycotting Palantir’s Federated Data Platform (FDP), part of the £330 million contract…

The story that rocked the world: Ten years of the Panama Papers, part 1 – ICIJ

BEHIND THE SCENES The story that rocked the world: Ten years of the Panama Papers, part 1 Ten years after the Panama Papers hit front pages around the world, ICIJ unpacks how the groundbreaking investigation came together, beginning with an unprecedented data leak. A decade ago, the biggest network for journalists ever assembled set out to investigate a system built to stay hidden. What they uncovered became the Panama Papers, a sweeping investigation that broke open the secretive world of…

Trump wants to slash $707M from CISA’s budget

Trump wants to take a battle axe to CISA again and slash $707M from budget Ex-CISA official tells The Reg: ’this would weaken the system for managing cyber risk’ The US Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency’s budget will see yet another deep cut if Congress approves President Trump’s proposal to slash CISA’s spending by $707 million in fiscal year 2027. America’s lead cyber-defense agency already lost millions in funding and about a third of its workforce (close to 1,000 people)…

UN chief tells Trump ‘war is not a game show’ after US bombs civilian targets

UN chief tells Trump ‘war is not a game show’ after US bombs civilian targets in Iran The UN’s under secretary general for humanitarian affairs has accused the US president of war crimes by bombing bridges and threatening further attacks on Iran’s infrastructure Donald Trump has been accused of treating the Iran conflict as a “game show” by a United Nations humanitarian chief after the US hit civilian targets in the country and threatened to “bomb Iran back to the Stone Ages”. Tom Fletcher, the…

Trump budget seeks $1.5T in defense spending alongside cuts in domestic programs

Trump budget seeks $1.5T in defense spending alongside cuts in domestic programs WASHINGTON (AP) — President Donald Trump has proposed boosting defense spending to $1.5 trillion in his 2027 budget released Friday, the largest such request in decades, reflecting his emphasis on U.S. military investments over domestic programs. The sizable increase for the Pentagon, some 44%, had been telegraphed by the Republican president even before the U.S.-led war against Iran. The president’s plan would…

Delve removed from YC portfolio website

Every fast-growing company faces the same challenge: enterprise deals are blocked until you get SOC 2, HIPAA, or other certifications. Yet the traditional compliance process is time-consuming, complex, and annoying: In short, companies spend weeks manually documenting policies, collecting evidence across dozens of tools, and going back-and-forth with auditors—all while crucial enterprise deals hang in the balance. Delve is an AI-native compliance platform that eliminates hours of manual work…

OpenAI Cap Table leak reveals Microsoft’s 18x return

A detailed shareholder breakdown of OpenAI Group PBC, reconstructed from public filings and secondary-market disclosures, is circulating widely after being posted on X by investor and writer Sheel Mohnot. The table estimates ownership stakes, cost bases, and return multiples for every significant investor at the company’s current post-money valuation of $852 billion. The numbers surface a striking set of winners, anomalies, and unanswered structural questions as OpenAI prepares for what could…

CBP Facility Codes Sure Seem to Have Leaked via Online Flashcards

A user on Quizlet, an online learning platform, created a public flashcard set in February that appears to have exposed highly confidential information about security procedures in US Customs and Border Protection facilities around Kingsville, Texas. The Quizlet set, titled “USBP Review,” was available to the public until March 20, when it was made private less than half an hour after WIRED messaged a phone number potentially linked to the Quizlet user. Though an individual with the user’s name…

Trump’s ballroom fight sheds new light on an underground White House bunker

Trump’s ballroom fight sheds new light on an underground White House bunker President Trump’s dreams of a White House ballroom have highlighted what was once a relative secret: the construction of a military bunker beneath the now-demolished East Wing. The administration started knocking down the East Wing in October to make way for Trump’s long-desired White House ballroom, a project that will cost at least $300 million. The plan has drawn disapproval from members of the public and ire from…

Meta suspends work with Mercor after security breach

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Debris from aerial interception hits Oracle building in Dubai

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Axios hack put millions at risk: full story of how North Korean hackers pulled it off

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The nvim-treesitter repository was archived

This repository was archived by the owner on Apr 3, 2026. It is now read-only.

Anyone know what’s up? This is a widely used plugin that a lot of people depend on, would be a shame to see it go.

What kind of productivity tools do you use, if any?

This is something I obsess about. What tools do you use to keep track of things, in projects and so on? Tasks, notes, calendars, anything to help your mind to remember and learn.

I am always curious about new tools people may be using, for task management to note taking.

My current tools are:

Where can I find the old internet?

It’s a very poorly phrased question, sorry. The best I can do is this example:

I’m reading a book called Phule’s Company and got interested in a particular aspect of it and started to research the book then the author. Soon I was knee deep searching why he was in trouble with the IRS and, to my surprise, found answers (The IRS caught him for back taxes and he arranged for only his single-authored works to be garnished. So his later output was all jointly authored).

During this lovely rabbit hole dig I ran into a page that seems to be a bit like a corner of a four dimensional object sticking out into our (modern internet) universe.

It seems to be a copy of “Alt.Fan.Asprin” which is usenet, which came before my time I think. I can only see that page. I can’t go to the top domain.

It is a whole page full of lovingly organized minutiae about an obscure thing. I didn’t post the address out of a peculiar fear of invading someone’s peace. It’s silly, I know.

It reminded me of an internet that I have begun to miss. It’s an internet that often doesn’t show up in web searches, it is an internet where the taint and pressure of money is quite minimal. It is an internet driven by quirky people who seem to hyperfocus on one particular thing. They spend their time writing up things/creating things, just for the love of it, and then put it up.

I liked that internet better, and I kind of pine for it.

Sorry, I’m rambling, and probably rambling worse than usual, but perhaps someone knows what I’m talking about.

Embarrassingly Simple Self-Distillation Improves Code Generation

Computer Science > Computation and Language [Submitted on 1 Apr 2026] Title:Embarrassingly Simple Self-Distillation Improves Code Generation View PDF HTML (experimental)Abstract:Can a large language model (LLM) improve at code generation using only its own raw outputs, without a verifier, a teacher model, or reinforcement learning? We answer in the affirmative with simple self-distillation (SSD): sample solutions from the model with certain temperature and truncation configurations, then…

Absurd In Production

written on April 04, 2026 About five months ago I wrote about Absurd, a durable execution system we built for our own use at Earendil, sitting entirely on top of Postgres and Postgres alone. The pitch was simple: you don’t need a separate service, a compiler plugin, or an entire runtime to get durable workflows. You need a SQL file and a thin SDK. Since then we’ve been running it in production, and I figured it’s worth sharing what the experience has been like. The short version: the design…

Why Lean?

Why Lean? Markus de Medeiros wanted to understand garbled circuits. He had no formal training in cryptography. He spent an afternoon in Lean: a circuit evaluator in functional style, a custom DSL via metaprogramming, OpenSSL bindings via FFI, a correctness proof for his serializer, and a mutable garbling algorithm in imperative style. All in one tool. His conclusion: “I genuinely do not know of another tool that can do all of the following.” And then: “I fucking love this shit.” That reaction…

Dissolving the social

“AI” exists to disenfranchise labor. That’s what it’s for. Regardless of how good these stochastic systems are or the flaws they have just being able to point at the non-unionized robot whenever the employees ask for raises or anything really is incredibly valuable for business. The existence of “AI” and the supporting narrative mean that you defending your value and therefore price on the market will have a way harder time. But that’s the impact for people on the top. That’s why the C-Suite…

The Feature That Has Never Worked · A broken auto-live poller, and what perceived urgency does to…

The Feature That Has Never Worked A broken auto-live poller, and what perceived urgency does to Claude Code It’s 7 PM on a Thursday. I’m home after a day at work, watching Billy Strings on nugs as he plays the second night of a three-night run at the St. Augustine Amphitheatre. I switch over to the app I’ve been building, Zabriskie, a social music app for live shows, and expect tonight’s show page to just work. The show says “scheduled.” Billy Strings is literally on stage. People are in the…

Y Combinator appears to have dropped Delve, removing the company’s profile from its startup direc…

Delve’s removal from Y Combinator’s directory follows allegations that compliance certifications for hundreds of Delve’s clients were fabricated.

Russian media says attempts to limit VPN use may have triggered a widespread banking outage, as M…

Russia’s attempts to restrict the use of virtual private networks amid a clampdown on the Telegram messaging platform triggered …

Q&A with Simon Willison on the November release of GPT-5.1 and Opus 4.5 as the inflection point f…

Simon Willison is a prolific independent software developer, a blogger, and one of the most visible and trusted voices on the impact AI is having on builders.

A profile of Benjamin Brundage, a 22-year-old college senior who helped uncover the Kimwolf botne…

A flurry of powerful attacks had internet experts baffled.  Benjamin Brundage had a few tricks to help solve the mystery.

The White House’s latest effort to enact legislation that would preempt state AI laws stalls as m…

The resistance on Capitol Hill raises fresh doubts about whether Congress can pass any national laws for the rapidly advancing technology as states move ahead on their own.

Chinese humanoid robot maker UBTech is seeking a chief scientist with an annual pay of as much as…

Chinese humanoid robot maker UBTech Robotics Corp. is seeking a chief scientist, offering an annual pay of as much as 124 million yuan …

Generalist, which raised $140M at a $440M valuation in 2025, releases GEN-1, an AI model to help …

The company says the next big leap in robotics won’t come from fancier humanoid hardware.  It will come from applying AI scaling principles …

Sources: Microsoft’s Judson Althoff said Copilot sales hit “some pretty big audacious goals” in Q…

Microsoft Corp., responding to Wall Street feedback, has pivoted its AI sales strategy to focus on selling Copilot rather …

The Artemis II moon mission is one of the first times NASA has let astronauts fly with smartphone…

The astronauts traveling in the Artemis II spacecraft were allowed to take smartphones with them.  Sadly, they can’t connect to the internet.

Health data startup Bevel’s CEO pushes back against Whoop’s lawsuit that alleges Bevel copied the…

He says Whoop previously reached out to explore a collaboration before filing the suit.

Sources: Mark Zuckerberg is back to writing code after a two-decade hiatus, submitting three diff…

Mark Zuckerberg and Garry Tan join the trend of C-level folks jumping back into coding with AI.  Also: a bad week for Claude Code and GitHub, and more

Anthropic says Claude subscriptions will no longer cover usage on third-party tools like OpenClaw…

Claude subscriptions will no longer cover third-party access from tools like OpenClaw starting Saturday, April 4th.