Louis Maddox

2025 year in review is up 🪩 cog.spin.systems/2025-in-review On dewarping, schema inference, and embeddings

Speculative knowledge to practical kn. implies the possibility of spec. prac. kn. (like spec dec, but for intentional actors: “given that we can foresee the agent is about to perform X, what would the agent in [either of possible worlds] benefit from knowing” ➡️ go hunt for that)

Just had the idea for a PMU lib called “tiramisù” and now might have to make it for the name alone…

Enlightened approach to pairing an agent session with a trace interpreter LLM ‘guardian’ chat: tell the latter: “as well as helping me interpret, if you can go and run any web searches that might shed light or encourage aha moments of realisation (not forced, but open to them)”

mibz2: a high-performance bz2 decoding library built around memory-level parallelism lmmx.github.io/mibz2/ Speeds up bzip2 decoding by interleaving independent inverse-BWT traversals, keeping multiple memory accesses in flight, plus SIMD and block-level parallelism boosters 💫

Marissa Mayer? From the AI industry?

TIL: someone has ported English to Rust github.com/Aaryan-Kapoo...

Claude warned about load bearing seams. Humans didn’t listen.

Skimming this new PDF, I feel some similarities to the sub-n*lg(n) FFT writeup by David Harvey. It's all like breaking the n^3 matmul bound: instead of doing many independent mat-vec-mul units of work, do them all at once, exploiting structure to save a few operations. bsky.app/profile/curi...

The glee with which I just explained my recollection of JL Austin's Goldfinch to a couple of bird watchers (who had seen 46 goldfinches on their app, apparently it's not even that rare)...... 🐥

Concept: semantic noise cancelling (or "context aware noise cancelling" or "selective hearing"), as an extension of turn-taking audio models to include not just syntactic breaks but attunement to relevant statements – those either pertinent to or direct address to the user/hearer

Karl Marx used to live in what is now Quo Vadis members' club ◕⁠o⁠◕

Broke: prompt engineers rebranding to ‘context’/‘loop’/‘agentic’ engineers Bespoke: prompt engineers rebranding to motivational speakers [unironic]

Soft goal deadlines seem like a natural way to elicit agent prioritisation (as opposed to hard ‘pencils down’ deadlines that would drop work in flight at the end)

“Ideas are like fish. If you want to catch little fish, you can stay in the shallow water. But if you want to catch the big fish, you’ve got to go deeper. Down deep, the fish are more powerful and more pure. They’re huge and abstract. And they’re very beautiful.” — David Lynch

The slop gens the French are doing with “Claudia” are becoming more than a little demonic

Benchmark tracker 📉 lmmx.github.io/wikidata-pq/... ⏱️ Pipeline wall time 15s → 3s and CPU 41s → 6s
🧠 Peak RSS per worker 1.8 GB → 242 MB
🚀 Expected release ETA 60h → 7.5h Big wins: building tables mid-download (−16% ETA), overlapping stages (−8%) & merging col chunks (−4%)

🐍🚀 Out now: security releases of #Python 3.11–3.15 🔒 They block the compromised #eMudhra intermediate CA keys in the ssl module as a last resort. Normal pip use, including upgrading pip itself, is now safe from attacks using those keys, even before pip is updated discuss.python.org/t/python-3-1...

Erol Alkan on bloghouse: "Many people don’t realise that around that time, we were all on iChat" www.loudandquiet.com/interview/wi...

Typoing autonomous as autochthonous and awakening thee shoggoth swarm

Do people have different /goal modes for like "away from keyboard" (merge PRs, ship packages) vs. "asleep" (merge only and use git shims pending approval) ?

bbtree: "the fastest concurrent BTree" bbtree.xiangpeng.systems/post/ 📁 github.com/XiangpengHao...

Reheated South Park-ism

Perf trick du jour: fuse download with computation > use the filesystem as a producer–consumer buffer, with .part, the finished filename, and .bad signalling the download's state. i.e. quarantine corrupted files by renaming to .bad, signalling to delete any downstream artifacts

is this a secure private sigil?

Lol Vercel rate limits to 100 deployments per day so non-trivial PR flow is punished... buh bye

Gotta keep the user sim on its toes

Agent autounblocking in software dev might be civilisation's best chance to shunt everyone onto the Trusted Publishing cyberapocalypto happy path fr

We went from “LLMs cannot perform composition” to “that image is too stage designed/art-directed to not be AI”

Quixotic good

“Content-defined chunking is not a publicly accessible arrow-rs capability but it’s fine we’ll just do raw row group concatenation in memory” 😮‍💨🧨

incredible things are happening in CI

“CI already has a linux x86_64 wheel built, so I'll download that instead of waiting on my local build and run the new tests against it” — traces of the utterly agentic

≈: Shoggoth emote ≈:

Wikidata GH runner ingest speedrun any % lfg