#code + #llm

Public notes from activescott tagged with both #code and #llm

Wednesday, January 14, 2026

the short version is that it’s now possible to point a coding agent at some other open source project and effectively tell it “port this to language X and make sure the tests still pass” and have it do exactly that.

the short version is that it’s now possible to point a coding agent at some other open source project and effectively tell it “port this to language X and make sure the tests still pass” and have it do exactly that.

Does this library represent a legal violation of copyright of either the Rust library or the Python one? #

I decided that the right thing to do here was to keep the open source license and copyright statement from the Python library author and treat what I had built as a derivative work, which is the entire point of open source.

Even if this is legal, is it ethical to build a library in this way? #

After sitting on this for a while I’ve come down on yes, provided full credit is given and the license is carefully considered. Open source allows and encourages further derivative works! I never got upset at some university student forking one of my projects on GitHub and hacking in a new feature that they used. I don’t think this is materially different, although a port to another language entirely does feel like a slightly different shape.

The much bigger concern for me is the impact of generative AI on demand for open source. The recent Tailwind story is a visible example of this—while Tailwind blamed LLMs for reduced traffic to their documentation resulting in fewer conversions to their paid component library, I’m suspicious that the reduced demand there is because LLMs make building good-enough versions of those components for free easy enough that people do that instead.

Saturday, January 10, 2026

Translate inputs to provider's endpoints (/chat/completions, /responses, /embeddings, /images, /audio, /batches, and more) Consistent output - same response format regardless of which provider you use Retry/fallback logic across multiple deployments (e.g. Azure/OpenAI) - Router Track spend & set budgets per project LiteLLM Proxy Server

#

The Tool Search Tool lets Claude dynamically discover tools instead of loading all definitions upfront. You provide all your tool definitions to the API, but mark tools with defer_loading: true to make them discoverable on-demand. Deferred tools aren't loaded into Claude's context initially. Claude only sees the Tool Search Tool itself plus any tools with defer_loading: false (your most critical, frequently-used tools).

With Programmatic Tool Calling:

Instead of each tool result returning to Claude, Claude writes a Python script that orchestrates the entire workflow. The script runs in the Code Execution tool (a sandboxed environment), pausing when it needs results from your tools. When you return tool results via the API, they're processed by the script rather than consumed by the model. The script continues executing, and Claude only sees the final output.

Monday, January 5, 2026

Monday, December 22, 2025

Apple’s release notes detail that RDMA integrates with the Thunderbolt framework to enable zero-copy data transfers, meaning data moves directly from one device’s memory to another’s without intermediate buffering. This eliminates bottlenecks associated with TCP/IP protocols, which Thunderbolt previously emulated. Insiders note that while Thunderbolt 5 offers peak speeds, real-world performance depends on factors like cable quality and device compatibility—only M4 and later chips fully support this enhanced mode.

Diving deeper into the technical specifics, Apple’s developer documentation explains that RDMA over Thunderbolt is exposed through new APIs in the macOS networking stack. Developers can initialize clusters using Swift or Objective-C calls that negotiate memory mappings directly over the Thunderbolt bus. This is a departure from traditional Ethernet-based RDMA, which relies on Infiniband or RoCE (RDMA over Converged Ethernet), adapting instead to Thunderbolt’s point-to-point topology.

For those building apps, the update introduces protocols for fault-tolerant clustering. If a device drops out—say, due to a disconnected cable—the system can redistribute workloads dynamically, minimizing disruptions. Testing scenarios outlined in the notes suggest latency as low as microseconds for small transfers, rivaling dedicated high-performance computing setups.

Security is paramount in such a powerful feature. Apple’s notes emphasize built-in encryption for RDMA transfers, preventing unauthorized memory access. A separate 9to5Mac report on the update’s patches reveals fixes for kernel vulnerabilities that could have been exploited in clustered environments, ensuring that the feature doesn’t become a vector for attacks.

Looking at adoption, early sentiment on X suggests enthusiasm among AI researchers. One thread discussed collaborative model training, where multiple users contribute compute power via clustered Macs, democratizing access to high-end AI tools. This could disrupt markets dominated by cloud providers, offering cost savings for startups avoiding subscription fees.

Thursday, December 18, 2025

Tuesday, December 16, 2025

we in- troduce SWE-bench, an evaluation framework consisting of 2,294 software engineering problems drawn from real GitHub issues and corresponding pull requests across 12 popular Python repositories. Given a codebase along with a description of an issue to be resolved, a language model is tasked with editing the codebase to address the issue. Resolving issues in SWE-bench frequently requires under standing and coordinating changes across multiple functions, classes, and even files simultaneously, calling for models to interact with execution environments, process extremely long contexts and perform complex reasoning that goes far beyond traditional code generation tasks.

Sunday, December 14, 2025

continually updating a model's parameters with new data, often leads to “catastrophic forgetting” (CF), where learning new tasks sacrifices proficiency on old tasks. Researchers traditionally combat CF through architectural tweaks or better optimization rules. However, for too long, we have treated the model's architecture (the network structure) and the optimization algorithm (the training rule) as two separate things, which prevents us from achieving a truly unified, efficient learning system.

By defining an update frequency rate, i.e., how often each component's weights are adjusted, we can order these interconnected optimization problems into "levels." This ordered set forms the heart of the Nested Learning paradigm.

We observed that many standard optimizers rely on simple dot-product similarity (a measure of how alike two vectors are by calculating the sum of the products of their corresponding components) whose update doesn't account for how different data samples relate to each other. By changing the underlying objective of the optimizer to a more standard loss metric, such as L2 regression loss (a common loss function in regression tasks that quantifies the error by summing the squares of the differences between predicted and true values), we derive new formulations for core concepts like momentum, making them more resilient to imperfect data.

In a standard Transformer, the sequence model acts as a short-term memory, holding the immediate context, while the feedforward neural networks act as long-term memory, storing pre-training knowledge. The Nested Learning paradigm extends this concept into what we call a “continuum memory system” (CMS), where memory is seen as a spectrum of modules, each updating at a different, specific frequency rate. This creates a much richer and more effective memory system for continual learning.

"Nested Learning" extends the traditional two-tier memory concept of "attention layers" (short-term memory / context window) and "feed-forward network layers" (long term memory) into a spectrum of modules that update at different rates, some very frequently (like attention), some rarely (like FFNs), and others at various points in between.

Thursday, November 20, 2025

Sunday, November 16, 2025

Friday, October 31, 2025

This software is not made for making the Crawlers go away. It is an aggressive defense mechanism that tries its best to take the blunt of the assault, serve them garbage, and keep them off of upstream resources. Even though a lot of work went into making iocaine efficient, and nigh invisible for the legit visitor, it is an aggressive defender nevertheless, and will require a few resources - a whole lot less than if you’d let the Crawlers run rampant, though.