With its acquisition of Bun, I believe Anthropic is setting itself up to become a vertically-integrated cloud hosting and web services platform for AI-powered apps. Just training and providing LLMs isn't profitable. Big players like Google can swallow the costs without blinking, but new players like OpenAI and Anthropic have to pivot to providing services to balance their books.

Bun is joining Anthropic | Bun Blog

Bun has been acquired by Anthropic. Anthropic is betting on Bun as the infrastructure powering Claude Code, Claude Agent SDK, and future AI coding ...

Jumble is becoming the Chromium of Nostr clients. View quoted note →

Has anyone else noticed that the psychology around AI is similar to the psychology that prevailed around COVID? Trying to do everything with AI, much like lockdowns and vaccine mandates, is something that looks insane on its face, yet it seems many people don't recognize the problems. I think it's due to a lack of first principles thinking. Few people know what their first principles are, so they are unable to reason about and judge novel situations when they arise. Some examples. Indefinite lockdowns were obviously wrong, because there is more to human existence than mere health. Vaccine mandates were obviously wrong, because informed consent is a core principle of medical ethics. Replacing people with AI is obviously wrong, because it is good for people to do dignified work. Yet in all three cases, many seemed, and continue to seem, blind to these obvious conclusions. Anyway, this article, while lengthy, is an excellent primer on the insanity of the AI industry. It's full of first principles thinking. Read it to help see past the hype.

Ed Zitron's Where's Your Ed At

The Case Against Generative AI

Soundtrack: Queens of the Stone Age - First It Giveth Before we go any further: This is, for the third time this year, the longest newsletter I've...

The #GitCitadel team is pleased to announce version 0.0.6 of Alexandria, now live on next-alexandria.gitcitadel.eu! This release features a UI overhaul, courtesy of our illustrious frontend developer @Nusa. Notably, the main site menu has been moved into an expandable menu, reducing clutter and making links easier to find. You'll also notice a fresher and more consistent look to our UI components! That's because Nusa has begun creating a Svelte component library for use within our project. It's documented for AI, so we'll be able to efficiently create consistent, beautiful UIs as we dream up new features. You can see some of the fresh UI components on a publication: Finally, be sure to check out our Notifications view, which you can reach by logging in and clicking on your profile picture, then clicking on "Notifications". You can view and respond to Nostr notes of _any kind_, and you can see public message threads. Alexandria is one of the first Nostr clients to support public messages. Thank you to all of our supporters! We're continuing to work on the app behind the scenes, so expect more updates Soon!

So Google is "reimagining" the Chrome browser with AI. Notably, they'll be introducing a search based on AI chat, apparently similar to Perplexity. The question that nobody's asking is: What are the consequences of putting the web behind a chat interface? In the near future, perhaps, we'll be making websites for bots. The emerging WebMCP protocol standard already indicates a trend in that direction. Sure, we already have an internet driven by search indexing algorithms, but even so, a search is still open to serendipity. With a chat, I might find the precise answer I'm looking for faster, but I might never find the answer that I need, but didn't know to look for. It's the difference between searching the library catalog and browsing the shelves. We need both.

My LinkedIn feed is more interesting than my Nostr feed.

This is a story worth watching for anyone interested in a free and open web. Oracle, legally, still owns the trademark for "JavaScript", despite the fact the language's standards and ecosystem have been open-source for well over a decade. Deno has launched a petition to deregister the trademark on the grounds that it has been abandoned, and that "JavaScript" is now a generic term. The petition is now entering legal discovery. The result of this process could shape the future of the relationship between private companies and the open-source software community. You can read more on Deno's blog:

Deno

Help Us Raise $200k to Free JavaScript from Oracle | Deno

Our legal battle over Oracle

Has anyone considered making an ephemeral-message relay based on Redis/Valkey? I could see it being a good data store architecture for large group chats, message passing servers, and other applications that require only transient storage of notes.

Getting a WebAssembly binary running inside #alexandria feels like magic 🪄

When you've got Claude working on something, and it hits you with "this file is completely broken"