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I don't think Gas Town was actually all that much ahead of the curve - see Cursor's swarm post from January this year, mentioned at the very top of this blog post.

I also don't know that beads is a very strong example that Yegge knows what he's doing - it's famously been described as (pseudo)malware.

The OnePlus One was exciting because I think it genuinely was an Android-flagship-competitor at a much lower price. Prices crept up though, and the last OnePlus I owned was the 5 which was still pretty excellent!

After a brief, very annoying stint using the Fairphone 4 (underpowered & expensive, though I did actually replace both the battery and the usb c port myself and it was exactly as easy as promised), I'm now finally on a Samsung S25+, though I did really really consider the newest OnePlus.

Sad to know that it won't even be an alternative for my next phone, though hopefully by then, memory/silicon prices will have settled and Nothing will have their own flagship alternatives.

For extra security against these text-to-speech model zero-shot clones, you might also want to use made-up gibberish words for which the pronunciation can't be reliably inferred from the spelling

This sounds plausible, but don't Samsung also sell tens of millions of units of their flagship galaxy range phones, in addition to their budget offering?

Perhaps the margin isn't quite as large as for Apple phones but the flagships are still not cheap by any means.

It can't come fast enough! I have a friend who works on battery storage in Europe and it sounds like an extremely busy time for them, which I'm glad for.

I was sure this couldn't be true but I couldn't find anything about high temperatures shutting down solar plants.

But I did find something about a predicted grid overload during a sunny period requiring a solar plant to go offline:

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2026/jul/12/solar-fa...

One of the tradeoffs of Rust is its verbosity I think (in return for which Rustaceans would say you gain explicitness).

For my current purposes, I need a speech-to-text model/API to also emit word-level timestamps - for now, that makes ElevenLabs's Scribe v2 the best multiplatform, multi-language choice though it does look like this SpeechAnalyzer API provides them (although only for English).

I'd imagine that mouse movement is just one signal among many that's weighted appropriately, but I hope we get feedback from these users

Cool product launch, though it feels a little weird to me that Cloudflare sells agentic products alongside this new service that seems designed to block agentic usage of the web?

I expect there's much more going on than just mouse path detection but I can imagine that this is already tricky for touchscreens and for people using non-traditional mouse inputs (the thinkpad nub comes to mind - but it would also be bad optics to accidentally block people using accessibility mouse tools as bot users, though then this becomes a loophole for agentic browsing!)

In general though I think this is almost definitely a good thing to reduce agentic bot abuse & spam.

I learned to write x this way during undergrad - supposedly for fluidity and speed but I think I just liked the way it looked

but it ain't there

On what grounds? I don't think you've provided any evidence other than LLMs can't "adapt" or "learn" to show that LLMs do not show intelligence in any way. I think it's clear that there must be some emergent form of intelligence over words from just the agentic coding ability alone. I am not claiming that LLMs are intelligent, only that they display aspects of what we understand as intelligence.

I don't think LLMs need to be intelligent to be (at least narrowly) useful

I agree! But they are more than narrowly useful, and they absolutely do not belong in the same category as random forests or genetic algorithms!

Go collect your Nobel prize then! This is no longer a discussion grounded in reality

Once again you are being condescending while misrepresenting my position. The emergent aspects of "intelligence" have been replicated by virtue of independent LLM vendors training their own models - I am not making a stronger claim, you have misunderstood me.

Thanks for participating.

To say that LLMs' existence is evidence for emergent phenomena in LLMs is tautological.

This is not at all what I was saying. I think you've already conceded that LLMs demonstrate emergent behaviour but you dismissed it as a "close enough facsimile to intelligence". I was saying that the emergent behaviour is reliably replicable, in response to your following statement:

Figure out how to make it happen reliably and in such a way that you know it's actually happening as opposed to just something you're imagining.

I think there is real work underway in the area of interpretability. In the meantime, there appears to be plenty of empirical evidence for the claim that LLMs exhibit some sort "intelligence" in the enormous penetration that agentic coding has achieved in software development? Do you deny the usefulness of LLMs here, or are you going to assert that actually software development requires no intelligence of any sort?

Figure out how to make it happen reliably

And you're happy that the replication of LLMs across many foundation model companies is insufficiently reliable?

just something you're imagining

So the alternative explanation you're suggesting to emergent LLM behaviour is mass independently-corroborated human hallucination. Which is more likely?

Also it really does seem like you've moved the goalposts a lot here without really giving me a substantive response.

Ah it seems you are a stochastic parrot believer (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stochastic_parrot). What are your responses to the Expert Rebuttals section?

I find the rebuttals pretty convincing - that there seems to be some emergent behaviour that is not simply just next-token-prediction, or that the ability to do accurate next-token-prediction requires something "extra" that LLMs have.

All the ways they fail to exhibit intelligence

Another implicit admission that there _are_ ways that LLMs exhibit intelligence?

By reaching into the voids of its embedding space and returning tokens related to nonexistent semantics. Or, if you like, "hallucinating". The hallucinations which are useful we might call "novel".

This sounds to me like an admission that LLMs are not just doing a stochastic search, then.

close enough facsimile to intelligence

What's the distinguishing criteria then? How can you tell the difference?

I think a few years ago (perhaps it's still ongoing) there was a big uptick in purchases of "old" compact digital cameras - I still see young adults and teenagers taking pictures of these around London and I think this is a very good thing! (I fell for the trend and bought a used Olympus Pen E-PL8)

I wish there was an option on all smartphone cameras to disable post-processing, or at least the generative stuff - this reminds me of the samsung space zoom moon photo furore all over again.

Google "temperature in LLMs".

No need to condescend, I'm very aware of what temperature is for LLMs. But I'm going to push back - if you're claiming all LLMs simply do is a stochastic _search_, how can that produce novelty, in the conceptual sense? (I'm not, for example, talking about novel rearrangement of existing ideas and code)

We know enough about what an LLM does, and what a brain does, to be quite certain they don't work the same.

I don't think the claim is that LLMs do what brains do - I think the correct form of the counterargument is that _whatever LLMs seem to be doing_ produces end results that were previously only possible through the application of human intelligence, so there must be some axis of however you define human intelligence that LLMs currently seem to display as an emergent behaviour.

Is an implication of this that models are incapable of producing entirely novel code?

Also, not to get too reductionist about this, but what do you posit is special about what is happening when humans think? Intelligence is hard to define so clearly, I reckon.

I found this article very well written, as a comparison

https://explained-from-first-principles.com/internet/

This feels like a semantic disagreement to me? If an LLM got to an acceptable end result code-wise, what would you call the process that took place to get it there?

I am surprised that no comment has yet mentioned Infinite Jest (which I'm still yet to complete - it's been years since I started).

Sounds very reasonable - I don't have a robot vac at the moment because there are some very large thresholds in my flat and the floor itself in places is very wobbly, but if I had a guide to safely mod one to work for my residence I'd definitely have a go.

Also, in my opinion, it's much easier to build a good MCP interface than it is to build a good CLI interface - and afaik there's support for MCP tools to return things like images from an MCP tool call directly to the calling LLM that is a bit tricker to do via CLI.

For IDEs there are many non-Electron apps out there. I like Zed, for example, and no longer have any other IDEs installed (not counting Xcode, or emacs/vim if you're one of those).

I've managed to successfully use the ANE to accelerate text-to-speech models on iOS (as an aside - this was much more straightforward than the equivalent on Android).

I did however struggle to run a diffusion model on the ANE - but found that mlx-swift and iPhone GPU sufficed: https://www.duration.ai/blog/generating-images-with-a-2020-i...

I applied some reflective film to the inside of some of my windows today and it seems to have had some effect, though the window is pretty hot to the touch now and apparently this kind of film can cause windows to crack through thermal stress.

It makes sense for any coating to be on the outside of your window but I wonder how much better hanging a reflective space blanket outside would be than this yoghurt layer or similar.

This is the "company brain" product spike from Anthropic I think

https://www.ycombinator.com/rfs#company-brain

There was an interesting study that I attempted to enroll in (but unfortunately was screened out by both age and childhood instrument learning) that was looking at psilocybin potentially giving adults the ability to acquire perfect pitch:

https://www.kcl.ac.uk/research/psilocybin-research-pitch-stu...

Multiple successive very short sentences are also anecdotally an LLM tell I think