Fresh Reads
Source desk · Blog
Armin Ronacher
- Engineering
- AI
Custom Voices With Qwen3-TTS
With my kids I’m currently building a little dungeron crawler and we’re trying to learn a bit about game development along the way. However given that we live in the modern times of increasing capabilities we wanted to get a narrator and voice over. But we also wanted it to not…
What is Codemode
More than a year ago I wrote a few posts here that recommended people not to load custom tools into their context (or MCP servers) but to just use more scripts. Most importantly I wrote that Code Is All You Need and I wrote about that MCP needs code. With Pi 1.0 we now added MCP…
Deser: Rethinking Rust Serialization
Serde is an amazing serialization library for Rust and it has been a huge reason why I felt productive with it for years. However already while at Sentry I got quite frustrated with some of the limitations with it but actually replacing Serde is tricky because of the might that…
Interpreting Pangram
Yesterday David Sacks wrote a tweet and within a few minutes people did, what they usually do, and they asked Pangram if it was AI. And Pangram said it’s entirely AI generated. To which David replied that these AI detectors are bogus. Now Pangram has a pretty low false positive…
P(doom)
This week some flavor of “AI is going to kill us all” went viral. In particular one where an employee put his personal probability of that happening above 10%. Which made me go to the Wikipedia page of P(doom) and I realized that Dario Amodei’s apparent probability of something…
Astra for Coding: Why Are We Doing This Again?
I’m more and more convinced that all of AI engineering is Neijuan (内卷, meaning curl inwards). In China it describes a system that demands ever more effort and competition without improving output. The way in which it sometimes shows up in the West is the 996 nonsense. The…
Latent Powers
A few weeks ago I felt like it would be fun to see if I can make one of those cheap Chinese CarPlay dongles run something other than the stock firmware. The idea was that rather than just forwarding CarPlay, why not do something more interesting with them? They all work quite…
Anger, Anxiety and Agency
Sean Goedecke wrote a post arguing that you should never be angry at work — a post with which I strongly agree. Anger can be a useful signal, but being angry at work rarely improves the situation. More often, it makes life worse for the people around you, many of whom have no…
Fast and Hard Code
One of the memes on Twitter is that “programming is solved now.” I’m not sure to what degree it is, but one thing is pretty clear: the act of familiarizing yourself with a language no longer matters and some of the friction that mattered for humans does not matter for agents. As…
What Is Reasoning
A few weeks ago a paper was shared that showed how to extract reasoning traces from closed-weight models. Together with online discussions about tricking models into leaking them, it made me investigate it more out of curiosity. Twitter seems full of half-truths and confusion…