Bookmarks - book, ai, map, llm

These are some things I’ve wandered across on the web this week.

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RFC 9958: Post-Quantum Cryptography for Engineers

The advent of a cryptographically relevant quantum computer (CRQC) would render state-of-the-art, traditional public key algorithms deployed today obsolete, as the mathematical assumptions underpinning their security would no longer hold. To address this, protocols and infrastructure must transition to post-quantum algorithms, which are designed to resist both traditional and quantum attacks. This document explains why engineers need to be aware of and understand post-quantum cryptography (PQC), and it details the impact of CRQCs on existing systems and the challenges involved in transitioning to post-quantum algorithms. Unlike previous cryptographic updates, this shift may require significant protocol redesign due to the unique properties of post-quantum algorithms.

cryptography ietf standard

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ElectricityMaps

At Electricity Maps, we’re data scientists, first and foremost.

Data comes in from many sources, and in many formats. We ingest and harmonize it, apply our models to it, and make it available to the world. This is the place to learn more about our data; read FAQs, or deep dive in our methodology.

electricity energy geo map vis

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BLOBPROC

BLOBPROC is a less kafkaesque version of PDF postprocessing found in sandcrawler, which is part of IA Scholar infra. Specifically it is designed to process and persist documents with minimum number of external components and little to no state.

The goal is to have artifacts (fulltext, thumbnails, metadata, …) derived from millions of PDF files available in a storage system (e.g. S3). In the best case, the artifacts can be kept up to date in an unattended way

metadata pdf webarchive

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AI-assisted engineers are burning out, is this fine?

We’re more productive than ever. AI allows us to generate code at supersonic speeds, unfold entire modules in seconds, and ship thousands of lines of code. It’s easier to pick up tasks and generate value, even in unfamiliar codebases. But there’s a dark side. AI-assisted code generation isn’t free; there’s a hidden cost that we as an industry are only beginning to realize: AI burnout. Are we dangerously ignorant to this problem? And how can we cope with it?

ai labor programming work

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Banned Book Library

A long while back I had an idea to hack a WiFi smart light bulb to do something more useful to me. Actually, I had a few different ideas of things to do with them. One of these ideas was to modify the device to have an open WiFi access point and a web server hosting banned books. The idea was that if you lived somewhere that banned books you thought were important, you could theoretically stick a digital copy of the book on one of these light bulbs. Then you could go install it somewhere in your community

arguing book censorship embedded web

🔖 Library by

Ben Brown

Library

book library

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AI Economics for Dummies

As AI companies get ready to go public and we get a deeper look at their inner workings, it’s only natural to have questions about their finances, like “Do they make money?” and “How?” Here are a few examples to help the average layperson understand the business side of AI.

ai humor scifi

🔖 Jerry’s Map

… the Map is now a two-dimensional “virtual world” art project which is now comprised of over 4000 individual eight by ten inch panels. When assembled, these panels form an approximate circle. The panel locations are defined by N, S, E, and W coordinates that originate at the center of the circle. The locations in the matrix do not change, but the panels themselves are continually revised based on instructions drawn from the artist’s custom deck of cards.

art game map random

🔖 He won’t stop

building a map to an imaginary place.

The remarkable story of Jerry Gretzinger and the map he’s dedicated his life to making.

map video

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Building a Small Language Model (SLM)

A step-by-step Jupyter Notebook demonstrating how to build and train a compact small language model (“SLM”) from scratch using the TinyStories dataset. Covers data preparation, BPE tokenization, efficient binary storage, GPU memory locking, Transformer architecture, training configuration, and sample text generation.

llm python slm

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Togetherness by Rowan Hooper review – a stunning portrait of cooperation in nature

Hooper adores Darwin – his account of visiting Darwin’s Kent residence Down House radiates reverence (“it’s a pseudo-religious experience”). But he feels that Darwinism and its union with genetics in the so-called “modern synthesis” has placed undue emphasis on competition in the natural world and underplayed the roles of cooperation and collaboration. In redressing that imbalance, Togetherness is not an attempt to make evolution cuddlier and more palatable; rather, it is a corrective deeply informed by what we have learned since Darwin about how nature works. Written with immense charm and passion, and packed with eye-popping facts, it is also a paean to the wonders of nature and the value and urgency of preserving them.

book cooperation evolution nature science

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A hidden infrastructure

Underground networks

Beneath our feet lie networks of invisible ecosystem engineers: arbuscular mycorrhizal (AM) fungi.

These fungi form trading relationships with more than 70% of plant species, building networks of tubular cells called hyphae that extend the surface area of root systems up to a hundred-fold.

Collectively, these networks comprise one of Earth’s circulatory systems.

fungi life map network vis

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Most Gen AI Players Remain ‘Far Away’ from Profiting: Interview with Andy Wu

Most people are aware of the high fixed cost of training the leading generative AI models, but there are also significant variable costs of “inference” in using generative AI. These inference costs are incurred every time we enter a prompt and receive a response.

economics llm

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The Era of Cheap AI Is Over

In the words of Harvard business professor Andy Wu, most people don’t realize how “ridiculously expensive” AI is. Most are aware of the high fixed costs, but not the variable inference costs incurred every time the model generates an image. OpenAI expects to spend more than $150 billion on inference costs alone through 2030. While the vast majority of users continue to access the platform for free, the question is how the gap between resources and revenue will eventually close, and who will bear the costs.

ai economics energy llm politics

🔖 Mes

forêts

«Son nom semble la relier à une constellation, mais sa présence au monde la rend indissociable des paysages qu’elle traverse : Hélène Dorion vit environnée de lacs et de forêts, de fleuves et de rivages, de brumes de mémoire et de vastes estuaires où la pensée s’évase. Dans ce recueil voué aux forêts, elle fait entendre le chant de l’arbre, comme il existe un chant d’amour et des voix de plain-chant. « Mes forêts… », dit-elle dans un souffle qui se densifie de poème en poème. Et l’on entre à pas de loup dans une forêt de signes où l’on déchiffre la partition de la vie sur fond de ciel, sur fond de terre, sur fond de neige, de feuillages persistants et de flammes qu’emporte le vent, de bourgeons sertis dans l’écorce et de renouvellement. Un chemin d’ombres et de lumière, qui donne sens à ce qu’on appelle humanité. »

book french poetry

🔖 Pudsey Clough

Radio

If you have problems with webpage playback try these stream buttons,or add the urls below to VLC or any other streaming/netradio software: https://orllewin.radioca.st/stream - High quality 256kbps stream. https://orllewin.radioca.st/lofi - Bandwidth friendly 64kbps stream.

radio

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MANIFESTO JAM 2026

The manifesto, in my imagined alternative, is the ugly smear on the polished surfaces of conference keynotes, aspirational #bizdev posts and job-ready portfolio pieces. The manifesto is awkward, clunky, impractical, confronting, uncompromising, defiant: all qualifiers undesirable in an increasingly professionalised, corporatised game making ecosystem. These traits are what makes the manifesto beautiful.

art game manifesto

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Dither Explorer

An interactive visualization of how various dithering algorithms work.

algorithm image vis

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Microsoft turns to Amazon for help with GitHub’s AI-driven capacity issues

Microsoft is turning to its biggest cloud rival, Amazon, to help address capacity issues on its GitHub coding platform following a series of AI-driven outages, according to two people familiar with the plans.

GitHub, which Microsoft acquired in 2018, is a popular place for engineers to store and manage code, and collaborate on projects. As an independent company, GitHub mostly operated its own data centers, but Microsoft had planned to move the coding platform entirely to its Azure cloud service by 2027.

Now, a boom in AI demand is forcing Microsoft to lean on Amazon. AI coding tools have made it easier for developers to write more software. That has swamped GitHub with a flood of new code, straining its compute resources.

ai aws github microsoft