GPU programming chaos
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.
What Pioneers ate on the Oregon Trail
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.
Which AI’s are best?
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
- Claude 3.7/4 is great for serious/production oriented code (after a code review). Probably the winner here.
- ChatGPT 4.1 is a good copilot for prototyping and exploration
- Grok 3 – responds quickly/good speed
- Gemini 2.5 Pro – does what you ask but not much more
Research
- Claude 3.7/4 for carefully explained reasoning and good for references
- ChatGPT 4.1for clear overviews
- Grok 3 for current event
- Gemini 2.5 Profor large, structured input and extraction
Storytelling
- Claude 3.7/4 – literary and reflective
- ChatGPT 4.1- most emotionally resonate
- Grok 3 – flexible and imaginative
- Gemini 2.5 Pro- informative and expandable
News
- Grock 3 wins this easily – gives news and what people are saying about it
- ChatGPT 4.1- Can handle current events decently but slower to pick up news
- Claude 3.7/4- largely sits out news and doesn’t comment unless widely verified
- Gemini 2.5 Pro- factual, accurate, but rarely first
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).
Romans go home!
There is a fabulous scene in Life of Brian where Brian is caught writing ‘Romans go home!’ on a wall. But his Latin is terrible so he makes a bunch of mistakes in his graffiti. He’s then accosted by a Roman soldier who exactly mimics the dressing down one would get by an overbearing Latin teacher. Even better – everything they discuss is100% grammatically accurate.
polýMATHY walks us through exactly what they were saying (if you don’t know any Latin):
Sister Clare Crockett
The real life story of an extremely unlikely, rambunctious 20 year old Irish girl who was embroiled in all the hard drinking and hard partying of a difficult Irish upbringing. She abandoned her wide open, promising acting career and the doors to fame in order to give her life to God.
Her cause for canonization to sainthood is already progressing. She’s part of a number of very young people being brought forth for canonization. As opposed to those thinking that God is dead in the world – people are returning to churches in record numbers, especially younger generations.
80’s School Pizza!
Tasting History with Max Miller makes foods from long ago. Medieval tavern meals, Wild West saloon meals, hardtack, 3rd class dining meals on the Titanic, WW 1 and WW 2 meals, ancient Roman and Greek foods, prisoner’s last meals, ancient exotic dishes like silphium, puls, black mead, and semlor. In a recent episode, he went and found the recipe for iconic square school pizza from the 80’s.
It turns out the recipe comes from the official government recipe book that can still be found on the Internet Archive: ‘Quantity Recipes for School Food Service‘. There are 2 versions: ‘Pizza with Cheese Topping’ (p189/Main Dishes D-30) and ‘Pizza with Ground Beef Topping’ (p191/Main Dishes D-31)
Here’s the recipe for the cheese version that most people remember:
And here’s his re-creation:
Van Gogh Sunflowers
Here’s a room full of sunflowers for the Van Gogh exhibit in Chengdu China
Intel Oregon continues dramatic layoffs in a region already suffering high unemployment
In what continues to be multiple waves of layoffs, Intel in Oregon has laid off at least 5,400 jobs since August and estimates are there are now less than 18,000 Oregon Intel employees. That’s a loss of just at 25% of Intel Oregon employees (based on the estimates) in 6 months.
This comes when Oregon’s job situation is lagging nationally and facing steep headwinds. Because Intel is the state’s largest tech employer, and many other local tech firms have left or are also downsizing, it means a lot of these employees are predicted to leave Oregon and cause serious economic repercussions for the local area. This has already alarmed local leaders that are now expecting a quickly eroding tax base.
Even worse, Oregon itself is facing a continuingly downward employment trend. Oregon reported a net 4,300 job losses in June 2025, up more than double the 2,100 jobs lost in May. The only sector in Oregon that grew was 900 jobs in heath care fields.
This is even more pronounced in the Portland area which is now in a multi-year decline. The Portland metro area saw the biggest declines in the whole state with 7,500 jobs lost in May and employment is down about 14,000 since last year. Unemployment has also risen dramatically – it was 3.6% in May 2024 but is now 4.6% in May 2025 – a trend that is expected to get worse for the foreseeable future.
Articles:
- https://www.oregonlive.com/silicon-forest/2025/07/intels-retreat-is-unlike-anything-its-done-before-in-oregon.html#:~:text=Intel%20has%20eliminated%20at%20least,come%20in%20the%20weeks%20ahead.
- https://www.oregonlive.com/business/2025/07/oregon-sheds-another-4300-jobs-unemployment-rate-creeps-up-again.html
- https://1190kex.iheart.com/featured/portland-local-news/content/2025-07-16-oregon-loses-4300-jobs/#:~:text=After%20averaging%20210%2C600%20jobs%20in,200%20jobs%20since%20June%202022.
Labyrinth of Time Speedrun
The Obscuritory has done a 12 minute speedrun of the classic obscure game “The Labyrinth of Time“. I loved Myst and saved up my money to buy this game – only to find myself utterly lost as to what to do. It’s an obscure, but ultimately bad, game. The idea is interesting – an adventure that requires collecting items or changing the past to affect the future puzzles. It’s an idea that is probably ripe for a remake or a part 2 (that was hinted at at the ending of the game, but never written)
Back in the day, I actually contacted and talked with one of the programmers. He said that they were running out of storage space to fit the game on one CD-ROM, so they kept compressing and re-compressing the audio until it was barely acceptable quality. I believe his exact words were that ‘It was criminal’ how much they compressed them.
I remember that the sound track was pretty good. Ironically, it was mostly stock audio that could be licensed very cheaply. Some of my favorites were ‘Intrigue‘, ‘The Killing Ground‘, ‘Pastoral colours‘, and many others. Fans on the playlist linked above seem to have identified all the songs.
Here’s a longer, slower playthrough for the curious:
I lived 30 miles from this incident
I wasn’t alive in 1968 when this accident happened, but I do remember visiting the base during a summer open house when I was quite young (likely around 5-7). I remember seeing all the fighter and bomber planes – even waiting in line to take a ride on one of the planes (but the wait was so long we ended up not doing it).
If this broken arrow accident had resulted in a nuclear detonation, I likely wouldn’t be here today since my parents lived so close.
This accident is also talked about in the absolutely fabulous books Command and Control by Eric Schlosser and might be also mentioned in the book Atomic Accidents by James Mahaffey.