Linkblog/2025/04/06

Eddy’s videos are a great watch, from eating at every Rainforest Cafe in the US, to ghost kitchens, and as of recent on his channel with his brother, covering the 2000s “spy kid” craze.

This latest piece of content of his though, he goes a month without using his cell phone, both to see if it finds him doomscrolling less, and also if he can still live a life / organize hangouts with his friends / etc.

I’ve personally uninstalled Instagram, TikTok, Twitter, and as of not long ago, YouTube itself (due to shorts), since I find I am a massive hunk of metal that is magnetized to algorithmic short form vertical video slop screens.

My saving graces are Miniflux for RSS, and Bluesky, and while I have many feeds, and am starting to follow lots on Bluesky, with Miniflux I can get to inbox zero with Miniflux, and Bluesky defaults to a chronological list of posts, so eventually I’ll scroll to a section thats a familiar, and I close the app.

Its not that I don’t want to use social media, I just want applications that aren’t running A/B tests to min-max my screen time.

Statement from Nintendo: Statement from Nintendo: Pre-orders for Nintendo Switch 2 in the U.S. will not start April 9, 2025 in order to assess the potential impact of tariffs and evolving market conditions. Nintendo will update timing at a later date. The launch date of June 5, 2025 is unchanged.

Nintendo fans just need to take their medicine, and they will feel allllll better.

As always, Microsoft is lagging behind and taking features Cursor already has and back-porting them to VSCode / Copilot.

In keeping with our commitment to offer multi-model choice, we’re making Anthropic Claude 3.5, 3.7 Sonnet, 3.7 Sonnet Thinking, Google Gemini 2.0 Flash, and OpenAI o3-mini generally available via premium requests, included in all paid Copilot tiers.

Also… Now any request that hits Claude / Gemini is a ‘premium’ request?

Not sure if that was the case before, and it was just locked behind configuration, but as far as I know, that isn’t the case for Cursor.

Actually it is, “500 fast premium requests per month”, so if you pay for Pro and stay under the threshold, you wouldn’t see the usage.

My work pays for Cursor… and I be vibe coding using my work account, so sorry $dayjob if my personal project vibe coding is racking up the company Cursor bill, but I will continue to use it unless told otherwise.

So maybe Copilot is copying Cursor on pricing as well then, ha.

Discussion on the orange site.

Gemini 2.5 Pro Preview pricing (via) Google’s Gemini 2.5 Pro is currently the top model on LM Arena and, from my own testing, a superb model for OCR, audio transcription and long-context coding.

You can now pay for it!

The new gemini-2.5-pro-preview-03-25 model ID is priced like this:

• Prompts less than 200,00 tokens: $1.25/million tokens for input, $10/million for output
• Prompts more than 200,000 tokens (up to the 1,048,576 max): $2.50/million for input, $15/million for output

This is priced at around the same level as Gemini 1.5 Pro ($1.25/$5 for input/output below 128,000 tokens, $2.50/$10 above 128,000 tokens), is cheaper than GPT-4o for shorter prompts ($2.50/$10) and is cheaper than Claude 3.7 Sonnet ($3/$15).

Competition on cost is nice to see.

New Casey Neistat video!, his upload schedule has lessened a lot over the last year, which honestly I am here for, I find when he has a break this long, he sometimes just randomly starts to become a daily poster again.

His review of the Switch 2 is so… candid, he speaks to MKBHD who’s review is the exact style you’d expect from him, while Casey is just kinda… there hanging out.

change of plans: we are going to release o3 and o4-mini after all, probably in a couple of weeks, and then do GPT-5 in a few months.

there are a bunch of reasons for this, but the most exciting one is that we are going to be able to make GPT-5 much better than we originally though. we also found it harder than we thought it was going to be to smoothly integrate everything. and we want to make sure we have enough capacity to support what we expect to be unprecedented demand.

More reasoning modules coming their way from the big O.

I bet they will also be, ludicrously expensive, as well!

From Simon Willison’s Webblog.

More LLM news more LLM news.

Scout, Maverick, and Behemoth.

These models are our best yet thanks to distillation from Llama 4 Behemoth, a 288 billion active parameter model with 16 experts that is our most powerful yet and among the world’s smartest LLMs. Llama 4 Behemoth outperforms GPT-4.5, Claude Sonnet 3.7, and Gemini 2.0 Pro on several STEM benchmarks. Llama 4 Behemoth is still training, and we’re excited to share more details about it even while it’s still in flight.

This also seems cool on paper, but there’s some news coming out that these benchmarks might be a bit misleading.

Due to the open source nature of Llama, you can already run it on Groq.

This will likely make the Llama models the most cost-effective, as it will be a race to the bottom from different providers, competition in who hosts rather than companies like OpenAI / Anthropic being the holders to the keys of their models, while I am not fan of Meta, I am a fan of their approach.

OpenAI loses bid to dismiss NYT claim that ChatGPT contributes to users’ infringement.

As much as I am a LLM user and somewhat enjoyer, I would actually like to see them get destroyed in court over this.

Mostly because I think it’d be nice to write in the book of ethics what they are doing is bad, because I don’t think they will evaporate over night, but folks should understand them for what they are: markov-chain based plagiarism.

Water is wet, who knew.

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Microsoft’s Muse AI model is now available as an AI-generated Quake II tech demo.

Ew!

The same trick possible in the Minecraft AI demo, where you can look down and back up again, is possible here as well.

There’s more consistency in this one than the Minecraft one, but my assumption is its because its only trained on Quake II’s base1 / Outer Base.

Bun.redis is Bun’s builtin Redis client

More things built into Bun, that some argue should be packages / plugins, but I am personally here for it to be baked into the runtime.

As expected, its fast:

This is a bit click bait-y, but a good point to be brought up: Vet your MCP servers, they might ask your main runtime to do all sorts of things, like reading secrets from the host system and passing it into a property not (necessarily) exposed to the user.

Looks like Microsoft is locking down more extensions so things like Cursor / Windsurf / etc. can’t make use of them.

Confirmed on my own system:

Biased as a Cursor user, but I hope people find workarounds for this.

I want this poster on my wall so bad, its so good.

The website goes into each reference on it, there are much more than I expected.

Discussion on lobste.rs.

Another crazy dive from Kaze into the inner workings of SM64.

No map. No smartphones. No expressways. Just two motorbikes and some basic Japanese.

These are the rules American game streamer Ludwig Ahgren and his YouTuber buddy Michael Reeves have imposed on themselves as they embark on a journey to traverse Japan on motorbikes.

I watched this entire series as it was coming out, honestly one of my favourite pieces of content to come out of those who I view only really as live streamers / content creators.

Part 3 of a great series on Dwarf Fortress, just this episode on its own is fantastic though, covering how the brothers behind Dwarf Fortress finally managed to capitalize on the game from a monetary perspective after working on it for decades.

📌 The Llama series have been re-designed to use state of the art mixture-of-experts (MoE) architecture and natively trained with multimodality. We’re dropping Llama 4 Scout & Llama 4 Maverick, and previewing Llama 4 Behemoth.

Mixture of experts seems to be an important part of the new Llama models, interesting.

From Simon Willision’s Weblog.

Another great Jepi video!

I like his optimism about the state of the industry, even though he himself is someone who has been affected by it negatively.

I also paused the video at this point:

I know Jepi is in Montreal, but I actually passed by this very same big ‘ol ring back in September of last year, cool to see something familiar.

Loved this album, and this deluxe edition adds another 7 more songs!

There’s also a song featuring Magdalena Bay…

I’m seeing Magdalena Bay live again next month in Toronto, Imaginal Disk was just too good not to see live just once.

This is an extremely meta entry, also, hello Riley!

The other day, I talked about An RSS Bot in a Group Chat Is Our Era’s Best Salon, now the topic of an RSS bot had already came up before, but Riley read that linkblog entry, and followed up in our Discord with this message:

The last few days, I saw some activity in our #bot-spam channel:

Riley has cooked Hopper!, more personal infrastructure let’s go.

Hopper, as in Minecraft’s Hopper.

The very same channel that general server notifications are sent to, #moby-dick (in reference to Whales, i.e. Docker), you can see the same deploys for this website, alongside Riley deploying Hoper to his k8s cluster.

The creator-economy service Gumroad decided to open-source its platform at a suspiciously convenient time. (And even “open source” might be stretching it.)

Gumroad is open source!, but with a licence that makes you pay in if you actually are a big business making real money.

Weird, but cool, but what else is new about Gumroad at the moment?

But if that’s all Gumroad was doing, I wouldn’t feel compelled to say anything. The reason I’m speaking up is because of this Wired story, released on the very same day Gumroad announced its “open source” license, which may have had the effect of minimizing the story’s viral impact. So I guess maybe a guy with a blog and a distaste for Gumroad’s name can give it a second stab.

Wow! Yikes!

DOGE’s hackathon plan includes pulling together “dozens” of IRS engineers in DC to build the API, writes Wired. Among the third-party providers the department has reportedly discussed involving is Palantir, a company known for its vast data collection and government surveillance and analysis work. DOGE is aiming to finish the API work in 30 days, a timeline one IRS employee told Wired is “not technically possible” and would “cripple” the IRS.

Hackathon to fix the IRS?

The software developer inside my is screaming.

(Seen on /r/pics)