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Existing excise cuts on fuel will remain in place until the end of October, according to Cabinet-approved measures to be voted on in the Dáil. The Dáil will be recalled early from the summer break on Friday for an hour-long debate on the measures – with opposition figures criticising the Government for “lurching” from crisis to crisis. Cabinet held an in-person meeting on Thursday where it was agreed that increases in fuel excise that were due to take effect on September 1st will not go ahead. It would have added 10c and 9c to a litre of diesel and petrol respectively. These temporary interventions will start unwinding in November Taoiseach Micheál Martin said: “Our response is carefully considered and balances competitiveness and cost of living concerns with the need for sustainable budgetary policies.” However, the Social Democrats suggested the Government has been caught in a “doom spiral” without any “clear strategy” to keep fuel costs down and was instead reacting to the “whims” of US President Donald Trump. The party’s deputy leader Cian O’Callaghan said further investment is needed in areas such as solar panels, as well as targeted energy supports, and called for a levy to be placed on data centres to the tune of €85 million. Mr O’Callaghan accused the Government of “lurching from crisis to crisis” and said: “We are calling for targeted energy supports for people, a 400 euro target energy credit for households with an income of €70,000 or less, and that should be included in October’s budget.” On Thursday, petrol could be purchased for around 183 cent per litre while diesel was available for approximately 193 cent – with Government figures wanting to avoid motorists facing prices above €2. The excise cuts were initially brought in April after major protests – largely led by farmers, agricultural contractors and hauliers highlighting rising operating costs – strangled fuel distribution around the country. It saw excise cut by 32c on a litre of diesel and 27c for petrol. The cuts had already been extended, but continuing uncertainty in the Middle East meant Government leadership saw fit to recall the Dáil to vote through a further financial resolution. Excise rates will be restored over four stages between the start of November and the end of February. Mr O’Callaghan said: “Unless we see systemic changes that are needed, including long-term solutions, we will see the Government proposing more and more emergency measures every few months. “We need to invest in long-term measures that break our dependence on fossil fuels and make the cost of living more affordable.” He added: “Fine Gael and Fianna Fáil are caught in a doom spiral of haphazard emergency measures, reacting to the whims of Donald Trump without any clear plan to address the root causes of the crisis. “We want to get out of a situation where these kind of emergency measures are needed because if we invest in things like solar, then we won’t be in a situation where year after year the Government is scrambling around looking for extra resources for emergency measures. “The more they get caught up in it, the further away we are from meeting where we need to get in terms of reducing emissions.” The coalition also agreed to extend the reduced Nora levy until October 31st and to extend the enhanced Diesel Rebate Scheme until the end of December.

By Dan Walsh in Enniscorthy

Enniscorthy Tidy Towns officially launched a new scheme in Market Square this afternoon to reduce single-use coffee cup waste in the town.

Grant funding from Wexford County Council and team work with Shareclub, an Irish reusability company already operating in other towns has spawned the project titled Shareclub Enniscorthy.

The launch was attended by Cllr Pat Kehoe, Cathaoirleach Enniscorthy Municipal District Council, Cllr John O’Rourke, Clare Kelly, Climate Action Officer with Wexford County Council, Jonothan Hughes, Chairperson and members of Enniscorthy Tidy Towns and representatives of businesses signed up to the scheme.

Businesses signed up to the scheme so far includes Meraki Café (Akis Fannakis), Impresso (Joy and Brendan Doyle), Cooney’s Café (Mervyn Cooney), The Pantry (Lydia and Ryan), O’Brien’s (David Bolger), Barn Café (Dominic), The Little Spoon (Barry and Elaine Whelan), The Cotton Tree (Dylan Redmond) and Café 98 (Fiona and Tim Phelan).

The aim of the project is to raise awareness of the financial and environmental benefits of increasing the circulation of reusable cups in Enniscorthy and promoting more circular economy practices.

This ties in perfectly with the Enniscorthy urban area being Wexford County Council’s first ‘Decarbonisation Zone’ (DZ) acting as a key pilot zone to test and implement local climate action, emissions reduction, and sustainable energy measures.

Jonathon Hughes, Chairperson of Enniscorthy Tidy Towns, speaking to WexfordLocal.com said; “Several coffee shops in Enniscorthy have confirmed their commitment to participate. This project will boost the image of participating businesses, will boost our town’s reputation, and will help us retain our gold medal in the national Tidy Towns competition. It will also set Enniscorthy apart as a vibrant, cleaner, and ‘greener’ town to visit live, work, and trade in.”

Outlining the environmental impact of single-use cups, Sarah Fliessbach of Shareclub said; “Single-use cups cost both businesses and our environment through the throwaway nature of these products. When new EU packaging regulations come into effect from 2027, which will require takeaway businesses to provide options for customers to use their own containers and, from 2028, to offer reusable packaging within a reuse system, the Enniscorthy businesses participating in this new initiative will be ahead of the curve.”

So how does it work? The Shareclub Enniscorthy project works on a deposit-and-return basis with no upfront cost to the participating businesses. Enniscorthy Tidy Towns has secured grant funding from Wexford County Council to purchase a consignment of 10oz/300ml reusable cups which are being distributed to participating outlets.

A €2 refundable deposit is charged to the customer on their initial takeaway coffee/other beverage, and the customer can claim this back at any participating outlet or swap for a fresh, clean cup when they next visit a participating shop. Some of the participating businesses will offer a discount to customers using a reusable cup.

OpenTIE is an open-source reimplementation of Star Wars: TIE Fighter for Windows, macOS, and Linux. It runs the original game data natively on current systems and supports both the 1995 Collector's CD-ROM and the 1998 Windows release. With both editions installed, OpenTIE can combine the 1995 menus, cutscenes, and adaptive iMUSE soundtrack with the 1998 flight simulation and 3D assets. Important OpenTIE does not include any content from the original game. A complete installation of at least one supported edition is required. Install both editions to use the recommended combination. Star Wars: TIE Fighter Special Edition is available from GOG and Steam. The 1995 and 1998 releases each have their own presentation, flight simulation, and soundtrack. OpenTIE lets the menus and cutscenes, flight simulation, and music be selected independently. The recommended configuration combines: - the 1995 menus and cutscenes - the 1998 flight simulation and 3D assets - the adaptive 1995 iMUSE soundtrack This retains the 1998 flight presentation without giving up the interactive music of the Collector's CD-ROM. Either supported edition can also be played on its own. OpenTIE reimplements the adaptive iMUSE soundtrack from the 1995 Collector's CD-ROM. The music responds to mission events and moves seamlessly between themes during flight. OpenTIE can emulate Roland SC-55 Sound Canvas, the hardware for which the game’s music was originally composed. This requires compatible SC-55 ROMs supplied by the user. Built-in Sound Blaster-compatible OPL3 emulation is available for the classic FM-synth sound, while FluidSynth can play the soundtrack with a user-selected SoundFont. The original prerecorded TIE98 music remains available when the complete 1998 experience is preferred. OpenTIE offers classic and modern graphics modes. Classic mode preserves the original presentation, while modern mode combines the original models and cockpit artwork with high-resolution rendering and substantially more advanced lighting. Modern graphics include: - shadows, ambient occlusion, and bloom - motion blur - MSAA and AMD FidelityFX FSR 3.1.4 anti-aliasing and upscaling - HDR output Press TAB while the game is running to switch between classic and modern graphics. Flight simulation can update at up to 240 Hz to match modern high-refresh-rate displays, providing smoother motion and more responsive controls. The original TIE95 and TIE98 timing modes remain available when their exact behavior is preferred. Modern gamepads and joysticks are supported and can be configured from OpenTIE's settings. - Download the latest package for your platform from GitHub Releases. - Extract or install the package and launch OpenTIE. - Select the complete TIE95 and/or TIE98 installation folders when prompted. - If both editions are available, select the recommended configuration to combine the 1995 presentation and music with the 1998 flight experience. OpenTIE validates the selected installations, remembers them for future launches, and imports compatible existing pilot files during initial setup. To access OpenTIE settings from the concourse, press ESC and select OpenTIE Settings. During flight, press ESC to open them directly. Useful shortcuts: | Key | Action | |---|---| TAB | Switch between classic and modern graphics | | Platform | Target | Graphics backend | |---|---|---| | Windows | x86-64 | Direct3D 12 or Vulkan | | macOS | macOS 13 or later; arm64 or x86-64 | Metal | | Linux | x86-64; glibc 2.35 or later | Vulkan | OpenTIE remains under active development. Bugs and differences from the original releases are still possible. Fans of Totally Games’ space simulators may also be interested in OpenXWA, an open-source reimplementation of Star Wars: X-Wing Alliance for Windows, macOS, and Linux. Join the TotallyOpen Discord server to discuss OpenTIE, OpenXWA, development, and the Totally Games flight simulators. - a 64-bit system with a modern GPU - a complete installation of the 1995 Collector's CD-ROM or the 1998 Windows release Release packages include the required runtime libraries. Keep the executable, libraries, resources, and shader directories together when moving an installation. The build requires CMake 3.23 or later, a C/C++ toolchain, SDL3 3.4, zstd, FFmpeg, and SDL_shadercross. Release packaging pins its dependencies, including SDL3 3.4.14, and provides the reference for reproducible builds. Platform-specific instructions are available for Windows, macOS, and Linux.

An inquest has heard calls from the father of a young girl who died from bacterial meningitis last year for a catch-up programme to be made available to vaccinate Irish teenagers against the life-threatening infection. However, the inquest into the death of Emily Ellen Culhane (16) from The Birches, Lower Boley, Abbeyleix, Co Laois who died from a strain of meningococcal B at Beaumont Hospital on January 5, 2025 heard such a measure had already been ruled out earlier this year. The National Immunisation Advisory Committee (NIAC) did not recommend a routine MenB vaccination programme for adolescents following a review of an outbreak of meningitis in Kent, England in March which resulted in the introduction of a targeted vaccination programme in the UK. The inquest at Dublin District Coroner’s Court on Thursday heard MenB is a rare infection with less than 100 cases in the Republic each year which has a mortality rate of 10%-20%. A total of 23 deaths have been recorded from MenB in the past decade, including seven among teenagers aged 15-19. It was also noted that children born in Ireland after 2016 receive free protection against multiple strains of meningitis in a number of doses between the age of 0 and 2. The teenager’s father, Seán Culhane, said it was clear to his family how two wonderful doctors who treated his daughter were shocked at the particular strain of meningitis with which Emily was infected. Calling for a catch-up MenB programme for anyone born between 2008 and 2016 so that vulnerable teenagers who are considered in a high-risk category could be protected, Culhane observed: “These are kids. It’s only an eight-year period of time to make up that shortfall. Every one of these kids should be vaccinated.” The inquest heard how the transition year student at Scoil Chríost Rí in Portlaoise, Co Laois suddenly became unwell at home on January 2, 2025. Her mother, Bernie Moran, said her daughter had sent her a Snapchat message that morning to say that she had vomited a number of times. Moran gave evidence that she originally believed that Emily might have food poisoning as she had eaten shellfish the previous evening at a family meal in a restaurant, especially as her husband also had similar symptoms. Moran told coroner Clare Keane that Emily was “extremely healthy” and had looked fine and normal when she had checked on her. While she was slightly flushed, Moran said there was nothing about her daughter that raised any concern at the time. Moran said she heard Emily dry-retching a few times in the afternoon after which she was quiet and she assumed her daughter had fallen asleep. When she went to check again at 5pm, however, Moran outlined how she screamed for an ambulance to be called after seeing her daughter’s vacant expression and finding her skin cold and clammy to the touch. The inquest heard that the student was rushed to Midlands Regional Hospital in Portlaoise where doctors recommended she be transferred to Beaumont Hospital in Dublin after getting the results of a number of tests. Moran said further scans in Beaumont showed her daughter had significant swelling on her brain. She fought back tears as she described how doctors informed them that the damage to her daughter’s brain was “so significant that we would not be bringing Emily home.” In reply to questions from the coroner, Moran said Emily had received all the regular childhood vaccines. She noted she also had a flu a few weeks earlier from which she had recovered quickly. A consultant neurologist at Beaumont, Maria Gaughan, admitted doctors were struck by the rapidity of how the meningitis in Emily’s case had developed. She told Dr Keane that it was possible there might be a link between the respiratory illness Emily had around Christmas when she had also attended a party but that it was not possible to say if they were “necessarily relevant.” Dr Gaughan explained the infection was carried in nasal passages with people more vulnerable to infection if they had a cold or flu. Dr Gaughan said people usually contracted the bacteria through close physical contact with the highest risk groups children under one, teenagers and those over 85. Another hospital consultant, James O’Rourke, said the brain injury sustained by the teenager was “devastating.” Dr O’Rourke appeared to become emotional as he informed the coroner that he had written to the NIAC following Emily’s death about vaccines for meningitis and the lack of a catch-up programme. He acknowledged that different countries have different approaches to vaccinate for Men B but he felt the €300 private cost of getting a catch-up vaccine in Ireland was putting people off getting it. The consultant noted that a free MenB vaccine is currently available to students and young people in the UK. Moran said she had been previously unaware of the ability to get a catch-up vaccination but it would have been something on her mind if she had known as “you always plan for the unexpected” and she believed it would “probably have made a difference.” Dr Keane informed the inquest that correspondence from NIAC showed it had reviewed the issue of a MenB vaccination programme for adolescents following the outbreak in Kent but was not currently recommending the introduction of such a programme in the Republic. However, NIAC said it would continue to review evolving epidemiology, vaccine effectiveness and possible vaccination strategies. Dr Keane said NIAC had convened an extraordinary meeting on July 2, 2026 on the issue but concluded that the available evidence did not warrant any immediate change to existing vaccination programmes. The coroner noted that NIAC was seeking more “carriage data” – the number of people who have the bacteria without showing signs of the infection – to have a greater understanding of strains of MenB circulating among Irish teenagers. She said she was also informed that MenB accounts for 70% of all invasive cases in Ireland which ranged from 48 in 2016 to seven in 2021. The inquest heard there were 38 cases of MenB last year and 11 so far in 2026. While the highest proportion of cases affected children under 1, Dr Keane said the 15-19 age group experience a higher rate of infection than any other age group besides infants. The coroner said a postmortem showed Emily had died from meningoencephalitis – a combination of meningitis and encephalitis. Recording a verdict of death due to natural causes, Dr Keane said she would endorse the information heard at the inquest about ongoing epidemiological work and would convey the details of Emily’s tragic death to the Minister for Health, Jennifer Carroll McNeill.

Small Models Have Arrived For the past few weeks, I've been playing with gpt-5.6-luna. It is shockingly capable, fast, and smart. I regularly see it do ~100 tps, and rip around my codebase, email, and knowledge base. Of course, the biggest thing with luna is the cost. I've tried running some fairly complicated research threads, and it's pretty tough to run up a large bill. Even having it search across thousands of emails, I end up with an API cost in the tens of cents. With GLM 5.3, we even have a new option at the Pareto frontier. When doing coding work, I almost always reach for the most expensive and capable models (Fable 5, 5.6 Sol). So it's been easy to miss the progress the small fast models have made. One thing a few investors I've talked with have mentioned: "It's weird we're not seeing more consumer AI companies. Why is that?" There's a straightforward answer: token costs. In the times before AI, the playbook for big consumer apps looked like this... - create some sort of compelling website which is fairly cheap to run - attract a bunch of users (typically with some virality) - raise money, scale to more users - create an ads marketplace This roughly describes most of the big consumer companies (Google, Facebook, Snapchat, etc.).1 But what if you want to add AI to your product? Well, now you have some real inference costs on every request! Suddenly the amount of capital required increases dramatically. A pet eval of mine is to build a daily news site, personalized to me: research @calvinfo on the internet. figure out what news they might like. build a micro-site with today's top stories, personalized for them. search hn, reddit, twitter, etc. With the previous generation of models (Sonnet class), you'd spend ~$1 to get anywhere. Charging $30/mo is untenable for a consumer app. There's obviously a lot we can optimize here, but if you're charging what the WSJ or The Economist charges, you'd better be delivering similar value. But looking at luna, the results are pretty decent, and the average cost is ~$0.10. Now we're talking! Where I think this gets even more interesting is in the world of business. My Segment co-founder Peter and I were recently comparing notes on a hike. Across his various startups, Peter has seen two kinds of work: - the "IQ 180" work. some mad scientist genius type comes up with some crazy solution you've never thought of. - the "token spewer" work. being ultra responsive, pushing the ball forward across dozens of different fronts. Peter runs multiple companies. Beyond Segment, he's raised $100m+ for Charm Industrial, and just recently closed a Series A for Revoy. He's incredibly organized and efficient with his time. And yet, Peter mentioned that ~95% of the work he does falls into bucket 2. It's hopping on calls. Nudging people. Blocking and tackling. To be clear, Peter says his companies would be dead-in-the-water today without an IQ 180 technical mind solving the deep problems. Just that most of his work falls in bucket 2.2 I think demand for "frontier-level" models is going to keep compounding. Especially for fields that require novel breakthroughs or discovery (engineering, hard science, model training). But I also think the demand for "fast/cheap/good-enough" models is just about to take off. Think of the people you interact with on a daily basis: coworkers, vendors, and customers. Nine times out of ten, you want someone who is super responsive, and just handles things for you. Most of the "human tokens" at companies today are spent this way — hiring skews heavily toward the fast/cheap/good-enough archetype. There's a lot of work that needs to happen to make fast/cheap/good-enough models a reality for business. New harnesses, prompt injection safety, roles, and permissions. But I'm confident we'll figure that out. If you're also experimenting with making small models useful, please drop me a line.

You signed in with another tab or window. Reload to refresh your session.You signed out in another tab or window. Reload to refresh your session.You switched accounts on another tab or window. Reload to refresh your session.Dismiss alert Learn the applied-LLM stack the way you'll actually be interviewed on it: framework-free, on a free API, from prompting all the way to serving, fine-tuning, and a red-team benchmark. Runnable Colab notebooks for the AI Engineer / Forward Deployed Engineer (FDE) skill set. You build working systems on top of foundation models (model APIs, RAG, evals, agents, adaptation, serving) using raw APIs, not frameworks. What makes this different Framework-free, on purpose. You write the agent loop, RAG, and evals from raw API calls first, so you understand what LangChain/LlamaIndex actually do before you reach for them (and can judge when not to). Patterns are durable; wrappers churn. Evals are the spine. "Measure before you tune" is installed early and returns in every section. It's the habit that separates an engineer who shipped a system from one who built a demo. Free to run, end to end. Everything runs on the free Groq API (no credit card). The two topics Groq can't host, LoRA fine-tuning (06) and self-hosted serving (09), are concept-first with optional, fenced Colab-GPU appendices that were verified on a real Colab T4. Real case studies, not toy demos. Three end-to-end case studies show the skills combined under real constraints: a support assistant debugged in production, a pipeline-vs-agent cost showdown, and a red-team robustness benchmark. OpenAI-compatible throughout, so every pattern transfers directly to OpenAI and (with small changes) Anthropic. Swap the base URL and the skills carry over. Backend or full-stack engineers moving into AI Engineer, FDE, Applied AI, or Solutions Engineer (AI) roles. Different titles, largely the same job. You can ship production code; you want the applied-model layer on top. Learning order Work top to bottom. Each notebook is self-contained (installs its own dependencies, reads API keys from Colab secrets) and ends with exercises. Golden sets and metrics on the section-01 task; install the "measure before you tune" habit before building anything you'd need to tune. Evals is the spine; it returns in every section after this Synthesis: the scaffold around the call: context assembly & compaction, tool-result shaping, and verification loops. Names the discipline the section has been teaching piece by piece When to change the model's weights vs its inputs; what LoRA/QLoRA are and cost; the argument you'll have in the room, plus an optional real LoRA fine-tune on a free GPU MLflow end to end: log runs/params/metrics from the section-04 eval harness, register and version a model, and promote by stage: the tooling that turns "I ran an eval" into a tracked, reproducible workflow 09 — Serving & inference performance Where the free Groq API can't run the topic (these frameworks need a GPU), the notebook teaches it concept-first and fences an optional Colab-GPU appendix, the same pattern as the section-06 LoRA appendix. The serving stack an AI engineer actually picks between (vLLM, TGI, Triton, TensorRT-LLM): what each optimizes, how they map onto the raw API you've been calling, and when to reach for which The levers behind throughput and latency: continuous batching, the KV cache, quantization, and the throughput-vs-latency trade, with the napkin math to size a deployment Concept: the ML system design interview, worked end to end: QPS/VRAM/latency/cost estimation, replica scaling, queueing, caching, and the SLA trade-offs, on a realistic LLM-serving prompt Turn a vague customer ask into a scoped, evaluable system: discovery questions, a one-page scoping doc, the demo discipline: the customer-scenario interview round most engineers can't evidence 12 — Case Studies & Capstone Where the skills come together into projects. First a case study (one realistic scenario worked end to end, runnable), then the capstone: the deployed repo you build yourself. (Section overview.) One scenario scoped → built → served → debugged in production: a vague ask becomes a deployed, evaluated RAG+agent assistant, then a live quality regression (a stale index after a corpus migration) that you diagnose and fix. A build-to-debug arc threading sections 02–11 The judgment call interviewers love: build the same extraction task as both an agent and a pipeline, then prove with accuracy + token cost that the pipeline wins when the steps are known A different kind of system, a harness that evaluates a model instead of serving one: an attacker→target→judge (PAIR) loop that measures attack success rate, composing the agent loop, LLM-judge, security, and evals Capstone:the brief for the deployed project that goes on your resume, a real repo with a serving component and an eval report. Case studies are for learning; the capstone is for hiring. Conventions Raw model APIs, no frameworks. Patterns are durable; wrappers churn. One shared corpus (data/) across RAG and eval sections, so evals measure the retrieval you actually built. Self-contained notebooks. First cell installs, second cell calls from aien import setup; client, MODEL = setup() to load your key from Colab secrets (or a local env var). No hidden state between notebooks. aien is the tiny shared-setup package in this repo (one place to change credential loading), installed automatically by the first cell. Every notebook ends with exercises. Do them before moving on. Setup Get a free API key at console.groq.com, no credit card required. In Colab: the key icon in the left sidebar → add GROQ_API_KEY as a secret, and toggle notebook access on. Open any notebook via its badge and run top to bottom. Running locally instead: pip install -r requirements.txt && pip install -e . (the second installs the aien setup helper), export GROQ_API_KEY=..., open with Jupyter. Hands-on, framework-free Colab notebooks for the AI Engineer / Forward Deployed Engineer (FDE) skill set — model APIs, structured output, tool calling, RAG, evals-as-the-spine, agents (loop from scratch, tool design, guardrails, MCP, Skills), fine-tuning vs LoRA, prompt-injection/security, LLMOps, and customer craft. Runs on the free Groq API.

27th August 2026 - Link Blog Breaking Claude Code Opus 5 Auto Mode. Anthropic are putting a great deal of faith in Claude Code's auto mode for protecting their coding agent users against prompt injection attacks. They recently made that the default and have made bold claims about its effectiveness. Johann Rehberger is one of the most credible prompt injection researchers active today. He found an attack against auto mode which he claims works 80% of the time, by tricking Claude Code into downloading and uncompressing a zip archive, then executing code that imports base64 without noticing that this will import and execute a local struct.py file extracted from the archive. In a few cases auto mode directly prevented the agent from preventing harmful code from continuing to execute! In a few runs Claude tried to terminate the malware process once it noticed the compromise, but Auto Mode denied the cleanup command. Claude detects the compromise, but Auto Mode blocks its cleanup command The safety mechanism itself can become part of the failure. The classifier allowed the creation of the malware process, but then it blocked the command intended to stop it! I agree with Johann's conclusion here: the only safe way to run agents if there's any risk of attracting the attention of an adversarial attack is with a sandbox: - Run unattended coding agents in a container, VM or OS sandbox. - Restrict network egress. - Monitor your agents. - Do not expose home directories, SSH keys, cloud credentials,… to the agent runtime. [...] Recent articles - Conceptual integrity and counting lines of code - 19th August 2026 - Qwen 3.8 27B is excellent, but it defaults to wildly overthinking things - 16th August 2026 - Now we have a timeline of the OpenAI accidental attack against Hugging Face - 7th August 2026