2026-04-13 10:44:24
The problem is that LLMs inherently lack the virtue of laziness. Work costs nothing to an LLM. LLMs do not feel a need to optimize for their own (or anyone's) future time, and will happily dump more and more onto a layercake of garbage. Left unchecked, LLMs will make systems larger, not better — appealing to perverse vanity metrics, perhaps, but at the cost of everything that matters.
As such, LLMs highlight how essential our human laziness is: our finite time forces us to develop crisp abstractions in part because we don't want to waste our (human!) time on the consequences of clunky ones.
— Bryan Cantrill, The peril of laziness lost
Tags: bryan-cantrill, ai, llms, ai-assisted-programming, generative-ai
2026-04-13 07:57:53
Thanks to a tip from Rahim Nathwani, here's a uv run recipe for transcribing an audio file on macOS using the 10.28 GB Gemma 4 E2B model with MLX and mlx-vlm:
uv run --python 3.13 --with mlx_vlm --with torchvision --with gradio \
mlx_vlm.generate \
--model google/gemma-4-e2b-it \
--audio file.wav \
--prompt "Transcribe this audio" \
--max-tokens 500 \
--temperature 1.0
I tried it on this 14 second .wav file and it output the following:
This front here is a quick voice memo. I want to try it out with MLX VLM. Just going to see if it can be transcribed by Gemma and how that works.
(That was supposed to be "This right here..." and "... how well that works" but I can hear why it misinterpreted that as "front" and "how that works".)
Tags: uv, mlx, ai, gemma, llms, speech-to-text, python, generative-ai
2026-04-12 03:56:53
SQLite 3.52.0 was withdrawn so this is a pretty big release with a whole lot of accumulated user-facing and internal improvements. Some that stood out to me:
ALTER TABLE can now add and remove NOT NULL and CHECK constraints - I've previously used my own sqlite-utils transform() method for this.jsonb equivalent.The result formatting improvements come from a new library, the Query Results Formatter. I had Claude Code (on my phone) compile that to WebAssembly and build this playground interface for trying that out.
Via Lobste.rs
2026-04-12 03:35:31
Tool: SQLite Query Result Formatter Demo
See my notes on SQLite 3.53.0. This playground provides a UI for trying out the various rendering options for SQL result tables from the new Query Result Formatter library, compiled to WebAssembly.
2026-04-11 03:07:02
Lenny posted another snippet from our 1 hour 40 minute podcast recording and it's about kākāpō parrots!
Tags: kakapo
2026-04-10 23:56:02
I think it's non-obvious to many people that the OpenAI voice mode runs on a much older, much weaker model - it feels like the AI that you can talk to should be the smartest AI but it really isn't.
If you ask ChatGPT voice mode for its knowledge cutoff date it tells you April 2024 - it's a GPT-4o era model.
This thought inspired by this Andrej Karpathy tweet about the growing gap in understanding of AI capability based on the access points and domains people are using the models with:
[...] It really is simultaneously the case that OpenAI's free and I think slightly orphaned (?) "Advanced Voice Mode" will fumble the dumbest questions in your Instagram's reels and at the same time, OpenAI's highest-tier and paid Codex model will go off for 1 hour to coherently restructure an entire code base, or find and exploit vulnerabilities in computer systems.
This part really works and has made dramatic strides because 2 properties:
- these domains offer explicit reward functions that are verifiable meaning they are easily amenable to reinforcement learning training (e.g. unit tests passed yes or no, in contrast to writing, which is much harder to explicitly judge), but also
- they are a lot more valuable in b2b settings, meaning that the biggest fraction of the team is focused on improving them.
Tags: andrej-karpathy, generative-ai, openai, chatgpt, ai, llms
