Every blog post that took off on Hacker News, ranked by the votes of its best submission. 3,090 posts.
I turned three security cameras into an automatic bird identification system using BirdNet-Go. Now my wife and I can track every bird species that visits our yard in real-time.
Here we go again. I started another company. The money is in the bank.
Translations: Chinese, Vietnamese. (V2 Nov 2022: Updated images for more precise description of forward diffusion. A few more images in this version) AI image generation is the most recent AI capability blowing people’s minds (mine included). The ability to create striking visuals from text descriptions has a magical…
Possibly the one you're Googling about.
The history of technology suggests that the greatest risks come not from the tech, but from the people who control it
Perplexity AI claims it sends a user agent and respects robots.txt but it absolutely does not
I wrote the other day about Uber blowing its 2026 AI budget in four months, and how that wasn't particularly surprising given they would have set that budget in 2025, …
"MCP is an open protocol that standardizes how applications provide context to LLMs. Think of MCP like a USB-C port for AI applications. Just as USB-C provides a standardized way to connect your devices to various peripherals and accessories, MCP provides a standardized way to connect AI models to different data…
Apple gave me access to this Mac Studio cluster to test RDMA over Thunderbolt, a new feature in macOS 26.2. The easiest way to test it is with Exo 1.0, an open source private AI clustering tool. RDMA lets the Macs all act like they have one giant pool of RAM, which speeds up things like massive AI models. The stack of…
Bad software is a choice you make
Yesterday at lunch a friend asked me what tech trend he should pay attention to but was probably ignoring. Without thinking much I said “artificial intelligence”, but having thought about that a...
A quick refresher on the maths behind LLMs: vectors, matrices, projections, embeddings, logits and softmax.
A simple explanation of how they work and how to implement one from scratch in Python.
This is a long article, so I've broken it up into a series of posts, listed below. You can also read the full work as a PDF or EPUB .
This is the second part of my ongoing self-education in how to adapt my programming experience to a world with computers that talk. The first part, How I program with LLMs , covered ways LLMs can be adapted into our existing tools (basically, autocomplete) and how careful prompting can replace traditional web search…
The uncanny valley of LLMs' prose
LLMs have become privately-controlled research infrastructure
Most of us last saw calculus in school, but derivatives are a critical part of machine learning, particularly deep neural networks, which are trained by optimizing a loss function. This article is an attempt to explain all the matrix calculus you need in order to understand the training of deep neural networks. We…
Hack the text output of Claude Code to make life a little bit sillier.
AI, science, education, & ethics
In Rewriting Bun in Rust Jarred Sumner made the following claim: Claude Code v2.1.181 (released June 17th) and later use the Rust port of Bun. Startup got 10% faster on …
llama.ttf is a font file which is also a large language model and an inference engine for that model.
What you need to know about local model tooling and the steps for setting one up yourself
A use case for ChatGPT
When integrating LLMs in your products, you often want to generate structured data, like JSONs. With the help of function calling (released June 13th 2023), this process has become much simpler! In this post I will explore the new API. Thanks for reading Simon’s Substack! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and…
You’ve seen the stories—in the Financial Times, Technology Review, CNET, Facebook, Reddit, Twitter, or elsewhere—saying that a group at Google has now achieved quantum computation…
All the same privacy harms with online tracking are also present with AI, but worse.
This article will be part of an extensive series in which I plan to explore various aspects of Fourier Mathematics. I will take notes, create some visuals (a good pretext to learn more about graphics), and hope that it will be helpful to anyone looking for a clear, visual introduction to these concepts. The article…
