Paging @masnick.com to the Streisand effect courtesy phone. An “engine problem“ is a complete non-issue and it was corrected in 24h! But Go2Sky sued @avherald.com! Now I’m reading about their 2016 incident they wanted to hide, and I’d never, ever fly an airline with this approach to transparency.

Well I'm sad to say it's my last week at Rainforest QA - a bunch of us got let go so if anyone is looking for incredible remote frontend (React) or backend engineers (Ruby / Rails / Python) DM me and I'll be happy to introduce you.

Woah I can really feel my decision-making ability drain in a new way now in the evenings. When most general-coding trivia is taken away, constantly facing actually challenging decisions is something else.

so happy ultrathink is back ♥️🧡💛💚💙💜🩷❤️🧡💛

OpenAI just launched an open-source agent orchestrator in Elixir! 🔥🔥🔥 github.com/openai/symph... #ElixirLang

So it turns out, if you've got an agentic workflow build out of specific subtasks, we can probably optimize it for you and drop your LLM bill by 10x. Small, distilled models often match and sometimes outperform much larger and more expensive models on well-defined tasks.

We’ve just released a new version of our CLI docs.distillabs.ai/getting-star... It includes `model deploy local` to run your models locally and `distil model deploy remote` which streamlines deploying your trained models to our playground docs.distillabs.ai/deployment/i...

Go read this post by @natolambert.bsky.social www.interconnects.ai/p/open-model... and then ask me about how to put small models in your production systems

When my agent is doing stuff and I accidentally interrupt it by pressing Esc with the terminal focused, I feel the need to apologize. Which is even dumber than usual, it doesn't perceive time!

This is excellent. I keep telling folks that the superpower of SOTA models is not that they can just generate endless amounts of code in whatever language you want, but also that they can act as a personalized engineering/coding teacher that can help you explain concepts in a way that YOU get.

Cat Hicks@grimalkina.bsky.social · 6mo ago

Key to efficient learning is realizing how we ACTUALLY learn, not just what FEELS like learning. I wrote a Claude Skill for some friends to help them think about this and they've liked it -- see Principles for some directions you could explore github.com/DrCatHicks/l...

I 💜 #ElixirLang! You 💜 #ElixirLang! I 💚 Python! You... will also 💚 after my talk in April!

If you don’t see the utility personally, I can get that. If I wasn’t coding I probably wouldn’t either. If you’re worried about its downsides, join the club. A lot of us are too. But no matter what your take is, take it seriously. This shit isn’t crypto.

We recently ran a project to help Knowunity cut their LLM bill by half. It’s pretty cool to beat a frontier LLM (Gemini) on all dimensions, which matter: cost, speed, and accuracy by trading off generalization, which is unnecessary here. More details www.distillabs.ai/blog/how-kno...

How Knowunity used distil labs to cut their LLM bill by 50%

We show how Knowunity use the distil labs platform to fine-tune and deploy their own models, significantly reducing their LLM costs.

distillabs.ai

my coding agent just got confused by cron and timezones, i don’t need any more proof it’s sentient

Elixir's operational simplicity (having e.g. a single repo & piece of infra, compared to more moving parts in other stacks) might either be a very big advantage or not matter at all in the new coding-agent world. I'm like 75% on the side of it turning out to be important, but who knows!

I love having my biases validated dashbit.co/blog/why-eli...

those H100s really are nice, huh

📢 I am hiring a highly-motivated Ph.D student at the University of Copenhagen to work on tokenization-free NLP. Read our previous work in this topic: aclanthology.org/2025.emnlp-m... aclanthology.org/2023.emnlp-m... openreview.net/forum?id=FkS... Apply by March 8: employment.ku.dk/phd/?show=1563

Fun demo we shipped this week: AI slop detector running locally in a browser extension! github.com/distil-labs/... The utility of the tool itself is questionable :) But it was super fun to build! I was hoping to get something working in a browser for a while, and this shows how :)

GitHub - distil-labs/distil-ai-slop-detector: Detect AI-generated text locally in your browser

Detect AI-generated text locally in your browser. Contribute to distil-labs/distil-ai-slop-detector development by creating an account on GitHub.

github.com

> It would be satisfying if humanity’s ambassadors to distant galaxies turn out to be humanoid robots made by a corporate successor to Twitter Inc. For the love of everything that’s good @matt-levine.bsky.social

And here you go! Definitely doesn't fix the entire state of LLM protocols... yet. But we're on our way. bsky.app/profile/apen...

apenwarr@apenwarr.ca · 6mo ago

Coding agents crossed a line this year: they’re useful enough that people are going to use them at work, whether the tooling is ready or not. So... here's some tooling! tailscale.com/blog/apertur...

tailscale figuring out how to make something sensible out of the current state of all the llm apis wen

apenwarr@apenwarr.ca · 6mo ago

I have looked at the actual byte streams LLMs use to communicate with clients and GOOD LORD WHAT THE HECK that is not how any of these protocols are supposed to be used

We released a Claude Skill allowing you to very easily get distilled small models, which can run locally on you machine! More here www.distillabs.ai/blog/train-y... and if we give you free training credits when you sign up :)

Train your SLM with distill-cli Claude Skill

Train a custom Text2SQL model by chatting with Claude and the Distil Labs skill. no ML expertise, no data labeling, just a conversation and a few examples.

distillabs.ai

I enjoy trying to cram magical Claude words into actual sentences "what do you ultrathink about this?"

Playing with @fly.io 's sprites by creating Claude skills to set up sprites for LiveView development. Adding Tidewave was super easy, I guess I should try LiveDebugger next. Many disposable Phoenix apps, here we come!

asking Claude Code to run Igniter to install Tidewave to use Claude Code feels Ouroborosy #ElixirLang

If you're looking into fine-tuning Small Language Models, we've benchmarked a bunch of them to see which perform best. www.distillabs.ai/blog/we-benc... TL;DR The Qwen3 family is the best all-rounder, while small Llamas show the biggest improvements after fine-tuning.

we just released small-and-mighty distilled PII reduction models, check them out github.com/distil-labs/... you can run them locally (1B!) and they work as well as much bigger generic models; SLMs FTW!

GitHub - distil-labs/Distil-PII

Contribute to distil-labs/Distil-PII development by creating an account on GitHub.

github.com

I'll give a demo at the Berlin Elixir Meetup tonight! www.meetup.com/elixir-berli... (last minute change) Come say hi if Elixir and/or AI is your jam. I'll show how to use distillation (featuring distil labs ofc) to make exmeralda.chat run on a smaller model. #myelixirstatus

Over the last couple of weeks we've been working on adding tool calling support to our distillation pipelines. Now you can use it! As a fun demo, we trained a model to help you remember git commands and it's only 3B so you can run it locally! www.distillabs.ai/blog/gitara-...

Gitara: How we trained a 3B Function-Calling Git Agent for Local Use

How we created a local tool-calling language model to turn plain-English language questions into git commands with the accuracy of a cloud LLM. You can check it out in our GitHub repo or get the model...

distillabs.ai