The efficient frontier of LLM inference
In the AI industry, we borrowed the term “efficient frontier” from economists. We use it to talk about managing tradeoffs, most often the tradeoff between cost and capabilities for models. A model is a “frontier model” if it offers the highest degree of intelligence at a given cost or size. ✕ An efficient frontier shows […]
FBI Probes Service Selling 153M+ Drivers Licenses
A new identity theft service launched on the dark web this week is selling digital scans of more than 153 million drivers licenses from people in the United States and Canada. Based on interviews with individuals whose licenses are available for purchase on this service, it appears to be siphoning images collected by a widely-used […]
My local model setup on an M4 Pro Mac Mini
I run a local LLM server on my M4 Pro Mac mini with 48 GB of RAM. It handles everything from my Hermes agent backend to quick chat queries on my phone. The whole thing takes about 30 minutes to set up. Here is the stack: Qwen3.6-35B-A3B-OptiQ-4bit: my main model for anything that needs reasoning […]
Show HN: Weedout – Safari extension that hides YouTube AI-labeled videos
Weedout for YouTube FOR YOUTUBE · SAFARI · MACOS Videos YouTube labels “Made with AI” — quietly pulled from your feed, search, related videos and Shorts before you scroll past them. No blocking screens, no drama. The weeds are just gone. FIELD CAM Simulated. On a real feed a weed is gone in about half a second — cached ones never […]
Hang on to Your Firefox
Monday, August 31, 2026 “Don’t throw the baby out with the bathwater.” According to Wikipedia, it’s an adage that goes back to 1512 in Germany. People have known for hundreds of years that you should be careful not to throw out a good and vital thing in your zeal to get rid of a minor […]
The ChatGPT/Codex app bundles a full copy of LibreOffice
1st September 2026 I was poking around in my ~/.cache/ folder using OmniDiskSweeper when I spotted something interesting. The OpenAI Codex desktop app (since rebranded to just ChatGPT) has 1.7GB of stuff in there in a folder called codex-primary-runtime, including a full Python installation, a full Node.js installation, and native binaries for Poppler, git, and […]
Refurbishing a Tektronix TDS7104 Oscilloscope
A little over a month ago, I ran into a Tektronix TDS7104 at the Silicon Valley Flea Market, where else? Other than some dirty buttons, a few smudges here and there, and the usual assortment of calibration and asset tracking tags, the unit was in excellent cosmetic shape, but the price tag of $700 was […]
How accurate have Ed Zitron’s AI skeptic predictions been?
How accurate have Ed Zitron’s AI skeptic predictions been? How accurate have Ed Zitron’s AI skeptic predictions been? | Patreon I was curious how well the predictions of the most widely cited AI skeptic I’ve seen (Ed Zitron) have done, so I looked at how his predictions panned out. To disclose my own biases, I’ve […]
UEFA’s Champions League draw creates unfair clusters; a Cayley graph fixes it
A tight little cluster hidden in the 2025-26 Champions League draw shows why the “new format” needs one small tweak, and gives a beautiful excuse to talk about symmetric graphs. TL;DR: UEFA’s new league-phase format can accidentally produce small clusters of teams that play each other disproportionately often, hurting their collective chance of advancing all […]
Claude Fable 5.1 and Claude Mythos 5.1
We’re introducing Claude Fable 5.1 and Claude Mythos 5.1. They’re the world’s most advanced models for coding and knowledge work—and their research capabilities offer an early glimpse of how AI models will contribute to scientific progress. Claude Fable 5.1 and Claude Mythos 5.1 are the same model, but with different levels of safeguards. Fable 5.1 […]