Effulgence was just announced and brings some amazing 2.5D rendering to the table – not using blitting or rendering – but drawing text. Check out their Effulgence Steam page or Andrey Fomin’s YouTube channel for more cool looking development videos.
PurpleMind demonstrates how modern algorithms generate giant prime numbers in just seconds. The key is they don’t actually check if it is exactly prime, but can do so with very high confidence using certain properties of primes. Bonus points for the fact he gives code too.
“At the Drive-in” is a free movie on Youtube about a group of quirky movie buffs work to save a dying drive-in theater. They end up sleeping on the floor, jury-rigging solutions, and holding it together all with their free labor.
Besides saving a theater, it speaks more about a group of individuals that become serious friends and fight to regain a sense of community and simpler times that is increasingly lost. We may be connect to the entire world by the internet but people feel more lonely, isolated, and anxious than ever. One of the folks working there even calls it feeling closer to God – even though he doesn’t know what that is.
Parish communities fill this need for community and belonging – but maybe they should engage social events like this even more. I know that the weekends my parish puts on picnics and events together – they become some of the most joyful and rewarding parts of my week.
A basic introduction to a vector database and why it’s becoming very interesting for AI workloads.
polýMATHY tried to use his Latin to talk to random priests in the Vatican and it goes pretty well. One of my instructors did Latin translations at the Vatican.
I would would have been a barely functional novice with my Latin verbal skills (even when I was still taking classes and using it regularly). My Latin knowledge was almost exclusively read, not spoken – so it would have been rough times. I could listen to him and understand a good bit of what he was saying, but I would have struggled to respond.
I obviously won’t comment on the accuracy of the analysis – but I am very impressed by the work High Yield did to walk through the die and connecting what he sees with the public technical details. We’ve come a long way since the 386.
Namibia is absolutely on my list of places I want to visit.
Anton somewhere takes the almost perfect road trip through the country. During his travels, he stops by Etosha National Park and goes animal spotting by visiting several of the numerous watering holes.
You can get a similar experience by watching the 24 hour live webcam of a watering hole from Gondwana Namib Park. There really is quite an amazing amount of animals that come to the water. It’s especially interesting in mornings/evening to see the different kinds of animals that show up at different parts of the day.
GPU programming used to be just about rendering graphics. As we’ve moved into bitcoin mining and AI, eisfrosch goes over the current chaotic programming environments for GPUs.
Tasting History with Max Miller shares what Oregon trail travelers ate.
First, at around 4am, they’d start fires to get breakfast going: bacon, johny cakes, and coffee. They often would milk the cows that they brought along, put the milk in a pale under the wagon, and the jostling would churn it into butter.
They had all kinds of other foods for their meals, including camas root and other items they found along the way.
Retired programmer Dave’s Garage decided to look into all the major LLM AI models and gives his feedback on using them for the last few months.
Which should you use? It depends on what you’re trying to do. It also depends on how you’re testing it – because others come up with different ratings.
Coding
Research
Storytelling
News
He also discusses the different context sizes when it relates to the tasks. Bigger windows cost more but can allow you to summarize huge codebases or 60 page complex legal documents.
ChatGPT can handle 128,000 tokens or about 96,000 words (1 token roughly equals 4 characters). Claude has 200,000 tokens or about 150,000 words. Gemini 2.5 Pro and Grock 3 claim to have 1 million tokens.
If all you’re doing is summarizing emails, ChatGPT could be just fine. But if you need to make sense of large codebases or summarize large legal briefs, Gemini or Grock will be better at avoiding hallucinations or leaving gaps. There are some that believe that these windows might actually shrink if the systems are under heavy load (Grock in particular).