In the last three months I’ve had people forward me four separate examples of a CEO losing his or her mind over AI. What’s been striking to me is the similarity in each case: It would be an “all hands” email in which the CEO talks up how amazing LLM tools are and saying that […]
_Time for your weekly edition of the Defector Funbag. Got something on your mind?__Email the Funbag_ _. You can also read Drew over at_ SFGATE_, and_ buy Drew’s books_while_ you’re at it_. Today, we're talking 60 Minutes, LLMs, sandwiches, great history class movies, and more._
Your letters:
Kevin:
I’ve spoken to enough teachers and professors to know that LLM tools are absolutely a challenge for many of them in the classroom. Many struggle with making sure they’re actually teaching students how to learn, worrying that the tools are doing the work for them, and skipping over the actual learning. Many are (understandably) resorting […]
'AI detectors' are unreliable, and stylometry alone is insufficient. The McFoxo Method instead sniffs out synthetic text extrusion using a theory-of-mind approach.
Late last week, the Commonwealth Foundation announced the five regional winners of its 2026 Short Story Prize. The quintet will move on to a final round of judging ahead of the grand prize announcement on June 30, though we can probably count out Caribbean regional winner Jamir Nazir. It seems Nazir's "The Serpent In The Grove," published last Tuesday in _Granta_ , was written by a large-language…
I wish this were hyperbole. It's not. The Cult of Claude has reached a new low.
Leaving agents do agent things for a few weeks, sometimes with adequate oversight.
Proposing a voluntary, machine-readable AI content disclosure scheme for OCaml spanning opam packages, dune, and per-module attributes, aligned with the W3C AI Content Disclosure vocabulary.
I remember, pretty clearly, my excitement over the early World Wide Web. I had been on the internet for a year or two at that point, mostly using IRC, Usenet, and Gopher (along with email, naturally). Some friends I had met on Usenet were students at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and told me […]
I thought language was too complicated for machines to understand, until I got sick. a lifelong, meandering journey of parsing, learning, and fixing my broken body.
what hath Amanda Askell wrought?
I first learned about the AI writing assistant Grammarly nearly a decade ago, when their YouTube ads suddenly sprang into ubiquity, clinging to my precious videos like a swarm of spotted lanternflies. At first this seemed innocuous, the high-pitched whine of a buzzy new startup that would soon fizzle into obscurity. Mostly I was confused by their gargantuan ad budget. I was not alone. But the ads…
Today's links AI "journalists" prove that media bosses don't give a shit: In case there was ever any doubt. Hey look at this: Delights to delectate. Object permanence: Eggflation x excuseflation; Haunted Mansion stretch portraits; "Lost Souls"; Time Magazine x the first Worldcon; Obama v Freedom of Information Act; Ragequitting jihadi doxxes ISIS; OSI v DRM in standards. Upcoming appearances:…
Generalist LLMs are not lawyers, and evaluating them that way is a waste of time. Evaluating LLMs with useful specialized prompts (and eventually, with specialized legal harnesses) is where the work must happen.
the last post about ai. (until next time)
I read an interesting post by Wojtek Powiertowski in partial response to Khürt Williams's excellent essay against defining the indie web by its enemies, which had inspired me to write a short post here and a long-form essay on NLJ. I agree that we should advocate for good tech in terms of what makes it good instead of in terms of bad tech (to put it roughly). Here, Mr. Powiertowski tackles AI,…
We live in a stupidly polarizing world where nuance is apparently not allowed. Everyone wants you to be for or against something—and nowhere is this more exhausting than with AI. There are those who insist that it’s all bad and there is nothing of value in it. And there are those who think it’s all […]
Hosting the Conservation Evidence conference at Pembroke, recovering from the India trip, and keeping up with LLM developments.
Wrapping up 25 days of agentic coding with a Claude Code OCaml plugin marketplace to share the skills and tools developed throughout the series.
Tuatara is a feed aggregator that integrates Claude to evolve and patch its own code when encountering parsing errors, embodying the concept of self-healing software.
Introducing unpac, a tool that unifies git and package management into a single workflow where all code dependencies live in one repository as trackable branches.
Materialising opam metadata into git submodules and monorepos, enabling cross-cutting fixes and unified odoc3 documentation across dozens of OCaml libraries.
Porting the W3C's Nu HTML Validator from Java to OCaml and running in the browser dynamically
Porting the Nu HTML Validator's language detection to OCaml, then optimizing from 115MB to 28MB and fixing WASM array limits for browser deployment.
Building an OCaml Zulip bot framework with functional handlers, and pivoting from TOML to INI codecs for Python configparser compatibility
Building tomlt, a pure OCaml TOML 1.1 parser with bidirectional codecs following the jsont design patterns
Building an OCaml JMAP client that runs in browsers and CLI, then using it to build personalised email workflows for taming notification overload.
Building interactive OCaml tutorials that compile to JavaScript, using agents to generate executable documentation that teaches protocols like JSON Pointer while you code review.
Vibespiling JustHTML from Python to pure OCaml, achieving 100% pass rate on the browser html5lib test suite using agentic workflows.
Vibe coding an OCaml library for the Karakeep bookmarking service by giving an agent a live API key and letting it debug jsont codecs against the real service.