Unlocking Python’s Cores:Energy Implications of Removing the GIL
Abstract:Python’s Global Interpreter Lock prevents execution on more than one CPU core at the same time, even when multiple threads are used. However, starting with Python 3.13 an experimental build allows disabling the GIL. While prior work has examined speedup implications of this disabling, the effects on energy consumption and hardware utilization have received less […]
GPL upgrades via section 14 proxy delegation
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Dumping Lego NXT firmware off of an existing brick
I’ve recently been contributing to the Pybricks project, a community-run port of MicroPython to Lego Mindstorms hardware. As part of that, I obtained a used Lego NXT which just so happened to still be running the original version 1.01 firmware from when it launched in 2006. I wanted to archive a copy of this firmware, […]
TeX Live 2026 is available for download now
Acquiring TeX Live – TeX Users Group TeX Live availability TeX Live is available for download now. You can acquire TeX Live in many ways. If you have a reasonable Internet connection, we recommend the first: Future releases The last general update of packages and programs for the DVD was made around 1 March 2026. However, we […]
System76 on Age Verification Laws
Access is everything There were two things I yearned for in 1990. As a ten year old kid in the backseat, road trips from Colorado to Illinois meant hour after hour of staring at row after row of corn stalks. The boredom was palpable and the corn possibly responsible for a slight obsession with orderliness. […]
Where things stand with the Department of War
A statement from Dario Amodei Yesterday (March 4) Anthropic received a letter from the Department of War confirming that we have been designated as a supply chain risk to America’s national security. As we wrote on Friday, we do not believe this action is legally sound, and we see no choice but to challenge it […]
Self-Portrait by Ernst Mach (1886)
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The next generations of Bubble Tea, Lip Gloss, and Bubbles are available now
v2.0.0 versions of Bubble Tea, Lip Gloss, and Bubbles are out of beta and ready to rock. These releases bring highly optimized rendering, advanced compositing, higher-fidelity input handling, and a more declarative API for very predictable output. The v2 branches have been powering Crush, our AI coding agent, in production from the very beginning. That […]
Stop Using Grey Text (2025)
Dear web designers: Please, for the love of Glob, stop using grey text. And especially do not use grey text on an off-white background. It doesn’t make you look more “design-ey”, it makes you look inept. Why‽ Why use grey text on a grey background? This requires you to specifically overwrite the default text color […]
Labor Market Impacts of AI
Key Findings We introduce a new measure of AI displacement risk, observed exposure, that combines theoretical LLM capability and real-world usage data, weighting automated (rather than augmentative) and work-related uses more heavily AI is far from reaching its theoretical capability: actual coverage remains a fraction of what’s feasible Occupations with higher observed exposure are projected […]