HackEurope 2026: A short rant on AI and hackathons
HackEurope is over. In many ways, it was a complete shitshow (vibe coded inaccessible UI for participants, lots of delays, miscommunications, and other issues too many to list). But now that the caffeine overdose and sleep deprivation is over, I can say that there were actually some important lessons. TL;DR: Front-end is almost everything. There […]
Linear algebra done right
Linear Algebra Done Right Sheldon Axler The fourth and most recent edition of Linear Algebra Done Right is an Open Access book available in English, Chinese, Farsi, Greek, and Portuguese. Other languages are coming soon. Electronic versions of this fourth edition, which has a Creative Commons BY-NC license, are legally availble without cost at the […]
Gmail might partially be to blame for receiving emails from other Sean Conners
Gmail might partially be to blame for me receiving emails from other Sean Conners I was reading the Lobsters thread about the article “A researcher bought noreply.net. Companies started sending him secrets” when I left a comment about my own struggles with receiving emails for other Sean Conners. That started a thread that swamped the […]
GIMP Development Update
For the past few months, we’ve been developing all kinds of features for the future GIMP 3.4 release. We noticed recently that our changelog was getting quite long – a good problem to have! While there’s been a lot going on internally, it’s been a while since we made a public progress report. So we want […]
AGI-64 Brings Sierra Adventures to the Commodore 64
AGI on the C64, at last We are happy to announce AGI-64, a long-awaited AGI interpreter for the Commodore 64. It is currently around 75% complete for Space Quest 1, which is completely playable now, and the engine aims to support most AGI games of the era. The interpreter is in testing and already supports […]
Rhombus 1.1 is now available
Rhombus version 1.1 is now available! We are pleased to announce Rhombus 1.1 is now available from https://rhombus-lang.org/. Rhombus is a general-purpose programming language that is easy to use and uniquely customizable. As of this release: Add annot and annot.def as ways to define an annotation without directly writing meta-time (i.e., macro) code. Add as […]
The Life and Death of Direct File [pdf]
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Qwen 3.8 27B is excellent, but it defaults to overthinking things
16th August 2026 Friday’s big release was Qwen 3.8 27B, an Apache 2 licensed 27B parameter vision-capable LLM from Alibaba’s Qwen research lab. I’ve been looking forward to this one: 27B is an excellent size for running a model on a reasonably specced laptop, and its predecessor Qwen 3.6 27B was impressive. Qwen’s self-reported benchmarks […]
Anthropic’s ‘Watermark’ Text Adulteration in Claude Is a Perversion of Writing
When I wrote this week about Anthropic’s announcement that all Claude models, worldwide, would soon begin “watermarking” everything they generate, including text, to comply with this EU regulation, we were left to speculate how this was going to work, because Anthropic offered not even a vague description of how it would work — despite the fact that […]
Claude Seems Down
It’s not just Claude API. See: “We are investigating reports of degraded performance affecting claude.ai, platform.claude.com, the Claude API, Claude Code, and Claude Cowork.”. Seems pretty big to me. It’s software used by many here so of course you will hear about Claude downtime here.