标签：#AR

Recently, while working on an in-progress open-source framework called Projector, I ran into a (not particularly novel) issue: one of it's internal packages ( core ) had grown during this period, and was not nearly as flyweight as it needed to be in the browser. The result was 10-20kbs of unnecessary machinery getting pulled in. I noticed this while running examples. I was consistently hitting a wall in bundle sizes that was surprisingly difficult to get past, even for someone as stubborn and relentless as I am. Naturally, I turned to Claude and ChatGPT to help me with this, and ended up using ChatGPT 5.5 with Codex as I find that, with the "precise" output mode, it tends to be a little more honest than Opus 4.8 these days. I shared exported HAR network logs with it, having it go through the chunks to confirm where the bulk was; consistently, it confirmed that the issue was around an entangling of authoring/resolution code with runtime code in core that was pulling in too much to the browser. The technical details here aren't really important, but I'm using them to illustrate a larger point. We then iterated through a lot of different solutions—I setup a "goal" in codex with benchmarks to hit, and gave it a bunch of constraints, context, and tooling. Finally, after about 2-3 hours of looping against that goal, it completed. Looking through the git diff, I noticed something odd—it had duplicated the result of the resolved module, so it could skip the resolution machinery and thus drop it from the browser bundle (again, technical details not really relevant). It hit the rough kb benchmarks, respected all constraints, utilized all context and skills available, and avoided importing the machinery that we both aligned on being the core problem. It provided an elegant, coherent, well-written api, implemented a surgical, well-tested, well-designed solution, and convincingly defended its work when I queried about the implementation. That sounds great, right? In fact, I thin

Startup Baseten is reportedly close to finalizing a $1.5 billion round at a $13 billion as the “inference gold rush" marches on.

Every connected device on your desk, from a smart plug to a fitness band to a hobbyist ESP32 board, runs on a descendant of one tiny chip that was never meant to change the world. In 1971, Intel released the 4004, the first commercially available microprocessor. It was not built for computers, robots, or the internet. It was built to run a desk calculator. The story of how a calculator chip became the foundation of modern IoT is one of the most instructive in all of electronics. A calculator contract that got out of hand The 4004 began as a job for hire. A Japanese calculator company called Busicom approached Intel in 1969 wanting a set of custom chips for a new line of printing calculators. The original plan called for around a dozen separate, purpose-built integrated circuits, each wired to do one fixed task. It was the standard approach of the era: if you wanted a device to do something, you designed silicon that did exactly that and nothing else. Intel engineer Ted Hoff looked at the sprawling design and proposed something radical. Instead of a pile of single-purpose chips, why not build one general-purpose processor that could be told what to do through software? A program stored in memory could make the same chip behave like a calculator today and something else entirely tomorrow. Stanley Mazor helped shape the architecture, and a newly arrived engineer named Federico Faggin turned the concept into a working device, inventing the silicon-gate design techniques that made it physically possible. Masatoshi Shima, Busicom's representative, worked alongside them on the logic. 2,300 transistors that started everything When the 4004 was announced on November 15, 1971, it packed about 2,300 transistors onto a single sliver of silicon. By modern standards that is almost nothing; a current smartphone chip holds tens of billions. But the leap was not about raw count. It was about the idea. For the first time, a complete central processing unit existed on one chip that an

Anthropic still can’t distribute Claude Mythos or Fable 5 after running afoul of the Trump administration. But no one can say exactly what the company did wrong.

TechCrunch spoke to investors to find the hottest startups in the Spring 2026 YC batch. Some of them commanded valuations of over $175 million, VCs said.

Dads are traditionally tough to shop for—let me help with these handpicked gift ideas for fathers with great taste.

On today’s Uncanny Valley, we dive into the dysfunction in Meta’s newly formed AI unit and why it’s been driving already-low employee morale even further into the ground.

I’ve been a software engineer for more than 12 years. And like many developers, I’ve been watching AI improve at an incredible speed. Every new model seems smarter than the one before it. Tasks that used to take hours can now be done in minutes. Problems that required deep research can often be solved with a simple prompt. A few years ago, we used to say: Think of AI as a junior developer. That made sense at the time. But today, I don’t think that’s true anymore. AI still makes mistakes. Sometimes very obvious ones. But it also comes up with solutions that surprise me. Sometimes it finds an approach I wouldn’t have thought of immediately. Sometimes it helps me solve a problem much faster than I could on my own. And honestly, that’s both exciting and a little scary. But the biggest thing AI changed wasn’t how I write software. It changed how I think about my work. For most of my career, I thought I loved writing code. I spent years doing it. At work, on side projects, and whenever I had free time. Then AI became part of my daily workflow. In the last month, I’ve built more projects than I normally would in an entire year. Ideas that had been sitting in my notes for years suddenly became possible. And that’s when I realized something important: I don’t actually love writing code. I love building things. I love taking an idea and turning it into something real. I love creating products, solving problems, and seeing something that only existed in my head become something people can use. Code was simply the tool I used to do that. And now AI is another tool. That’s why I don’t hate it. In many ways, AI has helped me build more than ever before. It helped me revisit old ideas that I never had time to work on. It helped me experiment faster. It even encouraged me to explore areas outside software development, like animation and content creation. And this isn’t just happening to programmers. AI is changing design. It’s changing writing. It’s changing marketing. It’s changin

You don't have to have a Pixel Watch to use Google Wallet. Here's how to set it up on your Galaxy Watch.

When you talk to ChatGPT about a subject you understand well, you quickly notice something. The first answer is rarely the final answer. You add context. You correct an assumption. You explain what has already been tried. You point out that one proposed solution conflicts with another part of the system. After a few iterations, the answer becomes useful. The same thing happens when AI writes code for real products. The difference is that a slightly incorrect explanation in a chat is usually harmless. Slightly incorrect code can become part of your product, pass a superficial review, and remain there for years. This is why successful AI adoption in software engineering is not primarily about generating more code. It is about context engineering : giving AI enough context, constraints, and feedback to generate code that belongs in your system. The First Answer Is Usually Not Enough AI coding tools are very good at producing plausible solutions. That word matters: plausible. The code may compile. The tests may pass. The implementation may even look clean when reviewed in isolation. But software does not exist in isolation. A change must fit the broader system architecture : the current architecture existing domain rules security requirements operational constraints established conventions previous technical decisions future product direction An AI assistant does not automatically understand those things. It knows the code it can see and the engineering context you provide. Everything outside that window must be inferred. And inference is where divergence begins. If you trust the first response without validating its assumptions, you are usually not accelerating engineering. You are accelerating uncertainty. Lack of Context Creates Duplication One of the first visible effects is duplication. AI does not necessarily know that your application already has: a validation helper for the same domain rule an established authorization pattern a shared API client a retry mechani

It's unclear whether the system is currently intact.

“You would not believe the texts I got from these tech guys,” NYT reporters Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan quote Donald Trump as telling associates in an upcoming book.

For the past four years, a sprawling Android-based botnet called Popa has forced millions of consumer TV boxes to relay Internet traffic linked to advertising fraud, account takeovers, and mass data-scraping efforts. This week, researchers from multiple security firms concluded that the Popa botnet is linked to NetNut, a "residential proxy" provider operated by the publicly-traded Israeli firm Alarum Technologies Ltd [NASDAQ: ALAR].

“People just really want to take back control of their time, their lives, their attention... They’re down for whatever helps them do that.”

Biggest AI firms will likely recoil at Bernie Sanders' AI wealth fund.

Karamo Brown, famous for his pep talks on Netflix’s “Queer Eye,” has jumped into the wellness and AI space with his new app, Kē. After spending a year and a half focusing on his own journey—from fitness and nutrition to meditation, sobriety, relationships, and personal growth—Brown wants to help others do the same. Kē offers […]

The software engineers filed a complaint with Seattle’s civil rights office accusing Amazon of illegally retaliating against them for expressing their personal political beliefs.

You walk into the RFP briefing. Your competitor has 200 people, 97% AI coverage, and a 4-day delivery promise. You have 15 people and a proposal you haven't even finished writing. Do you bet on better tech, or on understanding people better — and playing dirtier when you have to? This story is your answer. Act I · The Crack When Finova's RFP landed, everyone in the industry knew how big this was. Cross-border payment system. Multi-currency settlement + compliance + risk. Their last deployment had a P0 incident — an exchange rate module drifted by four decimal places in an edge case, and audit chased it for two months. So Finova's CTO made it clear: a $1.8M contract, and whoever signs off owns the result. $1.8M. Enough to keep a small testing company alive for a whole year. Plenty of firms showed up at the briefing. But only two were real contenders. QualiGuard — mid-sized, just closed their Series A, 200 people, their own AI testing platform called Aegis. A $1.8M contract was barely a rounding error for them — but with Series A money comes the pressure to show revenue growth for the next round, and Finova was a trophy client in the cross-border payments space. The case study was worth more than the project itself. Derek stood at the podium, flipping through slides packed with numbers: Aegis delivers 97.2% test automation coverage. Full Finova platform testing in four business days. No "we'll try." Just "we can do it." VeriTest — small, fifteen people. Marcus spent the whole morning working the room with Finova's people. I sat in the back row with nothing. Marcus slid back over and leaned in: "Their PPT makes yours look like a joke." I didn't answer. I was watching Derek's boss. Sarah — QualiGuard's VP, Derek's direct supervisor. She sat in the front row, off to the side, and never once looked at Derek during his entire presentation. She was on her phone. As one of the few women running a technical department, I watched her longer than I watched Derek. When Derek fla

This is Part 13 of my series on the Microsoft Agent Framework. You can read the original post over on lukaswalter.dev . In the previous article , we looked at workflows. Workflows make sense when the process itself needs structure: state, checkpoints, events, human approvals, and resumable execution. This post is the bridge from Agent Framework into RAG. I plan on doing a full RAG deep dive sometime later. The practical question for now is smaller: How do I connect an Agent Framework agent to private application knowledge without stuffing every document into the prompt? For agents, RAG is less about adding more text and more about giving the agent a controlled retrieval path. The agent should fetch the right context at the point where it needs it. Agents do not know your private data Your company documents, product catalog, tickets, rules, policies, runbooks, and internal knowledge base live outside the model. The model has generic knowledge. Your application has private knowledge. Treat those as separate systems. You can paste some private data into the prompt, and for a demo that may be enough. But this falls apart quickly: full documents are expensive to send repeatedly long prompts are fragile stale documents may sit next to current ones users may not be allowed to see every source long context still needs selection The last point is easy to underestimate. A larger context window lets you send more text. It does not decide which text is correct, current, relevant, or permitted. Do not give the agent all knowledge. Give it the right context at the moment it needs it. Retrieval owns that job. The minimal RAG shape The basic RAG loop is small: user question -> retrieve relevant chunks -> pass chunks to the agent -> agent answers using that context For documents, the longer pipeline usually looks like this: documents -> chunks -> embeddings -> vector store -> search -> retrieved context -> agent response Documents are split into smaller chunks. Those chunks are embe

Guardrails positions itself as a populist political movement that runs on small donations from people in the trenches of the AI boom.