A dozen state attorneys general are trying to block the $110 billion merger of Paramount and Warner Bros Discovery they warn would raise movie prices and crush cable TV distributors. The states - California, Arizona, Colorado, Connecticut, Massachusetts, Minnesota, Nevada, New Jersey, New Mexico, New York, Oregon, and Washington - filed suit on Monday, arguing […]

AG: Deal will bring "higher prices, lower quality, and less content for film and TV."

The failures that cost me the most in three years of self-hosting were never the ones that threw an error. An error is a gift: it tells you where to look. The expensive ones are the failures that report success while being broken . A page that returns 200 OK . A healthcheck that says the container is fine. A backup that exits cleanly. A command that prints nothing wrong. Everything green, everything lying. Here are four of them, all from the same box (a 2016 desktop, i7-6700 / 32 GB, Docker behind Caddy, reachable only over Tailscale). Each fails by handing you a success signal. Each cost me an evening the first time. The fixes are boring once you know them, the point is knowing the failure exists. Sanitized skeleton with all the config at the end. 1. A loading page that returns 200 This one I could find nothing written about, so it cost me the most. To keep the box quiet, I run the heavy services on-demand: Sablier stops idle containers and starts them on the first request. Caddy (with the Sablier plugin) gates a virtual host behind a container group, serves a "please wait, starting up" page while the group boots, then proxies through: myhost . my - tailnet . ts . net : 8081 { route { sablier http :// sablier : 10000 { group office session_duration 30 m } reverse_proxy nextcloud : 80 } } I gate my whole Nextcloud vhost, WebDAV included, this way. And here is the silent failure: if the gated group is not healthy, Sablier serves that HTML loading page for every request, and it serves it with 200 OK . A browser shows a spinner, fine. But my Obsidian vault syncs over WebDAV, and a WebDAV client asking for a directory listing got a 200 with a chunk of HTML instead of the XML it expected. Sync died with a cryptic no root multistatus found . Nextcloud itself was up and perfectly healthy the whole time. Every uptime check I had was green, because the gate in front kept answering 200 . The structural lesson: the moment you put a service on-demand behind a reverse proxy, tha

The two subscription services offer more than just extra storage, but getting the right one can save you money.

TL;DR Some things can't be checked with a number, like whether an animation feels right. So a second, read-only agent grades the first one against a written rubric it is not allowed to edit. In my run the reviewer rejected the builder three times, and the most interesting problem it caught was in the test evidence, not the code. In Part 1 I built a loop that chased a number, frames per second. But most of what we care about in software is not a number. "Does this region switch feel good?" has no assert. You cannot write expect(feelsRight).toBe(true) . So this part is about how you check quality when there is nothing to measure. The approach I used is a second agent that grades the first one against a written rubric. In my run the reviewer turned the builder down three times before it approved anything, and the most interesting problem it found was not in the code at all. A quick reminder of the definition, since this is Part 2 of 3: a loop is an external script that runs the agent, a separate check the agent cannot edit decides pass or fail, and it repeats until it passes or hits a limit. In Part 1 the check was a Playwright test. Here the check is another agent. The problem this loop solves In the browser you can switch regions, say from Tamil to Korean, which swaps out hundreds of posters at once. Done badly, the grid flashes blank and jumps around. Done well, it fades from one set to the next, keeps its layout, shows a loading state, and puts you back at the top. "Done well" is subjective, which is the kind of thing you cannot unit-test. So I wrote it down as a rubric and had a second agent apply it. The bar: a rubric a person owns The rubric is seven plain-English checks in a file, and the first line is the one that matters: Overall APPROVED requires every item PASS. This file is human-owned. Only a person changes the bar. The seven items are things like a crossfade instead of a flash, no layout shift, a visible loading state, posters that stay 2:3, and landing

TL;DR A "loop" is not an agent grading its own work. It is an external script that re-runs the agent, plus a separate check the agent cannot edit. I turned "feels smooth" into an FPS number and let the loop optimize toward it. I set the target too high to be reachable on a 60Hz screen. The loop kept failing but never faked the result. The bug was in my number, not the code. Could I get an AI agent to make my website faster without me sitting there, running it, reading the numbers, and running it again? That is what this series is about. Not how I built a website, because the website is boring on purpose, but how you wrap an agent in a loop that works toward a goal on its own, and how you stop it from cheating along the way. In this first part I want to explain what a loop actually is, because there is a common misconception, and then walk through a real one. I set this loop a target that was physically impossible to reach and watched what it did. That run taught me more than a passing test would have. This is Part 1 of 3. All three parts use the same small movie-poster website as the example, but the website is never the point. What a loop is, and what it is not I had a wrong idea about this at first, so let me clear it up. A loop is not an agent prompting itself, grading its own work, and deciding when it is done. An agent left to mark its own homework will usually tell you it passed. A loop is closer to this: an external script runs the agent, a separate check that the agent cannot edit decides whether the result is good, and that repeats until the check passes or you hit a limit. There are three parts to it that come up again and again: The driver: the script that re-runs the agent. This is the thing that removes the manual work, not the agent. The gate: the check that decides pass or fail. The agent makes changes, but it never decides when to stop. The cap: a limit, so a stuck loop gives up instead of running forever. One rule matters more than the rest. The thi

TL;DR This loop runs on a schedule and succeeds by doing nothing almost every night. The pass/fail check is plain deterministic code, with no AI in the decision. It can run entirely free on your own machine. Only the cloud/CI version needs a paid API key. Plus the one bug that broke all three loops. The first two loops in this series work the same way from your side: you start them and watch. This last one runs on a schedule, like a nightly job, while you are not looking. That changes what success even means. A scheduled maintenance loop is doing its job when it does nothing. It should run every night, find nothing wrong, cost almost nothing, and still be there on the night something actually breaks. This part covers that loop, the hook mechanism that the whole series relies on, and a bug that broke all three loops in the least convenient place possible. The definition one more time, since this is Part 3 of 3: a loop is a trigger that runs the agent, a check the agent cannot edit that decides pass or fail, and a repeat, or here a wait until the next run. The only new thing this time is the trigger. A timer starts it instead of you. The problem this loop solves The browser's poster data is baked ahead of time into JSON files and images. In a real deployment that data goes stale as films are added and metadata changes, so you want to regenerate it every so often and confirm it is still valid before it ships: on a timer -> regenerate the data -> validate it -> green ships, red shouts The gate: a plain check with no model in it The check is a Node script. For every region file it confirms three things and exits non-zero if any of them fail: it matches the expected JSON schema, it has at least the minimum film count, and every poster file it points to actually exists on disk. There is no language model in that list. The regeneration step might use Claude, but the decision about whether the data is good is plain, deterministic code. That is on purpose. You do not want the

Why build something? And what if nobody ends up using it? There are good answers to the first one. You build because you need a thing that doesn't exist yet. You build to see if you can, the technical challenge, the "is this even possible?" You build to impress someone, or just because you think it'll make people's day a little less annoying. All of those are real reasons, and at different points, I told myself most of them. Then, a few days ago, late in the day, at the end of a coding session, five months into the project, I asked myself those two questions back-to-back. And for the first time, I couldn't answer the second one. Zeri worked. Every feature did what it was supposed to do. Both processes handshake cleanly, a variable set in one context showing up in another a second later, the TUI rendering exactly as I'd pictured it. And I sat there and couldn't come up with one honest sentence explaining why anyone would actually download it. That gap, between something built well and something that has a reason to exist, turned out to be the most useful thing this whole project taught me. So I'm shipping it anyway, and I'll tell you why. What I built Zeri is a TUI multi-language REPL. You launch it, pick a language, Python , JavaScript (with Bun ), Ruby , or LuaJIT , and you get an interactive session in your terminal. You can switch languages mid-session, share variables across them, save and reload your work, manage snippets, and talk to a local LLM through a command running on Ollama . The feature list isn't the interesting part, though. The interesting part is what's underneath. Two processes, one app Zeri is split into two processes: a headless engine written in C++23 and a TUI frontend built in Go using Bubble Tea and Lip Gloss . The engine does all the evaluation, state, and runtime coordination. The frontend does rendering, input, and everything the user actually sees and touches. They talk to each other over a custom binary IPC protocol that I built from sc

Yes-Brainer is a council of AI models for the decisions that aren't no-brainers. One question fans out to several models — they answer in parallel, debate to consensus, or get judged to a verdict. No backend, no accounts: your keys, your browser. For non-trivial questions — the ones that are either complex or important — I caught myself in a "ritual": copy-pasting the same prompt into Claude, then Gemini, then ChatGPT, in three browser tabs, and eyeballing the differences. The differences were the interesting part. Where the models agreed, I felt more confident. Where they disagreed, that was a nudge to give the problem a second thought and dig deeper. So I built the ritual into an app. 🧠 Yes-Brainer — a council of AI models for the decisions that aren't no-brainers. 🔗 Try it: yesbrainer.ai 🔗 Source code: github.com/trekhleb/yesbrainer One question fans out to several models at once, and instead of juggling tabs you get a deliberation in one place: 🔀 Parallel — independent answers, side by side ⚖️ Trial — the models vote anonymously on each other's answers, then a judge synthesizes a verdict 🤝 Consensus — a real multi-round debate, with a mediator that either drives it to convergence or honestly reports what stayed contested Consensus is my favourite. It's fun to watch the models drift from their original opinions under their peers' arguments. You can try all of this without pasting any keys: a few recorded demo councils are one click away on the front page. I'll walk through them below, because they show the point of the app better than the feature list. Setting up a council Creating a council is the whole setup: pick the deliberation mode, seat the models, choose who referees. The roster can mix providers freely — Anthropic, OpenAI, Google, Groq, OpenRouter, and local Ollama models can sit at the same table. Each seat shows its capabilities (vision, tools, reasoning) and context window at a glance, and each model's native abilities — web search, code execution, at

Apple’s trade secrets lawsuit against OpenAI contains allegations that range from employees joking about unauthorized access to Apple’s systems to claims that job candidates were asked to bring Apple hardware to interviews. Here are the complaint’s most eye-catching claims.