29 July 2025

31 links · Tuesday

ScienceAdviser: Cats confuse AI

Today in Science and science: Peacock feathers can be lasers, making proteins less mysterious, and more

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jola.dev - When Software Engineers Think They Need More Focus Time

Johanna Larsson is a software engineer, manager, writer, speaker. With over 14 years of experience in software development and management, she has worked with clients from various industries, including finance, healthcare, and education. She is passionate abou…

The Importance of Wasting Time | Stephan Joppich

When I was a teenager, I spent my entire free time playing video games. Mostly League of Legends but also Call of Duty, Age of Empires, or Minecraft. This wasn’t a casual hobby. It was an obsession. I would come home from school, toss my backpack into the corn…

Do support that doesn’t scale

Many companies hurt their support by scaling too soon with tools meant for volume, not quality. This piece explores a different approach – one focused on speed, empathy, and fixing root causes.

Notes on Robot Vacuums

Notes I collected while shopping for a robot vacuum - all the confusing features and tech I had to figure out.

Obsidian Tricks: Entity Notes

An entity is a person, place, or organization that you want to track in your Second Brain. By creating separate notes in your Obsidian vault for each entity and using the power of backlinks, you can create a rich, interconnected knowledge base.

The Blueprint For A Modern Day LLM

Modern day LLMs stack started from a Transformer architecture, most refined & revolutionized by the attention mechanism as provided in 'Attention is All You Need'. The basic idea is that you can avoid using compute heavy models like RNNs by creating Query, Key…

The Real Ask

When someone comes to you with a question to do something, instead of blindly doing the ask, take a step back and try to understand what they actually want to achieve. Often this task might actually not be the best way to achieve the goal they are set out to d…

You are what you measure (even in open source) | DUNK

Transparency in open-source software A lot of effort is wasted in volunteering. Especially when people are giving away their time for free, I think we need to be just as careful as what we point their time at as if they were charging for their time. For solo p…

How Rewriting Training Data Improved Kimi 2’s Performance

Two weeks ago, Beijing-based Moonshot AI launched Kimi K2, an open source model that rivaled the coding capabilities of larger, closed models. It’s a really impressive model (though it’s coding capabilities have since been overshadowed by Qwen 3 Coder), especi…

Structural-Demographic Theory

The causes of revolutions and major rebellions are in many ways similar to processes that cause earthquakes (Goldstone 1991: 35). In both revolutions and earthquakes it is useful to distinguish the…