Bruno Pedro

April, 2025

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How do you document the processes behind API Governance?

I’ve been thinking about this for a while. It feels easy to document API definitions, style guides, linting rules, lifecycle transitions, and other artifacts.

On the other hand, I couldn’t find a simple way to document the interactions between stakeholders during API Governance processes. Until now.

I feel that Service Design can play a big role here. In particular, Service Blueprints can be the way to document API Governance processes.

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Deja Vu is when you’ve been there, the feeling you’ve been there before. We want the opposite of that and so we call it vujade. It’s when you’re in a place you’ve been a million times before like the lobby of your own building or the front page of your own website or things like that and you start to see it with fresh eyes. You see it the way a child would see it or a first-time customer would see it and you look for that and you think “oh my God, look at that!”
(…)
If you can practice that a little bit then you start to see the things and what we’ve learned from experience is first practice it on other people’s businesses right because you’ve got a lot of baggage about your own business. You have the curse of knowledge.—Tom Kelley

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Found at “What is API Quality?” on 2025-04-01 13:19:01 +02:00.

Everyone agrees that having a high-quality API is critical. However, most people who run APIs don’t know how to measure quality. To them, “quality” is something subjective. So, they can say if an API has good quality but they aren’t able to quantify it. To me, quality is the “glue” between all the stakeholders of an API. If you’re a consumer you naturally care about the quality of an API. If you’re the API producer, you want it to have the best possible quality. If you’re a developer, you’re interested in building something that is high quality. If you’re a business decision-maker, you want the API quality to represent your products and your company. So, if API quality is something everyone is interested in, what is it exactly? Follow me as I explore its meaning.

March, 2025

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Found at “On the Biology of a Large Language Model” on 2025-03-28 21:29:59 +01:00.

Large language models display impressive capabilities. However, for the most part, the mechanisms by which they do so are unknown. The black-box nature of models is increasingly unsatisfactory as they advance in intelligence and are deployed in a growing number of applications. Our goal is to reverse engineer how these models work on the inside, so we may better understand them and assess their fitness for purpose.

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Found at “The NSE confusions” on 2025-03-26 12:43:47 +01:00.

Scale is rarely the first signal of important work.

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Tyk referenced my API Hierarchy of Needs, which I created ~12 years ago, to explain how API Governance affects what developers can or can’t do. It’s interesting to see how a concept never gets old and how you can reuse it to introduce new ideas.

Found at “How to implement API governance without stifling developer creativity and agility” on 2025-03-24 16:30:58 +01:00.

Clearly, governance can help drive improvements in reliability, functionality, and usability. However, does it become a constraint as we head towards the top of the pyramid, holding back creativity?

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Interesting perspective on what is true and what isn’t. I tend to agree that what other people share isn’t necessarily the truth. It’s simply their perspective.

Found at “Useful Not True | Derek Sivers” on 2025-03-22 20:01:35 +01:00.

Beliefs are perspectives. Explanations are confabulated. Obligations are wishes. Rules are arbitrary. They’re useful, but not necessarily true.

“Useful Not True” is the latest Derek Sivers’ book. However, it’s not the most interesting one, I’m told. Apparently, “Hell Yeah Or No” is much better. I think I’m ordering both.

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I’ve been thinking about the connection between API metrics and the ability to do proper governance. What I’m seeing is two kinds of API Governance experts. The first kind speaks a lot about linting rules, automation tools, and how to control what people can or can’t do. The second kind is more concerned about the people behind the APIs and how governance changes their lives. I wrote about this dichotomy in “API Governance Isn’t Just Rule Automation.” But what about the connection between these two areas? How do you answer the question, “Why do we need API Governance?” What is the end goal?

Without metrics, you will never be able to know if you’re improving things with API Governance. It’s as simple as that. The first thing you should do is measure your APIs. So, what are the meaningful API metrics? That’s a topic for another time.

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The future favors dot connectors over perfectors. Dot connectors are going to have a better time. They always have because the fact of the matter is, arcane mastery of anything to an AI is just “perfecting calligraphy.”
What are you doing? If you’re not going up, you’re going nowhere. And the best way up is to go out.
Specialization has been a reliable path to reaching par with best practices. Cross-pollination is the key to creating next practices.
—Mike Bechtel, during the “Breadth is the New Depth: Why the Future Favors Learn-it-alls Over Know-it-alls” presentation at SXSW 2025

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It’s been a long time since I last published something on Medium. I remember when I used to publish short notes, so I thought of giving it a try again. The only thing is that now I publish regularly on different places like my own “public notes” Website, the API Changelog newsletter, my Bluesky profile, and my LinkedIn profile. What I write now is much more scattered than when I used to publish on Medium regularly.

But I’m stubborn.

So, I thought of publishing something on Medium again. However, I want to use the tools I now use to write. I want to be able to publish to Medium from Obsidian, which has been my writing tool of choice for the past two years or so. Before, when I used Ulysses, I remember it had a feature for publishing articles to Medium. I found something similar for Obsidian, the Post Medium Draft plugin.

After installing the plugin, I went to my Medium settings to get an Integration Token. Medium uses tokens as a way to authenticate API consumers. To my surprise, when I opened the settings option to generate a token, I saw the message, “Please note that you can no longer create any new tokens.” What could that mean? I did a quick search and found out that Medium no longer supports API access. Since January 2025, if you don’t have an integration token, you won’t be able to use Medium’s API.

I’m lucky because I have a couple of integration tokens, so I can still use the API and publish from Obsidian to Medium. However, the situation might change in the future, and I don’t think I want to create a habit that I know beforehand will probably end soon.

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Found at “The HTTP QUERY Method” on 2025-03-13 16:18:47 +01:00.

This specification defines a new HTTP method, QUERY, as a safe, idempotent request method that can carry request content.

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Found at “New tools for building agents | OpenAI” on 2025-03-12 10:12:25 +01:00.

[OpenAI is] launching a new set of APIs and tools specifically designed to simplify the development of agentic applications

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Found at “matiasmolinasevolving-agents: Evolving agents is a production-grade environment for orchestrating, evolving, and managing AI agents” on 2025-03-09 22:22:03 +01:00.

A production-grade framework for creating, managing, and evolving AI agents with intelligent agent-to-agent communication

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Found at “Introduction - BeeAI” on 2025-03-09 22:18:12 +01:00.

The Agent Communication Protocol (ACP) is a protocol designed to standardize how agents communicate, enabling automation, agent-to-agent collaboration, UI integration, and developer tooling.

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Found at “LiteLLM” on 2025-03-06 13:10:38 +01:00.

LLM Gateway to provide model access, fallbacks and spend tracking across 100+ LLMs. All in the OpenAI format.

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Local, open-source tools to review:

Docmost: collaborative wiki and documentation, Notion replacement.
Plane: project management, Trello replacement.
Strapi: headless CMS.

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Found at “dreamfactorysoftwaredreamfactory: DreamFactory API Generation Platform - API Wrapper for SQL Server, Snowflake, MySQL, and more!” on 2025-03-06 09:21:09 +01:00.

DreamFactory is an API generation solution best known for its ability to automatically generate secure and documented APIs for databases

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Found at “atproto by example part 1: records and views — mozzius.dev” on 2025-03-05 11:41:04 +01:00.

AT Protocol (hereafter referred to as “atproto”) is a groundbreaking new technology by Bluesky (the company) used to build Bluesky (the social app).

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Our ancestors arrived many years ago from the African continent. Nobody came of their own will. When the slave ships arrived, families were separated. And each family member would keep a piece of cloth that represented their tribe or family.

“Nobody came of their own will,” is the key sentence to remember. Slaves were transported like cargo. According to the “A terrible passage from Africa” article (from where the following picture was taken), between 1514 and 1866 more than 12.5 million people were transported from Africa to America.

The “piece of cloth” the video refers to is represented today by the “Pavilhão.” It’s a flag carried during the Carnival celebrations in Brazil to remember and honor the slaves. It’s a very important symbol because it identifies the samba school that carries it.

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Found at “A Practical Utopian’s Guide to the Coming Collapse” on 2025-03-03 19:36:45 +01:00.

(…) technological development will be redirected less toward creating ever more consumer products and ever more disciplined labor, and more toward eliminating those forms of labor entirely.—David Graeber

February, 2025

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Found at “Yaak – The API client for modern developers” on 2025-02-27 17:25:27 +01:00.

Yaak is an offline and Git friendly app for HTTP, GraphQL, WebSockets, SSE, and gRPC.

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Found at “Event Destinations Initiative” on 2025-02-27 14:39:56 +01:00.

A model for event interoperability between event producers and their consumers to favor better developer experience, robust integration, and infrastructural efficiency.

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Found at “Charging for API Access to Corporate Branding Images Like Mercedes-Benz” on 2025-02-26 17:55:27 +01:00.

It always makes sense to start with digital resources that offer value, but don’t have high security or private value.

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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

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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

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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.

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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.

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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 #

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

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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.

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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),

January, 2025

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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).

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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

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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.

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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.

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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

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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.

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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

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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

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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

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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.

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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

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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.

December, 2024

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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!

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(…) 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

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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

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

April, 2025

March, 2025

February, 2025

List of Open Euro LLM partners #

Universities and Research Organizations: #

Companies: #

EuroHPC centres: #

January, 2025

December, 2024