activescott's Notes

Public notes from activescott

Saturday, February 7, 2026

MicroQuickJS (aka. MQuickJS) is a JavaScript engine targeted at embedded systems. It compiles and runs JavaScript programs using as little as 10 kB of RAM. The whole engine requires about 100 kB of ROM (ARM Thumb-2 code) including the C library. The speed is comparable to QuickJS.

MQuickJS only supports a subset of JavaScript close to ES5. It implements a stricter mode where some error prone or inefficient JavaScript constructs are forbidden.

Although MQuickJS shares much code with QuickJS, it internals are different in order to consume less memory. In particular, it relies on a tracing garbage collector, the VM does not use the CPU stack and strings are stored in UTF-8.

Friday, February 6, 2026

The report stated that layoffs are up 118% from the same period last year and 205% from December 2025. On the inverse side, employers added 5,306 jobs, the lowest since January 2009. It’s important to note that Challenger began tracking labor data in January 2009.  “Generally, we see a high number of job cuts in the first quarter, but this is a high total for January,” said Andy Challenger, the workplace expert and chief revenue officer of the company. “It means most of these plans were set at the end of 2025, signaling employers are less-than-optimistic about the outlook for 2026.” Transportation had the most cuts in January at 31,243, according to the report. The majority of these cuts came from UPS’s major layoff announcement.  Amazon, one of the tech industry’s largest companies, also announced significant job cuts. The company said it would lay off 16,000 workers, mostly corporate-level employees. The Challenger report said Amazon was the main contributor to the nearly 23,000 job cuts the tech industry saw last month.  The health care industry also saw large cuts, with more than 17,000 workers losing their jobs. That was the largest staff reduction for the industry since April 2020, the report stated.  “Healthcare providers and hospital systems are grappling with inflation and high labor costs,” researchers wrote. “Lower reimbursements from Medicaid and Medicare are also hitting hospital systems. These pressures are leading to job cuts, as well as other cutting measures, such as some pay and benefits.”

Most of the deals, however, don’t affect what people with private insurance or Medicare pay for the drugs. People with Medicaid — who typically have minimal or no copays for prescriptions — already pay very little.

“Generally speaking, most people with insurance coverage will continue to be better off using their insurance to obtain medications rather than purchasing through the TrumpRx direct-to-consumer portal,” said Juliette Cubanski, deputy director of the program on Medicare Policy at KFF, a nonpartisan health policy research group.

The website asks customers to confirm that they are not enrolled in “any government, state, or federally funded medical or prescription benefit programs.” Those with both commercial and government-funded plans are considered to be on government insurance and are not permitted to participate in TrumpRx.

The US has one of the most expensive health systems in the world, with spending on health care estimated to reach $5.9tn (£4.3tn) in 2026, according to the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services. But despite spending twice as much per capita on healthcare compared with wealthy nations of a similar size, the US has a lower life expectancy than those other nations, according to health research nonprofit KFF.

Large publicly-traded health companies have tripled their profits over the last two decades, paying out shareholders over $2.6tn from 2001 to 2022, according to a study in the Journal of the American Medical Association. "We are the only major [health] system in the world that allows the free market to run loose," said John McDonough, Harvard TH Chan School of Public Health professor.

Roughly one in five Americans covered by private health insurance reported their provider refused to pay for care recommended by a doctor in 2023, according to a survey by KFF.

The number of overlapping health care systems in the US - Medicare, Medicaid, the marketplace, employer-sponsored insurance and veteran's health, among others - creates a confusing and sometimes wasteful system, said McDonough. "We have so many, each of them with their own set of rules, their own system, their own bureaucracy," he said. "We really do need some system consolidation."

Octopus takes over where your CI server ends, modelling the entire release orchestration process of software. This includes:

Release versioning
Environment promotion (beyond simple dev/test/prod workflows)
Deployment automation
Progressive software delivery (rolling deployments, blue/green, canary)
Configuration management
Approvals & ITSM integration
Deployment freezes
Coordinating deployments across projects and their dependencies

Decoupling the CI platform from the CD platform allows teams to bring their favorite CI tool - and most organizations have more than one - while we focus on giving you the most powerful best-of-breed CD capabilities. Octopus integrates with popular CI tools like GitHub Actions, Jenkins or TeamCity, letting them do what they do best - the CI part of the feedback loop. Octopus then takes over “artifact-forward”, and handles the release and deployment aspects of CD in advanced ways that no CI/CD tool can.

Thursday, February 5, 2026

The job openings rate, at 3.9 percent, changed little over the month. The number of job openings decreased in professional and business services (-257,000), retail trade (-195,000), and finance and insurance (-120,000). (See table 1.)

The number of job openings for November was revised down by 218,000 to 6.9 million, the number of hires was revised up by 6,000 to 5.1 million

Wednesday, February 4, 2026

Voxtral Realtime - A 4 billion parameter model aimed at live transcription, achieving “state of the art” transcription with 480ms latency across 13 languages. It can be configurable down to sub-200ms latency.

Performance on the FLEURS benchmark shows that Voxtral Mini Transcribe V2 performs competitively against models from Gemini and OpenAI, with the lowest diarization error rate.

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But including ads in conversations with Claude would be incompatible with what we want Claude to be: a genuinely helpful assistant for work and for deep thinking.

We want Claude to act unambiguously in our users’ interests. So we’ve made a choice: Claude will remain ad-free. Our users won’t see “sponsored” links adjacent to their conversations with Claude; nor will Claude’s responses be influenced by advertisers or include third-party product placements our users did not ask for.

We still have much to learn about the impact of AI models on the people who use them. Early research suggests both benefits—like people finding support they couldn’t access elsewhere—and risks, including the potential for models to reinforce harmful beliefs in vulnerable users. Introducing advertising incentives at this stage would add another level of complexity. Our understanding of how models translate the goals we set them into specific behaviors is still developing; an ad-based system could therefore have unpredictable results.

Our experience of using the internet has made it easy to assume that advertising on the products we use is inevitable. But open a notebook, pick up a well-crafted tool, or stand in front of a clean chalkboard, and there are no ads in sight.

We think Claude should work the same way.

Manus is the action engine that goes beyond answers to execute tasks, automate workflows, and extend your human reach.

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