Short things, kept in the open. A commonplace book, formerly rabbitholes.garden.

Pep’s favorite football players:

Simon Willison on the new Qwen3.8-27B model:

The fact that a 17GB file can do all of this stuff on my home machines is a miracle. Once again, I’m delighted and amazed at how much progress local models have made this year. A year ago this would have been competitive with the best and most expensive of the proprietary models—today it can run on a capable laptop.

The only thing holding this back from being a daily driver is performance. It feels pretty slow on both the M5 Mac and the DGX Spark. That’s the catch with these dense (non-Mixture-of-Experts) models—they require a whole lot of memory bandwidth to perform well, and neither of the machines I have access to are top performers in that regard.

The most important thing about Qwen 3.8 27B is what it demonstrates. We can have an open weights general purpose model with a long context, effective tool calling, strong vision ability, and competent code generation, and we can fit the whole thing in just a 17GB file.

The geo-economics of rare earths:

Expensive to produce, expensive to store … so what’s the solution? Government intervention — and lots of it. All along the supply chain, the US has stepped in. It has bought stakes in several US rare earth producers, struck offtake agreements with some of those producers to ensure a minimum price for their products, and pledged $10bn in debt backing for Project Vault, a stockpiling initiative designed as a backstop against shortfalls in raw materials. So after all those moves, the west is FREE from Chinese hegemony, right? Right?

💯

Damn

A nice overview of companies that are trying to figure out what comes next after the transformer architecture, which has led to the current AI race:

This is pretty cool:

For the critics who complain the AI is useless in the real world:

Today, in a paper published in Nature, we show that our WeatherNext AI model achieved state-of-the-art accuracy in predicting a cyclone’s track, intensity, and wind structure. On average, our model gives forecasters an extra day’s worth of predictive accuracy: our three-day forecasts are as good as what prior models were able to provide for only the next two days. This scale of improvement corresponds roughly to a decade’s worth of meteorological progress.

deepmind.google.com/science/weatherlab ↗

GitHub · github.com ↗GitHub - google-deepmind/weathernextContribute to google-deepmind/weathernext development by creating an account on GitHub.

Yuen Yuen Ang is one of the most thoughtful commentators on all things China, and everything she writes—including her books—is a must-read if you wish to understand the phenomenon that is China. She just made her book, How China Escaped the Poverty Trap, free and openly downloadable.

As I’ve mentioned, I have an enduring fascination with China, and much of what I know about it is informed by the mental models and heuristics from Yuen Yuen Ang’s work. I highly recommend downloading the book and reading it.

x.com/i/status/2085917747733762287 ↗

There are so many books and articles I want to read, videos I want to watch, podcasts I want to listen to, and posts I want to write. But my desires always clash headfirst with reality: time is finite, while the list of things I want to consume is infinite. ​For the longest time, I felt anxious and constantly looked…

Crazy!

Another example of why Twitter, for all its flaws, is still one of the best places to follow thoughtful discussions about important issues. They can be raucous, messy, and often contentious, but that’s also part of what makes the place interesting.
This thread, and the various threads branching off from it, with Dean Ball, Philippe Lemoine, Rohit Krishnan, Paul Novosad among others, debating the attitudes of U.S. elites towards AI is a good example. It’s the kind of intellectually rich discussion that’s hard to find elsewhere.

Never thought of innovation this way. Interesting framing.

ChatGPT free users now get access to Luna. This is actually quite crazy, considering the fact that Luna is a pretty decent model for a variety of normal, everyday tasks, that people now get access to Luna for free. I can’t believe that we are living in this world:

We’re expanding access to our latest models for free users with unlimited text chats using GPT‑5.6 Luna, plus a new Think button for harder questions.

For questions that require deeper reasoning, Free users can tap the new Think button to give GPT‑5.6 Luna more time to work through the answer.

Cloudflare is shipping things like it’s on steroids.

Cloudflare Blog · blog.cloudflare.com ↗Cloudflare OS: an open platform for agents, apps, and workCloudflare OS is an open-source platform that lets everyone in your company build apps, automate work, and safely access internal systems, shaped around what your organization knows and how it operates.

Cloudflare Blog · blog.cloudflare.com ↗Introducing Kitesurf: The agent-first browser that runs in V8 isolates on Cloudflare WorkersWe should be giving all agents tools that excel at what’s important for an AI model. Kitesurf is Cloudflare’s new stateless, highly scalable, and cost-effective web browser that runs entirely on top of Workers and was…

Cloudflare Blog · blog.cloudflare.com ↗Building an open Agentic Internet: readable, discoverable, callable, and payableAgents are a new kind of visitor. They don't render CSS or click ads, but they have a paying human on the other end. Block them and you block your customer. We're building the open tools and protocols so publishers and…

I can’t imagine what it is to be a young graduate looking for a job in this horrible job market when the uncertainty is so palpable: For many at the start of their careers, things are just as bad. Government analysis last month insisted that entry-level positions were declining in line with the rest of the job market…

Reality is masquerading as parody:

From trade wars to military wars, anything the US president says can shift markets, and so teams of traders - as well as a host of automated computer systems - monitor his statements to perform trades within seconds.

Trump Media & Technology Group (TMTG) now wants to charge for such market-moving information put out on its Truth Social platform. It has launched a paid service to give Wall Street firms and institutional investors the “fastest access” to the social media site’s most influential accounts.

TMTG has not directly said the service includes the account of the president himself, but with some 13 million followers - the most on the site - it’s fair to say that his posts would be among, if not the, most influential.

It’s all fine! Nothing to see here!

I don’t know enough about the technology itself—whether it’s actively being maintained or where it’s heading—and I can’t speak to all the historical details, but it seems accurate enough. The plain fact is: RSS is so fucking cool.

Even today, I rely heavily on RSS feeds to keep track of posts from all the blogs and writers I follow. I even built a small tool called **Small Web** where I curate lists of newsletters and blogs I read, with all new posts automatically appearing on the feed.

On every project I build, I make it a point to add an RSS feed so people can subscribe. It’s easily one of the best ways to follow the web.

Whethet you agree with or not Glenn always has interesting perspectives on China. I always learn something from his tweets: “China has gotten ‘pretty good’ at developing its economy” is something that many people are clearly loathe to admit. That is why many seem to gravitate towards flawed, simplistic macro-based…

Filed under useful tools:

GitHub · github.com ↗GitHub - run-llama/liteparse: A fast, helpful, and open-source document parserA fast, helpful, and open-source document parser. Contribute to run-llama/liteparse development by creating an account on GitHub.

This has been my experience with LLMs as well.
I often see posts from people with fancy, complex setups for coding with AI, claiming that doing X or Y leads to some ridiculous output. It used to make me feel a bit jealous—like I was missing out or using these tools completely wrong.

But whenever I actually sit down and use these coding tools, even with the most basic approach, the thing I set out to build eventually gets done. More often than not, I stick to projects I think are important or fun, and things just work out.
This post was a nice reminder of that whole dynamic

I often think about that story when browsing X. Every day, someone invents a new way of working that promises to change everything. Some probably will. But ultimately what matters most is solving the right problems.

This is horrific: Unlike Savitri’s daughters, most girls in the community are born into a system in which their families expect them to enter sex work — a practice passed down over generations. According to several members of the community and NGOs in the region, while many Indians celebrate the birth of a boy over a…

​Brad Setser is one of the go-to experts if you want to understand global imbalances, the political economy of China, and the complexities of currency movements. Regardless of whether you agree with him or not, he always backs up his assertions with data—which sets him apart from a lot of other commentators in…

I’m a huge fan of Anton Jäger, and I’ve been reading his writing for a long time. I’m yet to read Hyperpolitics, but I’ve heard several podcasts in which Jäger has spoken about the concept. The concept offers a useful lens to make sense of the contemporary political landscape and its interactions with the civil society:

Hyperpolitics is what came next: intense politicisation, with neither institutional roots nor ambitions. “On the surface,” Jäger writes, “the Black Lives Matter protests would seem to have little in common with the mob that stormed the Capitol in January 2021. Morally, they are worlds apart … Organisationally, however, these movements exhibit a striking set of similarities: fleeting in duration, they maintain no membership rolls and struggle to impose any real discipline on their adherents.” As a consequence, everything explodes and nothing changes; movements surge suddenly forward and yet no territory is taken. He quotes political theorist Paolo Gerbaudo’s contemporary interpretation of the evocative phrase “bodies without organs”. Modern political movements, he writes, are “concentrated and muscular, yet without an internal metabolism”.

Lots of new inequality statistics from the World Bank’s PIP on Our World in Data:

Inequality statistics are heavily contested and rightly so, but read the right way, they still have some use.

Cool site to visualize tariffs, sanctions, and global trade deals.

Fully relate to this feeling. Even as I was reading this post, I switched to check how Codex was doing with a few side projects I was working on and then go back to finishing reading the post :grimacing: I’m feeling it right now. I had to set a timer for 15 minute on my computer and block all distractions to write…

As always, a brilliant and incisive analysis of the student protests by Pranay Kotasthane: The WhatsApp uncles and aunties generation that have seen the benefits of the two decades after liberalisation are content with their “settled” lives, their garba in Vietnam and their misguided belief about India’s standing going…