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.
The Case Against Formal Verification, 50 Years Later
Engineers are getting excited about software verification! This may come as a surprise, since verification has long been considered useful only in very niche cases (at best; and impractical, useless or a complete waste of time at worst). Yet, the hype around it is clearly here: Google Trends shows a large spike in searches for […]
Models Are Getting Dumber on Purpose
Reasoning scores keep climbing while per-token compute keeps dropping. GLM-5.2 scores 99.2% on AIME 2026 with about 40 billion parameters active per token. Qwen3.5 scores 91.3% with 17 billion active. DeepSeek V4-Flash runs 13 billion active. For scale, GPT-4 was rumored to run around 280 billion active parameters in 2023, and it could barely solve […]
Protobuf has LSP support. You’re welcome
Buf is proud to announce the first fully-featured, production-grade LSP server for Protobuf. The Language Server Protocol is the standard API for integrating language support into your favorite IDE or text editor, such as VSCode, IntelliJ, or Neovim. An LSP server provides the smarts that power go to definition, code completion, finding references, and semantics-aware […]
MathCode, Mathematical Coding Agent
Requires macOS (arm64) or Linux (x86_64), plus the codex CLI for the default backend. git clone https://github.com/math-ai-org/mathcode.git cd mathcode bash setup.sh codex auth login mathcode setup.sh prepares the release checkout, downloads the bundled runtime and Lean toolchain, and installs a user-local mathcode launcher. Try it with: mathcode -p “prove that the square of an even […]
A 3rd World Embedded Engineer Responds to “RISC-V They Should Have Known Better”
Dmitry Grinberg published a long piece explaining his distaste for RISC-V, you can read his article here: RISC-V: They Should Have Known Better – Dmitry.GR. It went to the front page of Hacker News and it started a good argument on Lobsters. It is the most substantial criticism the architecture has had in a while […]