Cover story, Heinrichs & Bachmann

Epic Games has released Lore, an MIT-licensed version control system written in Rust and designed specifically for "games and entertainment purposes with large file sizes," reports Phoronix. From the report: While there is Git LFS for large file storage with Git, Epic Games has crated Lore as a version control system designed entirely around the large file needs of modern game development as well as multimedia/entertainment purposes. Lore is designed to be fast and efficient for large files including binary files, and be easy-to-use including for 3D artists and more.

The Lore documentation elaborates more on its differences and motivation for development compared to Git: "No existing system was designed for the combination of constraints that large game and entertainment projects require: arbitrary content types, multi-axis scale, multi-tenant safety, and a fully open specification and license. [...] Lore is designed to combine what works in each (Git's content-addressed revision graph and centralized systems): a centralized server-of-record for durability, access control, and conflict resolution; content-addressed storage with fragment-level deduplication that is as effective on a multi-gigabyte binary as on a kilobyte of text; sparse, lazy working copies that materialize only what you need; free branching; and a fully open, publicly versioned specification and MIT license. Normal editing operations -- staging, committing, branching, diffing -- never require a network round trip." You can learn more at Lore.org. All the code is available on GitHub.

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US officials have revealed a preliminary MOU between Washington and Tehran to end the costly 110-day conflict

Senior US officials have revealed the contents of a preliminary memorandum of understanding (MOU) between Washington and Tehran to end the 110-day conflict which has cost thousands of lives and devastated the world economy.

The officials dictated the MOU to journalists on Wednesday, ahead of a formal signing ceremony expected to take place in the coming days. Both sides have 60 days to negotiate the terms before a final agreement.

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They came to see Cristiano Ronaldo, perhaps expecting feats to rival Lionel Messi’s remarkable display the night before. Ronaldo’s many followers in Houston did their best to summon a meaningful contribution from their idol but ultimately there were 16 players infinitely more deserving of acclaim. The Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) could have folded after falling behind to João Neves’s early goal but recovered brilliantly to salvage a historic draw on their return to the World Cup, Yoane Wissa’s leveller followed by a triumph of defensive discipline and resolve.

Roberto Martínez kept Ronaldo on the pitch for all 95 minutes but, beyond two half-chances midway through the second period, his contribution was minimal and did little to assuage concerns that his presence is a potentially crippling millstone.

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Met hun debuutsingle ‘Bela Lugosi’s Dead’ (1979) bracht het roemruchte Bauhaus (1978 – 2022) een ‘in  memoriam’ over de dood van Dracula. Dat wil zeggen: de acteur Bela Lugosi, die in 1931 de rol van Dracula vorm gaf in de gelijknamige film.

Volgens de Wikipedia mag dit werk de eerste gothic rock plaat genoemd worden.

Bauhaus roept de overledene tot leven (Bela Lugosi’s dead / Undead, undead, undead / Bela’s undead / Oh, Bela, Bela’s undead). Dracula leeft nog voort, maar Bela Lugosi is in 1956 toch echt naar het eeuwige vetrokken.

If you're exposing your agent to a strong odor, it's time to clean up your instructions. Risky or poorly structured code patterns are known as "code smells," and it turns out coding agent directives can be similarly redolent, leading to wasted tokens and worse output. Coding agents rely on configuration files that summarize expected agent behavior. These context-enhancing files are commonly written in Markdown and named either CLAUDE.md for those using Anthropic models or AGENTS.md for pretty much everyone else. They include various text instructions that advise the coding agent about desired behavior and tool use. And they can get rather wordy. Anthropic advises no more than 200 lines of text because longer files consume model context and may hinder model coherence. Researchers affiliated with the computer science department of the Federal Institute of Minas Gerais in Brazil recently scoured some 532,000 files to build and analyze a dataset of 100 popular open-source projects containing either an AGENTS.md or a CLAUDE.md file. "Our results show that configuration smells are widespread," the authors state. "Lint Leakage was the most common smell, affecting 62 percent of the files, followed by Context Bloat (42 percent) and Skill Leakage (35 percent)." Linting is the process of running automated tools to check code for programming and style errors. Lint Leakage refers to agent instructions that repeat rules already enforced by linters, format checkers, and static analysis tools. Duplicative rules waste tokens by burdening the underlying model with guidance for a task already handled reliably by programmatic tools. Context Bloat, as its name suggests, describes the tendency of developers to overspecify code agent behavior. "Bloated configuration files increase token consumption, raise costs, and reduce the visibility of important instructions," the authors observe, pointing to Anthropic's recommendation of no more than 200 lines of text. Skill Leakage, another common configuration smell, occurs when rarely used tools or practices get added to the AGENTS.md file, which gets loaded in every agent session. The agent instructions would be better in a separate skills file (e.g. SKILLs.md) that gets loaded only when needed. Skill leakage also expands the agent's context unnecessarily and potentially distracts agents from other things. Other agentic odors include: Blind References, which happens when configuration files reference external documents (e.g. via URLs) without explaining when that resource becomes relevant; Init Fossilization, configuration details set up upon a project's initialization that are no longer relevant; and Conflicting Instructions, which occur when agent directives contradict each other. The study authors say that they found at least one of these six smells in 91 of the 100 AGENTS.md files tested. "These results suggest that developers could benefit from catalogs and tools designed to spot configuration issues in agent configuration files," they conclude in the preprint paper, entitled "Configuration Smells in AGENTS.md Files: Common Mistakes in Configuring Coding Agents." The authors are Helio Victor F. dos Santos, Vitor Costa, Joao Eduardo Montandon, Luciana Lourdes Silva, and Marco Tulio Valente. The message here is that less is more when it comes to code agent configuration files, perhaps even to the point that anything is worse than nothing. Similarly, when ETH Zurich boffins examined the impact of context files for agents a few months ago, they found [PDF] that developer-generated instructions raised costs and only improved code performance about 4 percent, while LLM-generated instructions had a small (3 percent) negative impact on agent-generated code. They concluded "unnecessary requirements from context files make tasks harder, and human-written context files should describe only minimal requirements." ®

If you're exposing your agent to a strong odor, it's time to clean up your instructions. Risky or poorly structured code patterns are known as "code smells," and it turns out coding agent directives can be similarly redolent, leading to wasted tokens and worse output. Coding agents rely on configuration files that summarize expected agent behavior. These context-enhancing files are commonly written in Markdown and named either CLAUDE.md for those using Anthropic models or AGENTS.md for pretty much everyone else. They include various text instructions that advise the coding agent about desired behavior and tool use. And they can get rather wordy. Anthropic advises no more than 200 lines of text because longer files consume model context and may hinder model coherence. Researchers affiliated with the computer science department of the Federal Institute of Minas Gerais in Brazil recently scoured some 532,000 files to build and analyze a dataset of 100 popular open-source projects containing either an AGENTS.md or a CLAUDE.md file. "Our results show that configuration smells are widespread," the authors state. "Lint Leakage was the most common smell, affecting 62 percent of the files, followed by Context Bloat (42 percent) and Skill Leakage (35 percent)." Linting is the process of running automated tools to check code for programming and style errors. Lint Leakage refers to agent instructions that repeat rules already enforced by linters, format checkers, and static analysis tools. Duplicative rules waste tokens by burdening the underlying model with guidance for a task already handled reliably by programmatic tools. Context Bloat, as its name suggests, describes the tendency of developers to overspecify code agent behavior. "Bloated configuration files increase token consumption, raise costs, and reduce the visibility of important instructions," the authors observe, pointing to Anthropic's recommendation of no more than 200 lines of text. Skill Leakage, another common configuration smell, occurs when rarely used tools or practices get added to the AGENTS.md file, which gets loaded in every agent session. The agent instructions would be better in a separate skills file (e.g. SKILLs.md) that gets loaded only when needed. Skill leakage also expands the agent's context unnecessarily and potentially distracts agents from other things. Other agentic odors include: Blind References, which happens when configuration files reference external documents (e.g. via URLs) without explaining when that resource becomes relevant; Init Fossilization, configuration details set up upon a project's initialization that are no longer relevant; and Conflicting Instructions, which occur when agent directives contradict each other. The study authors say that they found at least one of these six smells in 91 of the 100 AGENTS.md files tested. "These results suggest that developers could benefit from catalogs and tools designed to spot configuration issues in agent configuration files," they conclude in the preprint paper, entitled "Configuration Smells in AGENTS.md Files: Common Mistakes in Configuring Coding Agents." The authors are Helio Victor F. dos Santos, Vitor Costa, Joao Eduardo Montandon, Luciana Lourdes Silva, and Marco Tulio Valente. The message here is that less is more when it comes to code agent configuration files, perhaps even to the point that anything is worse than nothing. Similarly, when ETH Zurich boffins examined the impact of context files for agents a few months ago, they found [PDF] that developer-generated instructions raised costs and only improved code performance about 4 percent, while LLM-generated instructions had a small (3 percent) negative impact on agent-generated code. They concluded "unnecessary requirements from context files make tasks harder, and human-written context files should describe only minimal requirements." ®

A digital clock where the numbers are made from dozens of analog clock hands. Hard to describe…just go take a look.

Congo heeft met een gelijkspel voor een enorme verrassing gezorgd op het WK voetbal. In Houston wist het Centraal-Afrikaanse land Portugal, met Cristiano Ronaldo in de spits, op…