Kinney Drugs pulls back AI phone assistant after hundreds of customer complaints
BURLINGTON, Vt. (WCAX) – Kinney Drugs is scaling back its AI assistant after customers reported incoherent calls, wrong dosages, and missed prescription notifications. Kinney Drugs first introduced Burt, an AI assistant named after the pharmacy chain’s founder, back in May. The bot’s role was to communicate with patients about prescriptions and refills. But customers quickly […]
Mistral Patent for ”Code implemented tool calls”
1. A method, comprising: receiving, at a server, a user request for execution of one or more tool calls; generating, by a large language model (LLM), a code block in a programming language, the code block configured to encapsulate the one or more tool calls; executing, by the server, the code block in a sandbox; […]
Resurrecting the SuperH Architecture (2015)
Benefits for LWN subscribers The primary benefit from subscribing to LWN is helping to keep us publishing, but, beyond that, subscribers get immediate access to all site content and access to a number of extra site features. Please sign up today! Processor architectures are far from trivial; untold millions of dollars and many thousands of […]
50k Boat Names
A smattering of boat names found in NOAA’s Marine Cadastre data set. Source: NOAA. Visualization: Jon Keegan/Beautiful Public Data. In the vast ocean of government datasets that I trawl through, I am always on the lookout for moments where people express themselves, leaving behind their own little datum of personality. These tiny expressions of creativity […]
Over 181,000 AI meeting recordings left wide open in note taking app
I reported this on January 28th, 2026. It is now July 2026. Six months later. The Firestore database is still wide open. The CTO never responded. I guess my emails were too long and they didn’t view them. What is tl;dv? tl;dv (Too Long; Didn’t View) is an AI meeting recording platform. It drops a […]
Squeak/Smalltalk 6.1 Release Notes
These release notes are optimized for viewing inside Squeak, as they contain a lot of interactive examples. On this page, interactive links open in SqueakJS, which is a browser-based Smalltalk VM with some limitations. For the best experience, download Squeak and read the release notes there. *** Squeak 6.1 ”Vanessa” Release Notes *** As Squeak […]
Tail-call optimization in C is relatively recent
Tail-call optimization in C is relatively recent Posted Aug 21, 2025 22:11 UTC (Thu) by anton (subscriber, #25547) Parent article: Python, tail calls, and performance Actually tail calls in C have not been around forever. The C calling convention has been that the callee does not remove any stuff the caller has put on the […]
Because It’s Not Fun Enough: why languages fail
Andrew Oram wrote a two-part series for the Linux Professional Institute asking why programming languages rise and fall (parts one and two.) It says, roughly, that C, C++, and JavaScript are immortal (for now!), with Java a maybe; COBOL, FORTRAN, BASIC, and Perl lived respectable lives and got sent upstate to retire on a farm; […]
A ’bananas’ order for 5000 obscure book titles fuels suspicion
From Galway to Berlin and beyond, independent booksellers across Europe agree that something very strange is going on. Last May Tomás Kenny of famous Galway book retailer Kennys received what he describes as a “bananas” online order for 5,000 books. But it was less the scale of the order that caught his eye and more […]
Meta Muse Glimmer – open weights 30B local coding model
Today, we’re introducing Muse Glimmer, the next model from Meta Superintelligence Labs, and open sourcing the model weights under a permissive Apache 2.0 license. Muse Glimmer is a 30-billion-parameter model optimized for always-on local agent workflows. It’s small enough to run on a Mac or PC with a single consumer GPU, enabling use cases that range from local agents […]