AI really overuses certain phrases. I'm ok not hearing smoking gun or goldilocks zone again.
A very nice selection of articles in my reader today:
Anthropic, AI and The “Numbers” Problem
What is a Dickover?
What happens next, after the decline of tokenmaxxing?
Luceing Their Mind
GitHub has a merch store ★
GitHub has 70% of the SCM market and hosts 180 million registered developers. They also have a merch store where they sell keycaps and t-shirts. The fact that they bother to do this is amazing.
AT Protocol and decentralisation
If Bluesky shut their doors tomorrow what would happen to AT Protocol? That's why I haven't built anything on AT Protocol.
I posted this the other day and feel like I should have explained myself better.
I know that technically AT Protocol and Bluesky are separate and I know that there are other applications that have been built on AT Protocol. I also know that the goal is for AT Protocol to be completely decentralised and distributed and independent from Bluesky. My doubt is more about whether that has actually been achieved yet, and whether or not a certain invisible threshold of true independence has been crossed.
My understanding is that Bluesky (the company) pays the salaries of the majority—if not all—of the contributors to the protocol. They also run the majority of relays. If Bluesky were to go under tomorrow, would development on AT Protocol continue? Would there be enough relays left running to sustain it? Whether there is any incentive for individuals or other entities to run relays remains an open question for me.
I think that, as of today, if you're going to build on the AT Protocol, you have to believe in the vision and have a certain amount of faith that this threshold of true decentralisation will be reached in the future.
Bluesky posts in Electric Sheep
I've been testing adding Bluesky posts to my news reader Electric Sheep. This is how it looks.
If you don't know what to look for it won't be obvious. Second post from the top by Tynan Purdy is a Bluesky post. It looks exactly like the post below it from Manton Reese. This is because Manton is cross posting to Bluesky from his blog and the post doesn't have a title, just like a Bluesky post.
There are some oddities though like this:
The link to the user addressed (using @user) in the post works and links to the Bluesky profile but it just feels off. It doesn't really make sense to me to link to a Bluesky user outside of that app and context.
For now this was an interesting experiment, and I might play around some more with it, but I'm probably not going to add it.
If Bluesky shut their doors tomorrow what would happen to AT Protocol? That's why I haven't built anything on AT Protocol.
Project Hail Mary
I finally got to see this yesterday and I enjoyed it a lot. I did think it required you to suspend disbelief a little too much at times but if you can get past that it's pretty great.
4/5 stars
Isolating my dev environment
I've done this before over the years but mostly I've done development locally, as the same user that I do everything else as.
But with npm supply chain attacks becoming more prevalent and more severe than ever. And now with AI and agents and prompt injection attacks, it felt like a good time to re-assess my security.
As a result I've gone back to running Vagrant and doing my development inside of virtual machines, isolating any third party packages that I run from my main everyday work. It's slightly less convenient but well worth the trade-off.
A feature idea for Gemini
I've been using Gemini a lot over the last week while I've been running and testing local LLMs. It's been pretty great and suggesting models and configurations. I can't even imagine how long it would have taken me to go and do all of the research myself.
One thing that struck me today, after Gemini gave me a great step-by-step guide, was that it'd be very useful to be able to save that reply as a note. So I suggested the idea to Gemini.
Turns out Gemini can already save an answer to Google Keep so I went ahead and did that. My note idea though would be to add it to the interface in Gemini so you could quickly switch to it and reference it again in your chat if you needed to. Connecting to other Google services makes a lot of sense and is great but I do think it'd also be useful to build out the chat interface.
GitHub has paused newCopilot Pro subscriptions
What I missed when I wrote about GitHub Copilot changing to usage based billing is that a few days earlier they paused new sign-ups for Copilot Pro and Copilot Pro+
This also includes existing customers that cancel their subscription as re-subscribing appears to be considered a new subscription.
Since GitHub is rolling out the updated usage based billing starting June 1st I'm guess that this pause will be in affect at least until then.
Update
...
This also applies to new self-serve signups for GitHub Copilot Business
GitHub Copilot is moving to usage-based billing
Starting June 1st GitHub will switch from the current request based billing to usage based billing.
Meanwhile Anthropic has doubled it's estimate of the daily cost per developer for Claude tokens from $6 to $13.
I've been using Claude via Copilot and OpenCode for the last couple of months and rarely exceeded my monthly included requests with my biggest month costing me around $15.
Anthropic's latest estimate equates to $150-$250 per month per developer. It remains to be seen how this move will affect GiHub's pricing but it's safe to assume it's going to go up quite a bit from the current model.