Hi, I'm Luis 👋

If 2025 was about the fediverse — with new activity from Ghost, Flipboard, WordPress, and also newer platforms — I think 2026 will be a partial reset to the IndieWeb. More blogs. More independent voices, as diverse as the web. More platforms and bridges that span multiple protocols.

Looking forward to it.

This is exactly what I need for my Podcast TUI app. I need to give this a try. Thanks @hanselman

Explore physical games tagged journaling and One-page on itch.io

Listeners have requested a list of LibriVox recordings of books recommended by Ambleside Online for use with homeschooling. Anyone looking for audio books for children will find plenty of ideas on this page.

The "Staff Picks" are a monthly feature of the LibriVox homepage and news. Every month, 10 books from our catalog are chosen according to a theme and are displayed on our homepage. The main goal is to show the variety of audiobooks we are offering, and to help listeners find the hidden gems in our catalog.

I want to leave them the web we had in the 90s and 00s, but doing a lot of the new things we've learned how to do since, without the silos.

Everything built on the web, everything replaceable, choice for users. And all the writing features of the web show through.

When this done, the writer's web will be as open as podcasting, something I had a hand in developing. Any time you want to switch platforms, you can, and lose absolutely nothing.

It's not decentralized, it's uncentralized.

Today, we are pleased to announce Fara-7B, our first agentic SLM designed specifically for computer use.

Unlike traditional chat models that generate text-based responses, Computer Use Agent (CUA) models like Fara-7B leverage computer interfaces, such as a mouse and keyboard, to complete tasks on behalf of users. With only 7 billion parameters, Fara-7B achieves state-of-the-art performance within its size class and is competitive with larger, more resource-intensive agentic systems that depend on prompting multiple large models. Fara-7B’s small size now makes it possible to run CUA models directly on devices. This results in reduced latency and improved privacy, as user data remains local.

Fara-7B is an experimental release, designed to invite hands-on exploration and feedback from the community. Users can build and test agentic experiences beyond pure research—automating everyday web tasks like filling out forms, searching for information, booking travel, or managing accounts. We recommend running Fara-7B in a sandboxed environment, monitoring its execution, and avoiding sensitive data or high-risk domains. Responsible use is essential as the model continues to evolve."

Racket 9.0 is here!

A major release is always exciting and Racket 9.0 is no exception in that it introduces Parallel Threads. While Racket has had green threads for some time, and supports parallelism via futures and places, we feel parallel threads is a major addition.

Today, we’re introducing WorldGen: a state-of-the-art end-to-end system for generating interactive and navigable 3D worlds from a single text prompt. WorldGen is built on a combination of procedural reasoning, diffusion-based 3D generation, and object-aware scene decomposition. The result is geometrically consistent, visually rich, and render-efficient 3D worlds for gaming, simulation, and immersive social environments.

"Today, we’re releasing Nano Banana Pro (Gemini 3 Pro Image), a higher-fidelity model built on Gemini 3 Pro for developers to access studio-quality image generation. This follows our release of Nano Banana (Gemini 2.5 Flash Image) just a few months ago. Since then, we’ve loved seeing the community put its key features to work — from character consistency to photo restoration, and even using its capabilities to make local edits in an infinite canvas."

"Today we’re introducing SIMA 2, the next milestone in our research creating general and helpful AI agents. By integrating the advanced capabilities of our Gemini models, SIMA is evolving from an instruction-follower into an interactive gaming companion. Not only can SIMA 2 follow human-language instructions in virtual worlds, it can now also think about its goals, converse with users, and improve itself over time. This is a significant step in the direction of Artificial General Intelligence (AGI), with important implications for the future of robotics and AI-embodiment in general."

...we present DS-STAR, a new agent designed to solve data science problems. DS-STAR introduces three key innovations: (1) a data file analysis module that automatically extracts context from varied data formats, including unstructured ones; (2) a verification stage where an LLM-based judge assesses the plan’s sufficiency at each step; and (3) a sequential planning process that iteratively refines the initial plan based on feedback. This iterative refinement allows DS-STAR to handle complex analyses that draw verifiable insights from multiple data sources. We demonstrate that DS-STAR achieves state-of-the-art performance on challenging benchmarks like DABStep, KramaBench, and DA-Code. It especially excels with tasks involving diverse, heterogeneous data files.

Paper

We’re excited to share that the Y2 is already in development!

Already Planned for Y2:

1）Hardware upgrades: New chipset, increased internal storage, and improved Bluetooth 2）Dedicated DAC for enhanced audio quality 3）New physical buttons: Power and volume controls 4）SD card slot for expanded storage 5）Improved file management 6）Better playlist support, especially M3U playback and easier playlist editing 7）Refined music playback logic with fewer menu layers 8）Support for more audio formats and improved metadata display 9）PC-created playlist compatibility

Yes! I really like what's planned for the new device and plan to get it on day one because I love my Y1. Wi-Fi is something I could do without.

Also, TIL under the hood it the Y1 is running Android.

Today we’re taking another big step on the path toward AGI and releasing Gemini 3.

It’s the best model in the world for multimodal understanding and our most powerful agentic and vibe coding model yet, delivering richer visualizations and deeper interactivity — all built on a foundation of state-of-the-art reasoning.

Today, we are introducing Google Antigravity, our new agentic development platform. While the core is a familiar AI-powered IDE experience with the best of Google’s models, Antigravity is evolving the IDE towards an agent-first future with browser control capabilities, asynchronous interaction patterns, and an agent-first product form factor that together, enable agents to autonomously plan and execute complex, end-to-end software tasks.

The originals of these books are in the Cornell University Library.

“I think that it paves the way for a bunch of different, maybe ultraportables, maybe more powerful laptops being Arm-based,”

Exactly. A true mobile computer would need an ARM chip.

OneXSugar is a step in the right direction, but they're not using the X-series and the OS is Android. Not to mention the form factor is still focused on gaming.

Lapatine says his goal has always been to operate with transparency. He wants Stereogum to feel like talking to a friend who goes to shows and tells you about cool stuff on Bandcamp. Ultimately, he wants to build a connection with readers, help them find good music, and do it with personality. That human element is key because, he says, “I’ve never discovered anyone from the algorithm.”

This series lives on my blog but has nothing to do with me. It exists to connect you, the human who’s reading this, with all the other wonderful humans that are still out there, spending their time making sure the old school web, the one made by the people, for the people, is not dying.

This is the web many people are missing, a web that is, in fact, still here, very much alive. Y’all are great.

Friday mornings are one of my favorites because I get to "meet" someone new through this series. Thanks for your work and dedication to this series.

I’ve updated Micro.blog with support for Day One journals.

This is cool!

The purpose of beets is to get your music collection right once and for all. It catalogs your collection, automatically improving its metadata as it goes using the MusicBrainz database. Then it provides a bouquet of tools for manipulating and accessing your music.

Inspired by WikiTok, I thought I'd make something to discover sounds uploaded to Wikimedia. From political speeches and bird noises to genuine bangers, it's mostly wholesome, though I cant guarantee it won't play you something horrible once in a while.

Rumored dates for the company’s first trifold have come and gone with the latest suggesting a December 5th launch in Korea, priced around $3,000.

$3k?! That's a high-end laptop. I'd consider paying that much for a true mobile computer.

Today, we’re taking the next step in building helpful experiences that keep users safe with Private AI Compute in the cloud, a new AI processing platform that combines our most capable Gemini models from the cloud with the same security and privacy assurances you expect from on-device processing. It's part of our ongoing commitment to deliver AI with safety and responsibility at the core.

Private AI Compute is built on a multi-layered system that is designed from the ground up around core security and privacy principles:

• One integrated Google tech stack: Private AI Compute runs on one seamless Google stack powered by our own custom Tensor Processing Units (TPUs). World-class privacy and security is integrated into this architecture with Titanium Intelligence Enclaves (TIE). This design enables Google AI features to use our most capable and intelligent Gemini models in the cloud, with our high standards for privacy and the same in-house computing infrastructure you already rely on for Gmail and Search.
• No access: Remote attestation and encryption are used to connect your device to the hardware-secured sealed cloud environment, allowing Gemini models to securely process your data within a specialized, protected space. This ensures sensitive data processed by Private AI Compute remains accessible only to you and no one else, not even Google.

Once you get beyond toy usage, LLM governance is a pain. That's exactly why we built Pydantic AI Gateway (PAIG)

What's included

• One key, many models: talk to OpenAI, Anthropic, Google Vertex, Groq, or AWS Bedrock with the same key. More providers (notably Azure) are on the way.
• Cost limits that stop spend: set daily, weekly, monthly and total caps at project, user, and key levels.
• Built-in observability: every request can be logged to Pydantic Logfire or any OpenTelemetry backend.
• Failover: route around provider outages automatically.
• Open source & self-hostable: AGPL-3.0 core, file-based config, deploy anywhere. Console and UI are closed source.
• Enterprise-ready: SSO via OIDC, granular permissions, and Cloudflare or on-prem deployment options.
• Low latency: Finally, and perhaps most importantly, PAIG runs on Cloudflare's globally distributed edge compute network, meaning absolutely minimal latency. If you're sitting in Berlin making a request to a model near Frankfurt, you'll connect to a PAIG service running in Berlin. After the first request, it won't need to call back to our central database, so using the gateway will add single-digit milliseconds to your response time. It might even be faster, as the request will run through Cloudflare's backbone to the model provider.

One of the longest-running and most well-known podcast listening apps, Stitcher was officially shut down by SiriusXM on August 29, 2023. The app originally launched in 2008, and was famous for its ability to "stream" audio (without the need to manually sync audio files to your device).

While my first podcast "app" was Zune, Stitcher was the first third-party app I used on a smartphone. Good memories. RIP Stitcher

With less involvement from the listener, less intentionality, it’s easy for music to simply become background noise. Research suggests that younger generations are discovering new artists at a lower rate than previous ones, and there’s a direct correlation between lower levels of music discovery and reliance on the algorithm. So, how do you find new music with intention?

The simplest and most traditional is through music media. There are countless sources of excellent music journalism and criticism, it’s just a matter of finding one that speaks to you.

Just like everything else on the internet, music has its influencers.

Sort of straddling the line between traditional music media and influencers is the world of Substack. There are tons of newsletters out there that serve up artist interviews, curated playlists, and deep dives into bands’ discographies.

Traditional radio can still be a solid source of new music if you turn away from large commercial stations owned by iHeartRadio and the like. Your local college station is a good place to start, but there are other non-commercial independent stations out there, like WFMU in New York, that steer clear of your standard pop fare.

In addition to traditional terrestrial stations, there are streaming internet stations. NTS Radio is one of the best...

...you should become a fan of labels, not just artists.

Ultimately, record labels are curators, and the best ones have a distinct identity. That doesn’t necessarily only mean releasing death metal records (though it can). It means building a vibe and a particular point of view that unifies the artists under a single umbrella.

...easily the best way to find new and interesting music is just to connect with other people who share your tastes. This can be as simple as getting recommendations from friends or an older sibling. (Or, if you’re trying to stay on top of things as you get older, a younger sibling.) But there are plenty of online communities for getting music recommendations.

Lastly, go see live music. Go see a band you know, but make sure you get there for the opener.

Great list. I've had success with all of these. Some examples.

• NPR's Tiny Desk Concerts is how I discovered Chicano Batman
• 107.1 Chicago Independent Radio Project (CHIRP) is how I discovered Lingua Ignota. Here's a list of other radio stations I listen to
• Salami Rose Joe Louis was an opener for Flying Lotus.
• As a Flying Lotus fan, I also follow many of the artists signed to his label, Brainfeeder

As I discover music, I try to curate my findings through playlists

Get inspired by what you can do with Claude

I figured since I deleted all my social media profiles, I might as well have one space for everything I’m doing.

Today, we are incredibly excited to announce the launch of the new Google Colab extension for Visual Studio Code.

Project Suncatcher is a moonshot exploring a new frontier: equipping solar-powered satellite constellations with TPUs and free-space optical links to one day scale machine learning compute in space.

Reading existing code is the one of the biggest, most expensive bottlenecks in software development.

To address this issue and improve your productivity, we're introducing Code Wiki, a platform that maintains a continuously updated, structured wiki for code repositories.

Hierarchical Reasoning Model (HRM) is a novel approach using two small neural networks recursing at different frequencies. This biologically inspired method beats Large Language models (LLMs) on hard puzzle tasks such as Sudoku, Maze, and ARC-AGI while trained with small models (27M parameters) on small data (around 1000 examples). HRM holds great promise for solving hard problems with small networks, but it is not yet well understood and may be suboptimal. We propose Tiny Recursive Model (TRM), a much simpler recursive reasoning approach that achieves significantly higher generalization than HRM, while using a single tiny network with only 2 layers. With only 7M parameters, TRM obtains 45% test-accuracy on ARC-AGI-1 and 8% on ARC-AGI-2, higher than most LLMs (e.g., Deepseek R1, o3-mini, Gemini 2.5 Pro) with less than 0.01% of the parameters.

Today, we’re beginning to pilot a new experience in a few regions that makes it easy for people to collaborate with each other—and with ChatGPT—in the same conversation. With group chats, you can bring friends, family, or coworkers into a shared space to plan, make decisions, or work through ideas together.

Listen to nature sounds, fall in love with the Earth

Recurrent Neural Networks (RNNs) laid the foundation for sequence modeling, but their intrinsic sequential nature restricts parallel computation, creating a fundamental barrier to scaling. This has led to the dominance of parallelizable architectures like Transformers and, more recently, State Space Models (SSMs). While SSMs achieve efficient parallelization through structured linear recurrences, this linearity constraint limits their expressive power and precludes modeling complex, nonlinear sequence-wise dependencies. To address this, we present ParaRNN, a framework that breaks the sequence-parallelization barrier for nonlinear RNNs. Building on prior work, we cast the sequence of nonlinear recurrence relationships as a single system of equations, which we solve in parallel using Newton's iterations combined with custom parallel reductions. Our implementation achieves speedups of up to 665x over naive sequential application, allowing training nonlinear RNNs at unprecedented scales. To showcase this, we apply ParaRNN to adaptations of LSTM and GRU architectures, successfully training models of 7B parameters that attain perplexity comparable to similarly-sized Transformers and Mamba2 architectures. To accelerate research in efficient sequence modeling, we release the ParaRNN codebase as an open-source framework for automatic training-parallelization of nonlinear RNNs, enabling researchers and practitioners to explore new nonlinear RNN models at scale.

Repo

"Paged Out! is a free experimental (one article == one page) technical magazine about programming (especially programming tricks!), hacking, security hacking, retro computers, modern computers, electronics, demoscene, and other similar topics.

It's made by the community for the community. And it's not-for-profit (though in time, we hope it will be self-sustained) - this means that the issues will always be free to download, share, and print."

"...we developed the Multi-modal Critical Thinking Agent, or MMCTAgent, for structured reasoning over long-form video and image data, available on GitHub and featured on Azure AI Foundry Labs.

Built on AutoGen, Microsoft’s open-source multi-agent system, MMCTAgent provides multimodal question-answering with a Planner–Critic architecture. This design enables planning, reflection, and tool-based reasoning, bridging perception and deliberation in multimodal tasks. It links language, vision, and temporal understanding, transforming static multimodal tasks into dynamic reasoning workflows.

Unlike conventional models that produce one-shot answers, MMCTAgent has modality-specific agents, including ImageAgent and VideoAgent, which include tools like get_relevant_query_frames() or object_detection-tool(). These agents perform deliberate, iterative reasoning—selecting the right tools for each modality, evaluating intermediate results, and refining conclusions through a Critic loop. This enables MMCTAgent to analyze complex queries across long videos and large image libraries with explainability, extensibility, and scalability."

START with your Main Feed and Category Feeds. The others are nice-to-haves but don't overwhelm yourself trying to do everything at once.

Today, at KubeCon NA 2025, we’re focused on making Kubernetes the most open and scalable platform for AI agents, with the introduction of Agent Sandbox.

At its core, Agent Sandbox is a new Kubernetes primitive built with the Kubernetes community that’s designed specifically for agent code execution and computer use, delivering the performance and scale needed for the next generation of agentic AI workloads. Foundationally built on gVisor with additional support for Kata Containers for runtime isolation, Agent Sandbox provides a secure boundary to reduce the risk of vulnerabilities that could lead to data loss, exfiltration or damage to production systems.

• We can formally prove two models behave identically.
• Use it to validate pruning / distillation work.
• Use it to guard model retraining in CI/CD.
• If models diverge, Z3 gives the input that caused the divergence.
  
  No brute force, no test dataset guesses.
  
  Just mathematically guaranteed model equivalence (or a counterexample).

Interesting use of Z3

...as comments sections grew, they became less useful and more prone to toxic, hateful and counter-deliberative discussions...comments are great when the topic of blogs is more narrow, and the blogger is directly engaged. But in the context of broad and widely popular communities, they had the capability to fester.

As the web continued to grow, the issue grew. Without dedicated moderation, which many publications did try, comments sections became discordant and a liability...Washington Post was one of the first publications to remove comments, citing a lack of civility.

That trend has continued, as many sites chose to outsource discussions to social media platforms and third party networks. For sites that can manage comments, it is done through careful moderation and clear rules. But most major publications and platforms have simply opted out.

Comment sections continue to exist, but their presence is far diminished from its peak. The ActivityPub standard, the backbone of the Fediverse, was created as a partial response to their decline. Whether or not comments will find some new form is a story still unwritten.

My site probably isn't big enough (I don't know since I don't have analytics) but maintenance and moderation are reasons I don't support comments.

You want to have control of your own destiny. We call it digital sovereignty. In the old days, the early days of the web, anybody used to be able to make a website. So that feeling of sovereignty as an individual being enabled and being a peer with all the other people on the web, that is what we are still fighting for, and in fact, we need to rebuild.

So many gems from this episode but this is what resonated the most with me.

listen to college radio stations