Permalink: 20250213175957

Found at “Preparing for AI – O’Reilly” on 2025-02-13 17:59:57 +01:00.

chat-oriented programming (CHOP) isn’t the future; it’s the present

Permalink: 20250211122701

Found at “Work at the Mill - by Bradford Morgan White” on 2025-02-11 12:27:01 +01:00.

Olsen wanted to start a company that sold small, transistorized, interactive computers. The TX-0 showed that interactive computing was more appealing to people than the prior batch paradigm. While people would queue for hours for time on the TX-0, they largely ignored the larger and more powerful machines that ran batch.

Permalink: 20250207185756

Found at “bnewbold.net” on 2025-02-07 18:57:56 +01:00.

Here’s the definition of “Credible exit,” one of atproto’s values:

There should be no technical or social single-point-of-failure for the overall protocol and network. There should be no single organization or individual who can entirely exclude others from the ecosystem (though the ecosystem may collectively exclude bad actors). There should be multiple independent interoperating service providers for each infrastructure component.

Permalink: 20250205180900

Found at “The End of Programming as We Know It – O’Reilly” on 2025-02-05 18:09:00 +01:00.

(…) the job of the programmer will be to understand what can be done by traditional software, what can be done by AI, what still needs to be done by people, and how you string things together to actually accomplish the workflow.

Permalink: 20250205154813

Found at “About us - Apitally” on 2025-02-05 15:48:13 +01:00.

Apitally was born from a simple observation: REST APIs have become fundamental to modern software development, but monitoring them often involves complex, expensive tools

Permalink: 20250205095833

Found at “Ambsheets: Spreadsheets for exploring scenarios” on 2025-02-05 09:58:33 +01:00.

Ambsheets is a research project about new kinds of spreadsheets for exploring possibility spaces and making better decisions.

Permalink: 20250204175931

Found at “Opera introduces a new web browser: Opera Air - Blog | Opera News” on 2025-02-04 17:59:31 +01:00.

Today we’re introducing Opera Air, the first web browser built around the concept of mindfulness.

Permalink: 20250204134759

Found at “Open Euro LLM” on 2025-02-04 13:47:59 +01:00.

Europe’s leading AI companies and research institutions combine their forces and expertise to develop next-generation open-source language models in an unprecedented collaboration to advance European AI capabilities, the OpenEuroLLM project.

List of Open Euro LLM partners #

Universities and Research Organizations: #

• Charles University, Institute of Formal and Applied Linguistics, Czechia (coordinator)
• Alliance for Language Technologies EDIC, (ALT-EDIC), France
• Eindhoven University of Technology, the Netherlands
• ELLIS Institute Tübingen, Germany
• Fraunhofer IAIS, Germany
• Research Center Juelich, Germany
• Lindholmen Science Park, (AI Sweden), Sweden
• University of Helsinki, Finland
• University of Oslo, Norway
• University of Turku, Finland
• University of Tübingen, (Tübingen AI Center), Germany

Companies: #

• Silo GenAI, (AMD Silo AI), Finland (co-lead)
• Aleph Alpha Research, Germany
• ellamind, Germany
• LightOn, France
• Prompsit Language Engineering, Spain

EuroHPC centres: #

• Barcelona Supercomputing Center, Spain
• Cineca Interuniversity Consortium, Italy
• CSC - IT Center for Science, Finland
• SURF, the Netherlands

Permalink: 20250203221605

Found at “Introducing deep research | OpenAI” on 2025-02-03 22:16:05 +01:00.

Deep research is OpenAI’s next agent that can do work for you independently

Permalink: 20250203214340

Found at “Antiqua et nova. Note on the Relationship Between Artificial Intelligence and Human Intelligence (28 January 2025)” on 2025-02-03 21:43:40 +01:00.

While AI is an extraordinary technological achievement capable of imitating certain outputs associated with human intelligence, it operates by performing tasks, achieving goals, or making decisions based on quantitative data and computational logic.

Permalink: 20250201163853

Found at “OpenAI o3-mini | OpenAI” on 2025-02-01 16:38:53 +01:00.

OpenAI o3-mini is our first small reasoning model that supports highly requested developer features including function calling⁠(opens in a new window), Structured Outputs⁠(opens in a new window), and developer messages⁠(opens in a new window),

Permalink: 20250130175825

Found at “Mistral Small 3 | Mistral AI | Frontier AI in your hands” on 2025-01-30 17:58:25 +01:00.

Mistral Small 3 is competitive with larger models such as Llama 3.3 70B or Qwen 32B, and is an excellent open replacement for opaque proprietary models like GPT4o-mini.

Permalink: 20250130125831

Social Cognitive Theory, by Albert Bandura. This article, from 2001, explains what agency is and elaborates on the meaning of agentic features.

Permalink: 20250128184444

Found at “Berkeley Researchers Replicate DeepSeek R1’s Core Tech for Just $30: A Small Model RL Revolution” on 2025-01-28 18:44:44 +01:00.

A Berkeley AI Research team led by PhD candidate Jiayi Pan has achieved what many thought impossible: reproducing DeepSeek R1-Zero’s key technologies for less than the cost of a dinner for two. Their success in implementing sophisticated reasoning capabilities in small language models marks a significant democratization of AI research.

Permalink: 20250128115901

Found at “Meta is reportedly scrambling multiple ‘war rooms’ of engineers to figure out how DeepSeek’s AI is beating everyone else at a fraction of the price | Fortune” on 2025-01-28 11:59:01 +01:00.

Mark Zuckerberg’s Meta assembled four war rooms of engineers to determine how a Chinese hedge fund managed to release an AI game-changer that may already rival its own technology.

Permalink: 20250128115718

Found at “DeepSeek just blew up the AI industry’s narrative that it needs more money and power | CNN Business” on 2025-01-28 11:57:18 +01:00.

DeepSeek, which on Monday climbed to No. 1 on the Apple app store, claims to have built its base model for less than $6 million (versus the more than $100 million Altman has said it cost to build GPT-4).

Permalink: 20250127144655

Interesting article by Mark Boyd about the API consumption trend for 2025. I’m here highlighting Mark’s thoughts about API Product management.

Found at “Trend 3 API consumption - API Economy Trends for 2025 » Platformable” on 2025-01-27 14:46:55 +01:00.

(API) Product management may also require some rethinking, leading to an increase in the recent emergence of books like Bruno Pedro’s and training programs like API Masters which seek to provide core skills and alter industry roles in API consumption support.

API expert Bruno Pedro has written a book on API product management and thought leaders and product manager experts like Emmanuel Paraskakis regularly share best practices for API product management

Permalink: 20250124105949

Found at “Computer-Using Agent | OpenAI” on 2025-01-24 10:59:49 +01:00.

OpenAI’s announcement of their Computer-Using Agent (CUA) mentions APIs a few times. However, it shows that not needing to use APIs is a benefit and something to aim for. The first mention states that there’s an increased flexibility in bypassing any APIs and instead using Web apps directly.

This gives it the flexibility to perform digital tasks without using OS- or web-specific APIs.

The second mention of APIs shows examples of how flexible the CUA is because it doesn’t need to interact with APIs.

CUA (…) uses a virtual mouse and keyboard to complete actions. This enables CUA to act in a wide range of digital environments, performing tasks like filling out forms and navigating websites without needing specialized APIs.

The third mention of APIs hints at how the CUA can grow in usage over time. And, not using APIs is what makes that growth possible.

By moving beyond specialized agent-friendly APIs, CUA can adapt to whatever computer environment is available

Finally—and ironically—the announcement mentions that the CUA itself will be available through OpenAI’s own API.

We’re also working to make CUA available in the API, so developers can use it to build their own computer-using agents

Something else I also found interesting was their video announcement where Reiichiro Nakano reinforces the fact that not needing an API is an added benefit.

(…) before, if you wanted to build something like operator without CUA you’d need to use some specialized APIs. For example if you wanted your model to buy stuff from Instacart you’d need to figure out if Instacart had an API. You’d need to figure out if that API had all the functions that it needed and you need to give your model the specs of that API. But if your site, like most other websites did not have an API then you’re out of luck.

Permalink: 20250122180246

Found at “Building a backlog from a messy prototype | André Torgal” on 2025-01-22 18:02:46 +01:00.

if you’re unsure about priorities, struggling to decide if something is a “must-have” or a “nice-to-have,” it probably means it’s too early to ask that question. In such cases, toss a coin and move on.

Permalink: 20250121235545

The usefulness of a product depends on its users. To understand if a product is useful, you have to experience it from the perspective of the user, not yours, the designer. Designers need to learn who their product is for, empathize with them, understand their problems, and then come up with the best possible solution.

Found at “The Dieter Rams “Ten Principles of Good Design” | by Bruce Sterling | Medium” on 2025-01-21 23:55:45 +01:00.

Good design makes a product useful — A product is bought to be used. It has to satisfy not only functional, but also psychological and aesthetic criteria. Good design emphasizes the usefulness of a product whilst disregarding anything that could detract from it.—Bruce Sterling, citing Dieter Rams

See related design should not dominate things.

Braun T3 pocket radio, 1958. The Braun T3 pocket radio captures the essence of Dieter Ram’s design.

Permalink: 20250121235357

Found at “Announcing The Stargate Project | OpenAI” on 2025-01-21 23:53:57 +01:00.

The Stargate Project is a new company which intends to invest $500 billion over the next four years building new AI infrastructure for OpenAI in the United States.

Permalink: 20250117142212

Found at “All-Purpose Machines” on 2025-01-17 14:22:12 +01:00.

HyperMap is a new format for REST APIs that lets you execute JavaScript and WebAssembly on the client

Permalink: 20250115114617

REST allows client functionality to be extended by downloading and executing code in the form of applets or scripts. This simplifies clients by reducing the number of features required to be pre-implemented.—Roy Thomas Fielding and Richard N. Taylor. 2000. Architectural styles and the design of network-based software architectures. Ph.D. Dissertation. University of California, Irvine.

Code-On-Demand REST constraint. The Code-On-Demand constraint described by Roy Fielding in his ‘Architectural Styles and the Design of Network-based Software Architectures’ dissertation is interesting and something you don’t see applied in the wild.

Permalink: 20250115092836

Found at “Introducing CoreAI – Platform and Tools - The Official Microsoft Blog” on 2025-01-15 09:28:36 +01:00.

This is leading to a new AI-first app stack — one with new UI/UX patterns, runtimes to build with agents, orchestrate multiple agents, and a reimagined management and observability layer.

Permalink: 20250114153916

Found at “The problem with design tokens | André Torgal” on 2025-01-14 15:39:16 +01:00.

The modern design system uses tokens to distribute centrally managed design decisions and it faciliates iterating on brand and visual language. In most of the cases it support light/dark mode context but some are also dealing with multiple brands and identities at the same time. With some effort and crafty engineering, many are building token pipelines with integrations, transformations, and automatic docs generation.

Permalink: 20250110163031

Found at “The magic of the commons | Seth’s Blog” on 2025-01-10 16:30:31 +01:00.

It’s not that difficult to try to selfishly take advantage of the generous rules of open source. It’s tempting to take without contributing. Particularly if investors are pushing for market share instead of resilience and forward motion.

Permalink: 20250110105812

Found at “Writing as Transformation” on 2025-01-10 10:58:12 +01:00.

the written word can be remembered only exactly; if a written line is not repeated exactly, word for word, it is not being remembered, it is being paraphrased

Permalink: 20250110105403

Found at “The Seven-Action Documentation model - passo.uno” on 2025-01-10 10:54:03 +01:00.

docs frameworks and tools are essential ingredients to holding a sandwich together and handle it, but what gives a sandwich all the taste and meaning is the filling, that is, the mental model of user needs that you’re following

Permalink: 20250108214714

Found at “tilpython2025-01-07-scripting-GMail.md at main · pdubroytil · GitHub” on 2025-01-08 21:47:14 +01:00.

Please give me a python script that uses the GMail API. Given a query string, it should search for all messages that match the query string, and then download the attachments from those messages to the current working dir. Make it a standalone script that uses the uv tool, with inline dependencies if necessary.

Permalink: 20250108144907

Computers really didn’t start making an impact in the Design community until the late 80s. At the time, a lot of the OG designers of that era were vehemently opposed to using the computer. They were certain that we were going to lose jobs. It was going to take all the creativity out of the process, out of the way in which we created. It was going to create soulless work.—Debbie Millman, during the New York chapter of CreativeMornings on Dec 5, 2024, in conversation with Seth Godin

Permalink: 20250108121231

Found at “Calculating Empires” on 2025-01-08 12:12:31 +01:00.

Calculating Empires is a large-scale research visualization exploring how technical and social structures co-evolved over five centuries.

Permalink: 20241231000608

Found at “LN 040: The venerable hyperlink” on 2024-12-31 00:06:08 +00:00.

Alan Kay has talked about how the personal computer should work like the Internet: lots of late-bound programs passing around messages.

Permalink: 20241226230102

Found at “AI-generated tools can make programming more fun” on 2024-12-26 23:01:02 +00:00.

This is the dream of malleable software: editing software at the speed of thought. Starting with just the minimal thing we need for our particular use case, adding things immediately as we come across new requirements. Ending up with a tool that’s molded to our needs like a leather shoe, not some complicated generic thing designed for a million users.

Permalink: 20241219141406

Found at “Developing Developers” on 2024-12-19 14:14:06 +01:00.

Teaching explicit and systematic design introduces students to a general problem-solving approach that applies to many more domains than programming.

Permalink: 20241219095650

Exciting!

Found at “shaprmarkovkeyboard: keyboard layout that changes by markov frequency” on 2024-12-19 09:56:50 +01:00.

Static keyboard layouts are boring and predictable. Let’s spice up the whole idea of keyboard layouts by having the layout CHANGE WHILE YOU ARE TYPING!

Permalink: 20241218180654

(…) give a child an environment that’s active like him. It’s an environment in which thinking and creativity are the natural kinds of things that are done.—Alan Kay

Permalink: 20241218152102

Found at “Ethical Web Principles” on 2024-12-18 15:21:02 +01:00.

The web should be a platform that helps people and provides a positive social benefit

Permalink: 20241218151843

Found at “Never Forgive Them” on 2024-12-18 15:18:43 +01:00.

I don’t believe that this gradual enshittification is part of some grand, Machiavellian long game by the tech companies, but rather the product of multiple consecutive decisions made in response to short-term financial needs.

Permalink: 20241218151351

Found at “Tools for Thought as Cultural Practices, not Computational Objects” on 2024-12-18 15:13:51 +01:00.

If only to make clear to ourselves why we currently consider apps that allow you to link notes together the epitome of a tool for thought.

Permalink: 20241217115255

Protobuf has a new Opaque API.

Found at “Go Protobuf: The new Opaque API - The Go Programming Language” on 2024-12-17 11:52:55 +01:00.

With the Opaque API, the struct fields are hidden and can no longer be directly accessed. Instead, the new accessor methods allow for getting, setting, or clearing a field.

Permalink: 20241213153714

Trying an API is a natural extension to documentation.

While documentation—and reference, in particular—provides a source of truth of what the API is capable of, trying offers a layer of experimentation. Trying isn’t about understanding the capabilities of the API; it’s about seeing how they work.

Permalink: 20241205010513

Found at “Using Bluesky posts as blog comments” on 2024-12-05 01:05:13 +01:00.

Your blog’s comment section can be pulled directly from Bluesky.

Permalink: 20241204234157

Found at “Genie 2: A large-scale foundation world model - Google DeepMind” on 2024-12-04 23:41:57 +01:00.

Genie 2, a foundation world model capable of generating an endless variety of action-controllable, playable 3D environments for training and evaluating embodied agents.

Permalink: 20241130111417

Found at “The Influence of Bell Labs - by Brian Potter” on 2024-11-30 11:14:17 +01:00.

following WWII, research spending by both the government and the private sector increased enormously

There’s a well-known phenomenon that technological progress is often driven by bubbles, as irrational enthusiasm drives huge amounts of investment in a novel technology far beyond what can be economically justified.

Permalink: 20241127094934

Inverting the flow of control is something I was hoping to see for a while. The concept of human-in-the-loop (HITL) isn’t something new. However, seeing it all put together so nicely is interesting.

Found at “HumanLayer” on 2024-11-27 09:49:34 +01:00.

HumanLayer is an API and SDK that enables AI Agents to contact humans for feedback, input, and approvals.

Permalink: 20241126140636

Found at “Introduction to Causal Logs | Joel Gustafson” on 2024-11-26 14:06:36 +01:00.

People use apps, apps use databases, and databases use logs. Logs are useful because they make distributed replication easy, and can be deterministically reduced, but they’re inherently single-writer. All appends must go through a single point.

Permalink: 20241126122813

Found at “Deactivating an API, one step at a time” on 2024-11-26 12:28:13 +01:00.

The only suggestion I’d add is to implement API brownouts - short periods of time where the deprecated API returns errors, several months before the final deprecation. This can help give users who don’t read emails from you notice that they need to pay attention before their integration breaks entirely.

Permalink: 20241125204333

Found at “Introducing the Model Context Protocol \ Anthropic” on 2024-11-25 20:43:33 +01:00.

The Model Context Protocol provides a universal, open standard for connecting AI systems with data sources, replacing fragmented integrations with a single protocol.

Permalink: 20241122165821

Knowing how it works isn’t what makes it work. The magic of it isn’t how it works. The magic is the magic.—Rick Rubin

Permalink: Thoughts on OpenAPI JSON Schema descriptions

I recently posted that I wish the OpenAPI JSON Schema still had descriptions like it used to on v2.0. My post triggered a discussion on the official OpenAPI Slack, explaining they had removed the descriptions to avoid maintenance costs related to keeping the descriptions in sync in several places. I joined the discussion on Slack to share my perspective. The following is a transcript of what I wrote for future reference.

I’m looking at https://github.com/OAI/OpenAPI-Specification/blob/main/schemas/v3.1/schema.yaml and using it as the JSON Schema I refer to in the following comments.

• Using $comment is great. However, according to the spec, “JSON schema implementations aren’t allowed to attach any meaning or behavior to it whatsoever.” Comments are useful for leaving notes to other editors that aren’t meant to be passed to the end user. (see https://json-schema.org/understanding-json-schema/reference/comments)
• Most $comments are being used to reference the corresponding section of the OpenAPI spec. While that’s interesting, the links to the reference are all broken (404). As an example, the $comment on paths has the value of https://spec.openapis.org/oas/v3.1#paths-object. Instead, It looks like the correct value should be https://spec.openapis.org/oas/v3.1.0.html#paths-object.
• The description on the exact section of the spec is great for human consumption. On the other hand, extracting the information in a programmatic way is not easy.

My suggestions:

• Using the JSON Schema description annotation to describe what each OpenAPI schema object is.
• Because I see that maintenance cost is the reason why descriptions were removed, why not use the JSON Schema as the source of truth? Then, the sections of the spec could be programmatically generated from the information on the schema, avoiding maintaining two separate documents.

I might, obviously, be missing many other details. However, I wanted to share my opinion in case anyone finds it interesting.

Permalink: 20241119151234

Found at “Causal Islands Berlin 2024” on 2024-11-19 15:12:34 +01:00.

Causal Islands is a conference about the future of computing and a home for new perspectives ranging from deeply technical insights to sharp socio-political analysis.

Permalink: 20241119124718

How do AI agents identify themselves when consuming APIs? Agents are acting on behalf of people, so can they potentially use OAuth 2? Or something else? What about AI agents that act on behalf of other agents? Do we need a different authorization framework?

Permalink: 20241114103310

Found at “No-code, no thought? Substrates for simple programming for all - Tomas Petricek” on 2024-11-14 10:33:10 +01:00.

The idea of programming substrates is generalizing the usual distinction between programming a software system and using a software system.

Permalink: 20241114102943

Found at “Codestrates v2 | Codestrates v2” on 2024-11-14 10:29:43 +01:00.

With Codestrates, you can create dynamic webpages (or webstrates as we call them) that can be edited directly from within the browser — and editing can also be done collaboratively.

Permalink: 20241112122907

The secret to the most creative people I know is they work within a framework and that’s what allows creativity to flow.

Permalink: 20241109165306

What is API Quality?. I published this post on LinkedIn on October 2024. I wanted to understand how people familiar with APIs would define quality. The answers varied significantly but mostly revolved around the notion of technical quality.

Here’s a summary of the answers I captured from my LinkedIn post where I asked “What is API Quality?”

One kind of answer points toward a maturity model, hinting that quality is a technical aspect. The idea is to have a multi-dimensional model that includes what the Richardson and Amundsen (PDF) models offer, adding other layers.

Another view gives importance to the functional interface. There’s no quality if the API doesn’t offer what consumers need. Or, in short, quality is tied to usability. To achieve that, there are aspects such as consistency of interface, and semantic clarity, that should be taken into account. I still see this type of quality as technical.

Some answers connect quality to governance and point out that it’s often not easy to convince people the two are tied. Things like linting, having rules that enforce consistency and naming, and making sure APIs use the right architecture and types of operations are part of this line of thought.

Permalink: 20241107223940

Alan Kay refers to the “Creative Magic” as “Good Woowoo.” (20240306160214)

Permalink: 20241107162227

According to Seth Godin, there are three kinds of quality:

1. Technical.
2. Luxury.
3. Creative magic.

Having technical quality means things work according to specs. Luxury means there’s something about the product that makes it special to consumers. This is often what most people understand as quality. The third kind of quality is the most interesting one. Creative magic is the less-understood attribute that makes people love your product to the point they feel special when using it. Creative magic is what makes consumers recommend your product.

—from The Practice, pp. 75–77

Permalink: 20241106175323

An abstraction provides a higher-level vocabulary that shields the user from the underlying complexity.—Gregor Hohpe

Permalink: 20241101230335

Found at “The Dual Nature of Events in Event-Driven Architecture” on 2024-11-01 23:03:35 +00:00.

events that travel between services have a dual role: They trigger actions and carry data.

Permalink: 20241030144316

Found at “Engraft” on 2024-10-30 14:43:16 +01:00.

Engraft is an API that makes live & rich programming interfaces powerful and practical through composition.

Permalink: 20241029153437

What’s important is expressing your program as what you want it to do. Not a set of instructions on how to do it. Letting the computer itself figure out how to do it.—Bret Victor

Permalink: 20241026183145

Most OpenAPI editors aren’t doing what I think they should. They focus on two things: linting the OpenAPI document and rendering an API reference preview. The second thing puts the focus on creating good-looking API references. API creators will, naturally, try to write their OpenAPI documents so that the API reference looks nice.

When you’re creating, you want to see a preview of what you create. When you write code, you want to see the output of the code running. When you write a markdown document, you want to see it rendered—either in place or on a new panel. When you write an OpenAPI document, you want to see the API it defines running. What you want is to feel the result of what you’re creating.

Permalink: 20241023101956

Found at “The Strategy Questions | Seth’s Blog” on 2024-10-23 10:19:56 +02:00.

Where are the non-believers, and how do I avoid them?

Permalink: 20241010161954

Found at “Tenno” on 2024-10-10 16:19:54 +02:00.

You can think of Tenno as a mix of Word and Excel with a touch of Obsidian, Markdown and Javascript.

Permalink: 20241009160929

Found at “Potluck: Dynamic documents as personal software” on 2024-10-09 16:09:29 +02:00.

it’s critical that the system can provide immediate feedback as a user types and help them develop consistent expectations for how the system will interpret their text.

Permalink: 20241008222032

I’ve been using the first prototype of my API Assistant for a couple of weeks, and it feels like magic. The prototype automatically creates an API server based on the content of an OpenAPI document. I don’t need to write any code or generate any “server stubs” to have my API running. It just updates itself every time I change the OpenAPI document.

Permalink: 20241006153042

Found at “Prototyping APIs with OpenAPI - by Bruno Pedro” on 2024-10-06 15:30:42 +02:00.

I built a personal system for interpreting OpenAPI documents and using them as the only thing needed to run an API