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Here's the problem nobody talks about: the reason most AI outputs are mediocre isn't the model — it's that you asked for a final answer and got one. A model with no friction produces the path of least resistance. It pattern-matches to "good-enough" and stops. It doesn't know what your bar for quality is. It doesn't know what logic you'd push back on, what tone would make your audience tune out, or what structural flaw a sharp reader would catch in the first 30 seconds. It just fills the token space with the most statistically probable response and calls it a day. So the output hits your clipboard. You read it. You sigh. Then you spend 40 minutes editing something that should have come out right the first time. There's a better way — and it exploits the fact that AI critique is significantly sharper than AI generation. The Core Insight: Models Are Better Critics Than They Are Authors This sounds counterintuitive, so stay with me. When you ask an LLM to generate something from scratch, it operates in "produce plausible content" mode. The pressure is to fill the blank. But when you ask a model to critique an existing piece — especially if you hand it a specific evaluative persona — it switches into "find the gap between what is and what should be" mode. That's a fundamentally different cognitive task, and it's one where models consistently perform better. Research on iterative self-refinement in LLMs (Madaan et al., 2023) shows that when models are given their own output and asked to improve it with explicit feedback criteria, quality scores improve substantially across writing, code, and reasoning tasks. The key variable wasn't model size or prompt verbosity — it was the presence of a structured feedback loop. The mechanism is simple: the critique generates tokens that constrain and guide the rewrite. Those critique tokens become working context. The model rewrites against them. The output is necessarily better-fitted to the evaluation criteria than anything a single-

RQ (Redis Queue) is a delightfully simple way to run background jobs in Python. That simplicity is also why teams under-monitor it: it just works, until a downstream API gets slow or a bad deploy ships, and jobs start failing in bulk — quietly. Here's what to watch and how to get alerted before a customer tells you. RQ failures don't announce themselves When a job raises, RQ moves it to the FailedJobRegistry and moves on. The worker keeps running; nothing crashes. If you're not looking at that registry, the failure is invisible — the same trap BullMQ, Celery, and every robust queue share. So the job is to reach into the queue's state and turn it into a signal. The four signals that matter for RQ Failure count / rate — jobs landing in the FailedJobRegistry over a window. Backlog — how many jobs are queued vs. being worked; is the worker keeping up? Latency — how long jobs take, and how long they wait before a worker picks them up. Worker liveness — are your workers actually alive and heartbeating? Where to read them RQ exposes queue and registry state directly: from redis import Redis from rq import Queue from rq.registry import FailedJobRegistry , StartedJobRegistry redis = Redis () q = Queue ( " default " , connection = redis ) queued = len ( q ) # backlog failed = FailedJobRegistry ( queue = q ) # failures started = StartedJobRegistry ( queue = q ) # in-flight print ( " queued: " , queued ) print ( " failed: " , len ( failed )) print ( " started: " , len ( started )) Poll this on an interval and store the series — a single snapshot hides the trend , which is the part that matters. For failures specifically, walk the registry to get the actual exceptions: for job_id in failed . get_job_ids (): job = q . fetch_job ( job_id ) print ( job . id , job . exc_info . splitlines ()[ - 1 ] if job . exc_info else "" ) Two gotchas: Group by exception, not by job. A thousand jobs failing with the same traceback is one incident. Normalize the message (strip IDs, timestamps, host

A lot of Robot Framework projects still look like plain Selenium scripts with .robot file extensions. Someone imports webdriver , creates driver = webdriver.Chrome() , then calls find_element and send_keys in Python helpers. Robot Framework runs the suite, but readable keywords, shared libraries, and consistent waits never show up in the tests. If you already use Robot Framework with SeleniumLibrary , you do not need the raw WebDriver API. SeleniumLibrary gives you high-level keywords. The Page Object Model gives you structure. Together they keep tests short and UI changes localized. We published a small MIT template that shows the layout: rf-seleniumlibrary-pageobject-template . It targets Sauce Demo — clone it, run four tests, fork the folder structure. What breaks when you mix in raw WebDriver driver = webdriver . Chrome () driver . find_element ( By . ID , " user-name " ). send_keys ( " standard_user " ) driver . find_element ( By . ID , " password " ). send_keys ( " secret_sauce " ) driver . find_element ( By . ID , " login-button " ). click () Fine for a script. Painful in a growing suite. Locators spread across helpers and test files. Waits become time.sleep(2) in one place and missing in another. You end up maintaining SeleniumLibrary and a parallel WebDriver stack. CI fails on a Tuesday night and you are not sure which path opened the browser. Before and after Before After driver.find_element(...).send_keys(...) Login With Valid Credentials ${VALID_USER} ${VALID_PASSWORD} Locators in every file LoginLocators.USERNAME in one module Ad-hoc sleeps wait_until_element_is_visible in BasePage.click() Two browser stacks One SeleniumLibrary instance per suite Four layers Layer Job Example Locators Selectors per screen login_locators.py BasePage Shared waits and actions click() , enter_text() Page library Screen keywords LoginPage.login() Robot test Scenario only Inventory Should Be Visible Folder layout in the repo: resources/locators/ → selectors pages/ → Python pa

I’ve been thinking about a small image-processing problem lately: how to reduce an image to a limited palette without making it look muddy. This comes up in a lot of places: pixel art tools printable pattern generators low-color previews LED matrix displays icons and small thumbnails craft or grid-based workflows The easy version is: pick the nearest color for every pixel. The hard version is: keep the important shapes readable after the palette gets much smaller. Nearest color is only the baseline A simple nearest-color pass usually works like this: Take each pixel. Compare it with every color in the target palette. Pick the closest one. Replace the pixel. That gives you a valid output, but not always a good one. The problem is that closest is local. It does not know whether the whole image still reads well. A face can lose warm midtones. A shadow can turn into a flat dark blob. A small highlight can disappear. Skin, fur, fabric, and background colors can collapse into the same bucket. So palette reduction is not just a color problem. It is also a structure problem. RGB distance can be misleading A common first attempt is Euclidean distance in RGB: function rgbDistance(a, b) { return Math.sqrt( (a.r - b.r) ** 2 + (a.g - b.g) ** 2 + (a.b - b.b) ** 2 ); } This is easy to implement, but it does not match human perception very well. Two colors can be numerically close in RGB and still feel different. Other colors can be farther apart numerically but visually acceptable. A better approach is to compare colors in a more perceptual color space, such as Lab or OKLab. You still have to be careful, but the distance metric starts closer to what the eye notices. Dithering helps, but it changes the style Error diffusion, like Floyd-Steinberg dithering, can preserve gradients and perceived detail with fewer colors. That is useful when the output is meant to look like a low-color image. But dithering is not always desirable. In grid-based outputs, it can create scattered single-p

The Smartest AI Workflow I Have Ever Seen Ran on Three Pages of Prompt Project managers are quietly building their own AI chief of staff. The duct tape is the interesting part. A few weeks ago I was talking with a project manager who runs large industrial projects. Real ones, with safety officers and subcontractors and go-live dates that cost serious money when they slip. Somewhere in the conversation he mentioned, almost apologetically, a side project of his. Every week, he feeds an AI model his project charter, the project plan, the risk register, the action tracker, and the last six weeks of status reports. Then he adds the current week's meeting notes and any relevant emails. On top of all that sits a prompt he has iterated on for months. It covers three A4 pages in font size 10. Out the other end comes a list of specific open topics he needs to chase down before writing his end-of-week status report. He has a second prompt that helps him prepare sharp questions for the weekly team meeting. A third one, about 200 lines, assembles everything and drafts the status report itself. He even runs scenario checks: the safety officer found discrepancies during vehicle inspections, the subcontractor says compliance takes two extra weeks, does this move the critical path and the go-live date? He called it manual and clunky. I think it is one of the most sophisticated AI workflows I have ever seen a working professional build, in any field. And I have been building software for a long time. But he was right about the clunky part. And the reason it is clunky tells you almost everything about where AI in project work is actually stuck. The analysis was never the hard part Here is the thing he said that stuck with me, close to verbatim: The AI is good at analysing lots of text sources. The challenge is to obtain all the information, and the effort to write it down comprehensively. Read that again. The intelligence is not the bottleneck. The bottleneck is assembly. Every single

A fintech RAG pipeline poisoned its own vector store and the LLM-as-a-judge validator approved every hallucination. The fix: gate writes with code.

Muse Image allows users to generate AI images using photos from public Instagram accounts. As long as a person's profile is public, another user can tag that account and use their images as part of an AI-generated creation.

Runtime authorization for Claude, Cursor, Codex and OpenClaw Discussion | Link

If you’re looking for a relatively affordable way to cut down on cooling costs, Google’s Nest Thermostat can help. It’s packed with smart controls and energy-saving features, and right now it’s on sale in white for $79 ($50 off), which is its best price of the year, at Amazon. The smart thermostat is quick to […]

The company is taking a modular approach to designing these chips, anticipating that their needs will change as AI evolves rapidly by the time the chips are in production.

Having proven how valuable compute can be, the company finds itself at the center of a market everyone wants to be in — while simpler technologies and less interesting companies get rich on the sidelines.

Windows 11 updates could soon include fixes for more security issues at once. Microsoft said in a blog post on Thursday that it's now using AI to "identify potential issues earlier," which means "customers will see a higher volume of security updates included in each security release." Hackers, even amateurs, have increasingly been using AI […]

GitHub had over 14,000 repositories. Fewer than half had clear ownership. Here's how we gave every active repository a validated owner in under 45 days, archived the rest, and made ownership the foundation for everything that followed. The post How GitHub gave every repository a durable owner appeared first on The GitHub Blog .

The soft, oddly intimate home-chore robot has been given some very tactile hands.

Every system that does "semantic" anything — RAG pipelines, recommendation engines, image search, dedup — boils down to one operation: given this vector, find the closest ones out of millions. The vectors are embeddings, a few hundred to a couple thousand numbers each, and "closest" means closest in meaning. You'd assume the database either scans all of them (slow but correct) or uses some clever tree to jump straight to the answer. It does neither. Instead it deliberately settles for the approximately closest vectors — and that compromise is the entire reason vector search is fast enough to exist. Two algorithms do almost all the heavy lifting in practice, in pgvector, Qdrant, FAISS, and the rest: IVF and HNSW . Here's what they're actually doing under the hood, and how to choose between them. Why "exact" is off the table The natural objection is: why approximate? Just find the real nearest neighbor. In two or three dimensions you could — a k-d tree or similar structure prunes away big regions of space and finds the true closest point quickly. The trouble is that embeddings live in hundreds of dimensions, and high-dimensional space is deeply weird. It's called the curse of dimensionality . As dimensions grow, the distance to your nearest point and the distance to your farthest point drift toward being almost the same. Formally, the contrast (d_max − d_min) / d_min shrinks toward zero. When everything is roughly equidistant from everything else, a tree can't confidently say "skip this whole branch, it's too far" — the bounding regions all overlap, every branch looks plausible, and the search degrades into checking nearly everything. Exact indexes quietly collapse back into brute force. So we change the question. Instead of "prove you found the nearest," we ask "quickly find something very probably among the nearest." That's approximate nearest neighbor (ANN) search, and it swaps a guarantee for speed. The quality knob becomes recall : of the true top-k neighbors, wh

I recently commented on Jonathan Lewis’s blog, Savepoint Funny , where I compared how PostgreSQL handles uniqueness differently: “PostgreSQL resolves uniqueness through heap tuple visibility". This deserves a more detailed explanation. In Oracle, unique indexes store unique entries because the B-tree key is the index key, preventing duplicates. Non-unique indexes add the ROWID to ensure that all entries are physically unique, even when indexed column values are duplicated. In PostgreSQL, all indexes, even unique ones, created explicitly by CREATE UNIQUE INDEX or implicitly to enforce a unique constraint, behave like non-unique indexes by appending the TID (tuple ID, similar to Oracle's ROWID) to the index key. This indicates that the index itself doesn't guarantee physical uniqueness, allowing multiple entries to have identical logical keys but point to different heap tuples. The actual uniqueness verification occurs at the heap level, not within the index entries. Initially, this might seem unusual—a unique index that permits duplicates. However, PostgreSQL requires this because of its MVCC system. MVCC allows duplicate entries to coexist in an index, since they can represent different versions of the same logical row. Still, PostgreSQL must guarantee that no MVCC snapshot views two rows with the same index key. Oracle doesn't face this issue because its MVCC implementation also versions index blocks, allowing a single index version to maintain unique keys. Let’s show that. Page inspect In PostgreSQL, the heap contains the table data, and index entries point to heap tuples. Visibility depends on the heap header, especially the transaction information. Index scans often visit the heap pages to check visibility, except for index-only scans, which use the heap's visibility maps as an optimization. B-tree indexes can store entries for multiple versions of the same logical row, including versions that are no longer visible to current snapshots. To ensure uniqueness, the

How I moved from a traditional web application mindset to exploring local-first architecture I wanted to build a simple software tool for my personal use. Nothing complicated. Something in the category of tools people build for themselves: A personal expense tracker A budgeting application A private knowledge management tool A personal organization system The important characteristic was this: The data belonged to one person. It was not a social application. It was not a collaboration platform. It did not need users interacting with each other. There was no requirement for: Public profiles Sharing updates Real-time collaboration Social features It was simply a tool that helped one person manage their own information. When I started thinking about building it, my first instinct was the most natural one for me. I am a web application developer. My comfort zone is building web applications. So my first thought was: "Why not build a Ruby on Rails application?" Something like: User | Web Application | Ruby on Rails API | PostgreSQL Database This is an architecture I have worked with many times. The workflow is familiar: Create models Build controllers Add authentication Store data in a database Deploy the application Access it from anywhere This is a proven architecture. For many products, this is exactly the right approach. But while thinking about this project, I asked myself a different question: Am I choosing this architecture because the problem requires it, or because it is the architecture I already know? That question changed the direction completely. Understanding The Actual Problem Before choosing technology, I wanted to understand the nature of the problem. What kind of application was I actually building? There is a big difference between building: A social network A marketplace A collaboration platform A communication application versus building: A personal tool A private utility A single-user productivity application In the first category, the server is the

Last week I open sourced FableCut , a Premiere-style video editor that runs in the browser and that AI agents can operate. It hit the front page of Hacker News ( thread ), and the questions there made me realize the interesting part isn't the editor. It's one design decision: the project file is the interface. The usual way, and why I flipped it Most AI video tools hide the edit behind an API. You call addClip() , applyFilter() , and the tool owns the state. If you want a human to touch the result, you build a whole collaboration layer. FableCut does the opposite. The entire timeline lives in one JSON document, project.json : media, clips, tracks, keyframes, transitions, markers. The editor UI reads it. The export renders it. And anything that can write JSON can edit video: Claude Code through MCP, a Python script, jq , or you with a text editor. { "id" : "c_title" , "kind" : "text" , "track" : "V3" , "start" : 0 , "duration" : 2.2 , "props" : { "text" : "HANDMADE" , "font" : "Bebas Neue" , "glow" : 45 , "textAnim" : "letter-pop" } } That clip is a glowing kinetic caption. There is no API call that creates it. Writing it into the file IS creating it. SSE as a doorbell, not a data channel The first question on HN was "what's the benefit of SSE here?" Fair question, because the SSE channel does almost nothing, and that's the point. The server watches the project file with fs.watch , debounces 150ms, and pushes the literal string change to the browser. No payload. The browser re-fetches the project and re-renders. The whole mechanism is about 15 lines on a bare node:http server. Why not WebSockets? Because the data only flows one way. Everything that writes (the UI, an agent, a shell script) goes through REST or the filesystem. The browser only ever needs to hear "something changed, go look." An event with no payload can't arrive out of order, and a missed event costs nothing because the next fetch has the latest state anyway. The revision counter, or: how a human and

TLDR; I got tired of babysitting N terminal tabs of five different coding-agent CLIs. So I built agentproto — one daemon that drives Claude Code, Codex, Hermes, opencode, and Mastra through the same lifecycle, and actually supervises them. Why I built a daemon to drive every AI coding agent from one interface I have a confession: at any given moment I have Claude Code, Codex, and Hermes running in parallel terminal tabs, and I cannot remember which flag spawns which, which one eats --prompt , which one needs --cwd vs cd , and which one will hang forever if I close the laptop lid. simonw described the feeling on Hacker News recently — "Today I have Claude Code and Codex CLI and Codex Web running, often in parallel" — and called it a real jump in cognitive load compared to a year ago. aantix asked, also on HN: "how does everyone visually organize the multiple terminal tabs open for these numerous agents in various states?" I didn't have a good answer. So I built one. It's called agentproto . It is one daemon and one CLI that drives any coding-agent CLI — Claude Code, Codex, Hermes, opencode, Mastra, and a few more — through the same start / prompt / monitor / kill lifecycle, so you stop memorizing five different CLIs. On top of that lifecycle it adds the supervision layer people keep hand-rolling by hand: durable policy gates, nested orchestration, and multiplexed fan-in monitoring. MIT, no paid tier, the daemon itself is an MCP server. This is the story of why it exists. The hand-rolled watchdog The sharpest signal while I was building this came from other people independently re-inventing the same primitives in tmux scripts. On r/ClaudeAI, Confident_Chest5567 posted a writeup of orchestrating agents via tmux panes with a watchdog that resets dead sessions — "a swarm of agents that can keep themselves alive indefinitely." In the same thread, IssueConnect7471 (18 upvotes) described wiring a Redis pub/sub heartbeat plus dead-letter respawn between tmux panes, and arriv

Episode 1/4 — 3 incidents, one root: default GRANTs open more than you think — [CANONICAL URL EPISODE 1: fill in after push] Episode 2/4 — await mutation() lies when nobody opens the { error } envelope — [CANONICAL URL EPISODE 2: fill in after push] The morning Françoise sees zero rows, again It's a Tuesday in April 2026. I've just added the agent_readonly role to the authenticated membership — a one-liner, meant to share a GRANT for a reporting job. First SELECT on cours , Sentry receives infinite recursion detected in policy for relation "user_roles" , code 42P17 . From the office next door, Françoise is already on the phone with the Maisons-Laffitte branch: "So they can't see anything over there — is that normal?" Foreman tone, not really a question. I read the error on my screen. The difference from episode 1: this time Postgres is talking. What came out of Sentry was no longer a silent empty set — it was an explicit error. That difference saved me two days. When Postgres shouts, you listen. The trap is that what it says isn't where you're looking. I won't pretend this is obscure. A policy on user_roles that queries user_roles to decide who can read user_roles is a loop. You avoid it, you work around it with SECURITY DEFINER , you move on. The problem: my user_roles policy didn't reference user_roles . I had already cleaned it up three weeks earlier. The recursion was coming from somewhere else. The diagnostic that targets the wrong object First reflex: re-read the user_roles policy. It's clean, reads auth.email() , never calls itself. Second reflex: disable policies one by one to find the culprit. Wrong angle. -- supabase/migrations/20260420_admin_write_cours_v1.sql -- "Admin write cours" policy — original version that loops CREATE POLICY "Admin write cours" ON public . cours FOR ALL TO authenticated USING ( EXISTS ( SELECT 1 FROM public . user_roles WHERE email = auth . email () AND role IN ( 'admin' , 'super_admin' ) ) ); The recursion doesn't come from a fau