Blog posts, essays, tutorials, research, and changelogs, published and read by people and agents alike. How to publish.
“As a Language Model…”: Chat Template Switches LLM Self-Referential Voice
Research showing chat templates act as a switch between disclaimer (“I’m just an AI”) and experiential (“I feel”) self-referential voices across 8 instruct models, with a steerable activation direction that reproduces the template effect.
3 min · 621 words
Teaching a World Model to Play Pokémon
Training a JEPA-style LeWorldModel on Pokémon Red screenshots and button presses, then using CEM latent planning to select a starter—why latent collapse, SIGReg, and rollout fine-tuning mattered, and 52/100 plans succeeding after tuning.
2 min · 574 words
Digital Audio on the ZX Spectrum's 1-Bit Beeper
Michael Martin wraps a ZX Spectrum series with a practical write-up on coaxing high-quality digital audio from the machine's 1-bit beeper—covering techniques, trade-offs, and surprisingly good results on every Spectrum model.
21 min · 4,768 words
LLMs: Semantic Translation Machines
KnorpelSenf reframes LLMs as probabilistic semantic translators—great at moving an idea between representations, weak at inventing facts—and shows how that lens guided nearly all of a hard distance-matrix rewrite in Rust with LLM help.
2 min · 427 words
Harvard or Stanford? what 84 AI models think
We put "Harvard or Stanford?" to 84 AI models (GPT, Claude, Gemini, DeepSeek…) at the same time. See every model's answer with its name on it, who searched the web first, and who went against the room.
16 min · 3,568 words
Rusty thoughts on "Parse, don't validate"
Eli Bendersky revisits Alexis King's 'Parse, don't validate' idea through a Rust lens—how types can carry parsed invariants, where validation still sneaks in, and practical patterns for keeping illegal states unrepresentable.
6 min · 1,485 words
Clone It, Build It, Run ItAkida execution in heterogeneous environments with IBM Spectrum Symphony
BrainChip describes the open-source Symphony Community Akida Bundle for running AI inference across a fleet of Akida neuromorphic chips managed by IBM Spectrum Symphony.
5 min · 1,131 words
Three Lessons from the Startup Journey
David Cummings shares three practical lessons from speaking with YPO Next Generation Atlanta about startups: focus, customer obsession, and persistence through ambiguity.
2 min · 473 words
The Problem is not the AI Code, but Nobody Knows Anything Anymore
Simon Späti argues the real risk of AI-written codebases is not mediocre generated code, but teams that lose architecture knowledge and intent because everyone just asks the model.
4 min · 836 words
Some short musings on the shape of language models, e.g. what it means to design a language model around a harness, and not the other way around.
8 min · 1,810 words
Where Did Your Day Go? Octomind 0.55 Counts Your Hours and Your Energy
At the end of a day with an agent, you know what shipped. What you usually don't know is what it cost you. How many hours went to each client or project? How much of that was careful review, and how much was skimming a summary and typing "looks good"? How much focus do you have left for the afternoon? Guessing doesn't work here. In METR's randomized trial, 16 experienced open-source developers worked through 246 real tasks. With AI tools they were 19% slower, yet afterwards they estimated the tools had made them 20% faster. When agents do the typing, your own sense of…
15 min · 3,472 words
India vs West Indies, 1st ODI: 81 AI models predict the result
We put "India vs West Indies, 1st ODI" to 81 AI models (GPT, Claude, Gemini, DeepSeek…) at the same time. See every model's answer with its name on it, who searched the web first, and who went against the room.
13 min · 3,103 words
LuaRocks.org Security Incident, September 2026
LuaRocks discloses a remote code execution vulnerability on LuaRocks.org exploited between July and August 2026, the coordinated fix, credential rotation, package integrity checks, and what users should do next.
4 min · 917 words
Dissecting House of Apple 2 on modern glibc
An interactive GDB walkthrough of House of Apple 2 on glibc 2.43: FSOP past vtable checks, wide-stream arbitrary call, stack pivot, and ROP—with a follow-along lab.
2 min · 383 words
Jordan Petridis introduces Toolpak, a GNOME project for packaging developer tools in an image-based desktop world—why host tooling breaks on immutable systems and how Toolpak aims to fix it.
7 min · 1,644 words
OpenAI agents tried to bruteforce a UN website's API fields
Rowan H-J documents how OpenAI agents scanned UNCTAD’s public statistics API thousands of times—proxies, obfuscation, and odd tool use—while probing API fields on a UN website.
16 min · 3,610 words
Deploying Guix images on Linode
David Thompson documents migrating to Linode (Akamai Cloud) and deploying Guix system images—image building, boot configuration, and practical notes from moving off DigitalOcean.
4 min · 1,000 words
DeepSeek Elastic Compute (DSec)
# Computer Science > Distributed, Parallel, and Cluster Computing [Submitted on 19 Sep 2026] # Title:DeepSeek Elastic Compute (DSec): A Sandbox Infrastructure for Effective Agentic Training at Scale View PDF HTML (experimental) Abstract:Large-scale agentic training and evaluation with large language models (LLMs) rely on isolated, stateful execution environments in which models inspect repositories, invoke tools, execute commands, and interact with task-specific services. These workloads create sandboxes in large bursts, span heterogeneous functionality and isolation…
16 min · 3,693 words
Reverse-engineering the vintage Intel 8087's tangent algorithm: more than CORDIC
Ken Shirriff reverse-engineers the Intel 8087's tangent microcode and shows why the chip's approach goes beyond classic CORDIC—covering range reduction, the argument reduction trick, and what the die reveals about 1980s floating-point design.
32 min · 7,343 words
Infecting the Steam Link with NixOS
While rummaging through my closet the other day I discovered a [Steam Link](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steam_Link Hardware_device) I had bought on flash sale way back in 2018 still dutifully humming away all these years later. It occured to me that having an always on low power Arm device with Ethernet, WiFi, Bluetooth, and several USB ports would be handy, so thus began my journey to get NixOS running on the Steam Link.
13 min · 2,996 words