Today
- Since 2024 the role of the CMO or marketer in a startup has really changed. Mostly, everyone has the same tools so everyone is producing the same slop at the same time. I can no longer remember times that I’ve read content that looks and sounds exactly the same. They organize...
Yesterday
- A developer guide to the Gemini Interactions API, text generation, streaming, multi-turn chat, multimodal inputs, structured output, tool use, managed agents, and background execution from a single endpoint....
- You can’t be model agnostic if you’re hand-tuning prompts Thanks to natural language interfaces, AI applications can be prototyped quickly. You write what you want in English, hand it to a frontier model, and a working prototype appears in an afternoon. This is extraordinarily...
- Hi, this is Gergely with a bonus, free issue of the Pragmatic Engineer Newsletter. In every issue, I cover Big Tech and startups through the lens of senior engineers and engineering leaders. Today, we cover one out of four topics from this past The Pulse issue. Full subscribers...
- Technology businesses are heavily influenced by waves of technology change, like the rise of the internet or AI. Knowing how to adjust strategy for these changes is one of the most important skills to develop. As technology has advanced, technology waves have become larger, more...
- This morning on Hacker News I saw Moebius: 0.2B Lightweight Image Inpainting Framework with 10B-Level Performance, describing a small but effective inpainting model—a model where you can mark regions of …
This week
- My family is pledging another $400,0001 to the Zig Software Foundation (ZSF). This brings our total pledged support for ZSF to $700,000, after our initial donation in 2024.
- Consistency serves a purpose in visual design, but it seems to have become the purpose of a lot of visual design. Look no further than these evolutions of macOS icons (image courtesy of BasicAppleGuy): The Creator Studio icons are undeniably consistent visually: rounded...
- Here's a reproduction of the infamous "Waterfall Diagram", from the landmark paper Managing the Development of Large Software Systems (Royce, 1970): SYSTEM REQUIREMENTS SOFTWARE REQUIREMENTS ANALYSIS PROGRAM DESIGN CODING TESTING OPERATIONS Behold, the enemy of Agile! Although,...
- sqlite-utils is my combined Python library and CLI tool for working with SQLite databases. It provides an extensive set of higher-level operations on top of Python’s default sqlite3 package, including …
- Blog About Moonbound Shop This is a post from Robin Sloan’s lab blog & notebook. You can visit the blog’s homepage, or learn more about me. June 19, 2026 I absolutely LOVE the premise of this upcoming conference at Georgetown Law: Life After Data, the conference on...
- Every single time a post about atproto hits Hacker News, somebody asks in the comments: “But where are all the Bluesky instances?”. The problem is, there are no instances in atproto! The question is a category error. Instances are a Mastodon-brained concept, and I wanted...
- Meet Alice. Alice is impatient. What do you mean? Meet Alice. Alice uses your web service. Alice, like most humans, measures her time in seconds and minutes. Alice says your service is slow. You tell Alice that the mean request to your service completes in 100ms, but Alice says...
- You’ve probably heard the term. It’s meant to convey how difficult it can be to start something. “Blank page paralysis”. But for my money, beginning is easy. Finishing is the hard part. In software, they call it “the last 90%”. In logistics, they call it “the last mile”. It’s...
- Named slots are one of web components’ biggest superpowers ✨. Imagine a Button component with an optional icon; in Web Components we don’t need a separate Button and IconButton, a single Button component with <slot name="icon"> will do. Or a card component with a handful of...
- Today we launched a new plugin for Datasette, datasette-apps, with this launch announcement post on the Datasette project blog. That post has the what, but I’m going to expand on …
- I play Clues by Sam nearly every single day. I wrote about it before, but solving a little crime puzzle adds a micro-thrill to my day. A little blast of logic, misdirection, and wordplay. It’s a frequent topic of conversation in the ShopTalkShow Discord where people share their...
- Is this blog written by AI? No. None of the human-readable text on this blog is written by AI, and I have no plans to change that. The weird grammar, incorrect assumptions, spelling errors, and annoying tics are all mine. Including the em dashes. I don’t use LLMs for writing. On...
- Chinese AI lab Z.ai released GLM-5.2 to their coding plan subscribers on June 13th, and then yesterday (June 16th) released the full open weights under an MIT license. Similar in …
- Blog About Moonbound Shop This is a post from Robin Sloan’s lab blog & notebook. You can visit the blog’s homepage, or learn more about me. June 17, 2026 Rather than stand apart as some kind of revolution or rupture, language models should mostly cause us to reflect on the...
- June 17, 2026 We do not yet understand how to train language models! This seems obvious to me, because it ought to be possible — it will be possible — to produce a tight, capable “programmatic reasoner” with something like 30 billion parameters. The famous Scaling Laws only...
- Building a great organization is all about finding skills that complement each other. People tend to think everyone can do everything—especially at the leadership level. VP and above, the assumption is that for the amount they’re paid, leaders should be great strategically,...
Last week
- One of the most interesting projects my colleagues have done with LLMs has been building a system with Bayer to allow pharmaceutical researchers to query decades of information about studies buried in PDF reports. Sarang Sanjay Kulkarni describes its evolution from keyword-based...
- “Prag Dave” Thomas (co-author of the outstanding “Pragmatic Programmer”) has loved programming since he was young. Programming was how I could express myself. I wasn’t an artist. When I sing, dogs howl. When I draw, friends say, “Very nice. What is it?” I didn’t connect...
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