GLM-5.2 from Z.ai may be the strongest open weights text model now
A new open weights model from Chinese AI lab Z.ai dropped on June 16th under an MIT license, and the early benchmarks suggest it deserves attention. GLM-5.2 (the latest in the GLM…
Software
Articles about software applications and tools
107 articles
Dinky replaced three Mac compression apps in my dock
I was running ImageOptim for images, HandBrake for video, and a paid PDF tool for shrinking documents. That is three apps to install, three menus in my dock, and three different mental…
My 2014 ProBook is more repairable than anything made since
I still own an HP ProBook 640 G1 from 2014. It is not a museum piece. It runs Windows 11, it has been opened more times than my two newer laptops combined,…
TSA PreCheck just works from Google Wallet now
I fly maybe four times a year, and every trip has the same ten-minute friction at the TSA PreCheck line: dig out the boarding pass, dig out the driver’s license, scan the…
Six R linters worth installing before you ship another script
I keep a small R project that runs nightly, processes about 40,000 rows of CSV data, and ships the cleaned output to a Postgres database (an open-source relational database management system). Last…
Thirteen graphical BitTorrent clients, and the one I’d pick
I needed a new BitTorrent client this month, and the choice was harder than I expected. There are at least 13 actively maintained graphical clients in the open-source world, and they make…
FOSS Weekly: the Linux stories from week 26 worth your time
This is the week that Brave decided to give Linux users a free browser that costs $59.99 for everyone else, Canonical remembered that ARM64 servers exist, and a small tiling window manager…
Brave charges $60 for Origin. Linux users get it for nothing.
Brave launched a stripped-down browser called Origin this month. It is the same Chromium engine, the same shield blocking system, and the same update cadence as the flagship Brave Browser, but it…
Rclone UI: a real graphical face for the command-line workhorse
I have been using rclone from the command line for about three years. It runs my offsite backups, syncs files between the two cloud providers I keep subscriptions with, and handles the…
OpenClaw alternatives that survive on cheap single-board computers
I have been running OpenClaw (an open-source agent framework that orchestrates large language models against local tools and APIs) on a handful of single-board computers (SBCs) for the last six months. The…