Latest entries
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Quoting Karel D'Oosterlinck
When I want to quickly implement a one-off experiment in a part of the codebase I am unfamiliar with, I get codex to do extensive due diligence. Codex explores relevant slack channels, reads related discussions, fetches experimental branches from those discussions, and cherry picks useful changes for…
Simon Willison — Published
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Mitchell Hashimoto: My AI Adoption Journey
Mitchell Hashimoto: My AI Adoption Journey Some really good and unconventional tips in here for getting to a place with coding agents where they demonstrably improve your workflow and productivity. I particularly liked: Reproduce your own work - when learning to use coding agents Mitchell went through…
Simon Willison — Published
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AI companies want you to stop chatting with bots and start managing them
Claude Opus 4.6 and OpenAI Frontier pitch a future of supervising AI agents.
Ars Technica — Published
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The Switch 2 is getting a new Virtual Console (kind of)
Hamster Corp.'s new "Console Archives" does what Nintendon't.
Ars Technica — Published
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With GPT-5.3-Codex, OpenAI pitches Codex for more than just writing code
The emphasis is on "mid-turn steering and frequent progress updates."
Ars Technica — Published
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"ICE Out of Our Faces Act" would ban ICE and CBP use of facial recognition
Senator: ICE and CBP "have built an arsenal of surveillance technologies."
Ars Technica — Published
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Opus 4.6 and Codex 5.3
Two major new model releases today, within about 15 minutes of each other. Anthropic released Opus 4.6. Here's its pelican: OpenAI release GPT-5.3-Codex, albeit only via their Codex app, not yet in their API. Here's its pelican: I've had a bit of preview access to both of these models and to be honest…
Simon Willison — Published
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Neocities founder stuck in chatbot hell after Bing blocked 1.5 million sites
Microsoft won’t explain why Bing blocked 1.5 million Neocities websites.
Ars Technica — Published
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Watch Kanzi the bonobo pretend to have a tea party
“Kanzi is able to generate an idea of this pretend object and at the same time know it’s not real.”
Ars Technica — Published
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Bad sleep made woman's eyelids so floppy they flipped inside out, got stuck
Never underestimate the value of a good night's sleep.
Ars Technica — Published
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Google hints at big AirDrop expansion for Android "very soon"
AirDrop came to the Pixel 10 last year, and more Android phones will join the party in 2026.
Ars Technica — Published
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OpenAI is hoppin' mad about Anthropic's new Super Bowl TV ads
Sam Altman calls AI competitor "dishonest" and "authoritarian" in lengthy post on X.
Ars Technica — Published
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You Know What? Just Don’t Split Words into Letters
This is an unplanned part two for Barriers from Links with ARIA. The title reflects my exasperation because this isn’t new, I’ve simply failed to be explicit about it over the last decade or so. In 2012 I vented about TypeButter using for each letter. In 2020…
Adrian Roselli — Published
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This black hole "burps" with Death Star energy
Dubbed "Jetty McJetface," the tidal disruption event's energy keeps getting brighter and should peak in 2027.
Ars Technica — Published
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NASA changes its mind, will allow Artemis astronauts to take iPhones to the Moon
"We are giving our crews the tools to capture special moments."
Ars Technica — Published
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Tesla slipped behind VW in European EV sales last year
Electric vehicle sales increased by 29% in 2025, even as overall sales grew 2.2%.
Ars Technica — Published
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Steam Machine and Steam Frame delays are the latest product of the RAM crisis
Valve says it still hopes to ship both devices "in the first half of the year."
Ars Technica — Published
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Increase of AI bots on the Internet sparks arms race
Publishers are rolling out more aggressive defenses.
Ars Technica — Published
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Museums incorporate "scent of the afterlife" into Egyptian exhibits
“Smell added an emotional and sensory depth that text labels alone could never provide.”
Ars Technica — Published
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Spotlighting The World Factbook as We Bid a Fond Farewell
Spotlighting The World Factbook as We Bid a Fond Farewell Somewhat devastating news today from CIA: One of CIA’s oldest and most recognizable intelligence publications, The World Factbook, has sunset. There's not even a hint as to why they decided to stop maintaining this publication, which has been…
Simon Willison — Published
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Selfie: WEBP means selfies are back on the menu
Selfie picture of me topless with some wild land in the background.
Protesilaos Stavrou — Published
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Emacs: new Doric themes ‘doric-jade’ and ‘doric-copper’
I am developing two new themes for my minimalistic 'doric-themes' package for Emacs.
Protesilaos Stavrou — Published
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Microsoft releases urgent Office patch. Russian-state hackers pounce.
The window to patch vulnerabilities is shrinking rapidly.
Ars Technica — Published
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Voxtral transcribes at the speed of sound
Voxtral transcribes at the speed of sound Mistral just released Voxtral Transcribe 2 - a family of two new models, one open weights, for transcribing audio to text. This is the latest in their Whisper-like model family, and a sequel to the original Voxtral which they released in July 2025. Voxtral Realtime…
Simon Willison — Published
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FBI stymied by Apple's Lockdown Mode after seizing journalist's iPhone
Post reporter was compelled to unlock MacBook Pro with fingerprint, however.
Ars Technica — Published
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Should AI chatbots have ads? Anthropic says no.
ChatGPT competitor comes out swinging with Super Bowl ad mocking AI product pitches.
Ars Technica — Published
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US House takes first step toward creating "commercial" deep space program
"We will continue to rely on the ingenuity of the private sector."
Ars Technica — Published
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Judge gives Musk bad news, says Trump hasn't intervened to block SEC lawsuit
Musk is stuck fighting SEC suit seeking $150M in disgorgements from his Twitter takeover.
Ars Technica — Published
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“A streamlined newspaper for a streamlined era”
Posted today for no particular reason. The post “A streamlined newspaper for a streamlined era” appeared first on Jeffrey Zeldman Presents.
Jeffrey Zeldman — Published
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Trudging Through Nonsense
Last week Anthropic released a report on disempowerment patterns in real-world AI usage which finds that roughly one in 1,000 to one in 10,000 conversations with their LLM, Claude, fundamentally compromises the user’s beliefs, values, or actions. They note that the prevalence of moderate to severe “disempowerment…
Kyle Kingsbury — Published
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Distributing Go binaries like sqlite-scanner through PyPI using go-to-wheel
I've been exploring Go for building small, fast and self-contained binary applications recently. I'm enjoying how there's generally one obvious way to do things and the resulting code is boring and readable - and something that LLMs are very competent at writing. The one catch is distribution, but it…
Simon Willison — Published
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Favourites of January 2026
The end of the start of another year has ended. So now all there is left to do is to look forward to the end of the next month, starting effective immediately, and of course ending after the end of the end we are going to look forward to. Quite the end-eavour. I guess I’ll end these ramblings by ending…
Wouter Groeneveld — Published
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Weekly Update 489
This week I'm in Hong Kong, and the day after recording, I gave the talk shown in the image above at INTERPOL's Cybercrime Expert Group. I posted a little about this on Facebook and LinkedIn, but thought I'd expand on what really stuck with
Troy Hunt — Published
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Interpretation of “God himself” by Blé (Giorgia Kefalá)
Translation of---and philosophical commentary on---a Greek song whose translated title is 'God Himself'.
Protesilaos Stavrou — Published
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Emacs: beframe version 1.5.0
Information about the latest version of my beframe package for GNU Emacs.
Protesilaos Stavrou — Published
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Introducing Deno Sandbox
Introducing Deno Sandbox Here's a new hosted sandbox product from the Deno team. It's actually unrelated to Deno itself - this is part of their Deno Deploy SaaS platform. As such, you don't even need to use JavaScript to access it - you can create and execute code in a hosted sandbox using their deno…
Simon Willison — Published
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Saying “No” In an Age of Abundance
You’ve probably heard this famous quote from Steve Jobs about saying ‘no’: People think focus means saying yes to the thing you’ve got to focus on. But that’s not what it means at all. It means saying no to the hundred other good ideas that there are. You have to pick carefully. I’m actually as proud…
Jim Nielsen — Published
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Try text scaling support [link]
I've had a larger phone because I got fed up with squinting at my screen, but because of that I also have the OS level font bumped to 115% (and I know Jule, my wife, has it bumped to 125%). This meta tag will use the system font size to adjust the font. Importantly, Josh also points out that the default…
Remy Sharp — Published
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January sponsors-only newsletter is out
I just sent the January edition of my sponsors-only monthly newsletter. If you are a sponsor (or if you start a sponsorship now) you can access it here. In the newsletter for January: LLM predictions for 2026 Coding agents get even more attention Clawdbot/Moltbot/OpenClaw went very viral Kakapo breeding…
Simon Willison — Published
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Quoting Brandon Sanderson
This is the difference between Data and a large language model, at least the ones operating right now. Data created art because he wanted to grow. He wanted to become something. He wanted to understand. Art is the means by which we become what we want to be. [...] The book, the painting, the film script…
Simon Willison — Published
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Introducing the Codex app
Introducing the Codex app OpenAI just released a new macOS app for their Codex coding agent. I've had a few days of preview access - it's a solid app that provides a nice UI over the capabilities of the Codex CLI agent and adds some interesting new features, most notably first-class support for Skills…
Simon Willison — Published
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A Social Network for A.I. Bots Only. No Humans Allowed.
A Social Network for A.I. Bots Only. No Humans Allowed. I talked to Cade Metz for this New York Times piece on OpenClaw and Moltbook. Cade reached out after seeing my blog post about that from the other day. In a first for me, they decided to send a photographer, Jason Henry, to my home to take some…
Simon Willison — Published
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The European Space Agency got hacked, and now we own the domain used!
It's not often that two of my interests align so well, but we're talking about space rockets and cyber security! Whilst Magecart and Magecart-style attacks might not be the most common attack vector at the moment, they are still happening with worrying frequency, and they are
Scott Helme — Published
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Untitled
Gone skiing.
Paul Robert Lloyd — Published
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JS Bin down in 2026 [blog]
January 27th I got an email notification saying that JS Bin had become unavailable. Then next day real life human beings were asking what's going on. By 11pm on the 30th the last of the issues were resolved. Earlier today Jake asked me: what went wrong? Fucking, everything.
Remy Sharp — Published
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Interpretation of “You stopped evoking love” by Pyx Lax
Translation of---and philosophical commentary on---a Greek song whose translated title is 'You stopped evoking love'.
Protesilaos Stavrou — Published
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TIL: Running OpenClaw in Docker
TIL: Running OpenClaw in Docker I've been running OpenClaw using Docker on my Mac. Here are the first in my ongoing notes on how I set that up and the commands I'm using to administer it. Use their Docker Compose configuration Answering all of those questions Running administrative commands Setting up…
Simon Willison — Published
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The Browser’s Little White Lies
So I’m making a thing and I want it to be styled different if the link’s been visited. Rather than build something myself in JavaScript, I figure I’ll just hook into the browser’s mechanism for tracking if a link’s been visited (a sensible approach, if I do say so myself). Why write JavaScript when a…
Jim Nielsen — Published
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15 years of blogging
My first blog post was published just under 15 years ago in March of 2011. Since then, I’ve published 151 posts, including this one. (If I was a numerologist, I’d think it had something to do with Pokémon.) This blog has covered a wide variety of topics, including Pokémon in fact (I wrote the first …
Nolan Lawson — Published
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It’s hard to justify Tahoe icons
Looking at the first principles of icon design—and how Apple failed to apply all of them in macOS Tahoe
Nikita Prokopov — Published — Updated
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Statistics made simple
Announcing a simple statistics library for Clojure web servers
Nikita Prokopov — Published — Updated
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How to get hired in 2025
A collection of red flags in software engineers' test assignments
Nikita Prokopov — Published — Updated
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Needy programs
We used to use software; now software started to use us
Nikita Prokopov — Published — Updated
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I am sorry, but everyone is getting syntax highlighting wrong
Applying human ergonomics and design principles to syntax highlighting
Nikita Prokopov — Published — Updated
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Interpretation of “I am not another” by Christos Thivaios
Translation of---and philosophical commentary on---a Greek song whose translated title is 'I am not another'.
Protesilaos Stavrou — Published
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Quoting Andrej Karpathy
Originally in 2019, GPT-2 was trained by OpenAI on 32 TPU v3 chips for 168 hours (7 days), with $8/hour/TPUv3 back then, for a total cost of approx. $43K. It achieves 0.256525 CORE score, which is an ensemble metric introduced in the DCLM paper over 22 evaluations like ARC/MMLU/etc. As of the last few…
Simon Willison — Published
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Banning Syntax Highlighting Steroids
I’ve always flip-flopped between so-called “light” and “dark” modes when it comes to code editors. A 2004 screenshot of a random C file opened in GVim proves I was an realy adopter of dark mode, although I never really liked the contemporary Dracula themes when they first appeared. Sure, it was cool…
Wouter Groeneveld — Published
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Building a browser API in one shot
TL;DR: With one prompt, I built an implementation of IndexedDB using Claude Code and a Ralph loop, passing 95% of a targeted subset of the Web Platform Tests, and 77.4% of a more rigorous subset of tests. When I learned that two simple browser engines had been vibe-coded, I was not particularly surprised…
Nolan Lawson — Published
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Singing the gospel of collective efficacy
Singing the gospel of collective efficacy Lovely piece from Matt Webb about how you can "just do things" to help make your community better for everyone: Similarly we all love when the swifts visit (beautiful birds), so somebody started a group to get swift nest boxes made and installed collectively…
Simon Willison — Published
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Switching to your headset mic automatically
tl;dr: Save the file at the bottom of this post as ~/.config/alsa-card-profile/paths/analog-input-headset-mic.conf, then run systemctl restart --user wireplumber. Done! Here’s some more background: Since I got my Framework 13, I had an annoying problem: When I plug in my headset, it doesn’t switch to…
Sebastian Morr — Published
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Interpretation of “Full moon” by Haris Alexiou
Translation of---and philosophical commentary on---a Greek song whose translated title is 'Full moon'.
Protesilaos Stavrou — Published
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Durastar Heat Pump Hysteresis
In which I discover that lying to HVAC manufacturers is an important life skill, and share a closely guarded secret: Durastar heat pumps like the DRADH24F2A / DRA1H24S2A with the DR24VINT2 24-volt control interface will infer the set point based on a 24-volt thermostat’s discrete heating and cooling…
Kyle Kingsbury — Published
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Quoting Steve Yegge
Getting agents using Beads requires much less prompting, because Beads now has 4 months of “Desire Paths” design, which I’ve talked about before. Beads has evolved a very complex command-line interface, with 100+ subcommands, each with many sub-subcommands, aliases, alternate syntaxes, and other affordances…
Simon Willison — Published
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Moltbook is the most interesting place on the internet right now
The hottest project in AI right now is Clawdbot, renamed to Moltbot, renamed to OpenClaw. It's an open source implementation of the digital personal assistant pattern, built by Peter Steinberger to integrate with the messaging system of your choice. It's two months old, has over 114,000 stars on GitHub…
Simon Willison — Published
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We gotta talk about AI as a programming tool for the arts
We gotta talk about AI as a programming tool for the arts Chris Ashworth is the creator and CEO of QLab, a macOS software package for “cue-based, multimedia playback” which is designed to automate lighting and audio for live theater productions. I recently started following him on TikTok where he posts…
Simon Willison — Published
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Poem: Dreams
Just read the poem. No further comment.
Protesilaos Stavrou — Published
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Datasette 1.0a24
Datasette 1.0a24 New Datasette alpha this morning. Key new features: Datasette's Request object can now handle multipart/form-data file uploads via the new await request.form(files=True) method. I plan to use this for a datasette-files plugin to support attaching files to rows of data. The recommended…
Simon Willison — Published
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Mark your calendar: Local News Day is 9 April
It’s no secret that newspapers across the country exist in a fragile ecosystem. Automattic has long supported journalism and local media with investments in publications and platforms like Longreads, The Atavist, and Newspack. We believe that local news still matters—and now more than ever. That’s why…
Jeffrey Zeldman — Published
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The desire for control
An entry from my journal in which I comment at length on how the desire for control can be useful and harmful.
Protesilaos Stavrou — Published
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The cults of TDD and GenAI
I’ve gotten a lot of flack throughout my career over my disdain towards test-driven development (TDD). I have met a lot of people who swear by it! And, I have also met a lot of people who insisted that I adopt it, too, often with the implied threat of appealing to my boss if appealing to me didn’t work…
Drew DeVault — Published
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Adding dynamic features to an aggressively cached website
My blog uses aggressive caching: it sits behind Cloudflare with a 15 minute cache header, which guarantees it can survive even the largest traffic spike to any given page. I've recently added a couple of dynamic features that work in spite of that full-page caching. Here's how those work. Edit links…
Simon Willison — Published
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The Five Levels: from Spicy Autocomplete to the Dark Factory
The Five Levels: from Spicy Autocomplete to the Dark Factory Dan Shapiro proposes a five level model of AI-assisted programming, inspired by the five (or rather six, it's zero-indexed) levels of driving automation. Spicy autocomplete, aka original GitHub Copilot or copying and pasting snippets from ChatGPT…
Simon Willison — Published
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The Don’t “Contact Us” Page
Nic Chan comes out as the whistleblower on how many “Contact Us” pages are made (spoiler: they’re designed to keep us from contacting anyone). A “fuck off contact page” is what a company throws together when they actually don’t want anyone to contact them at all. They […] are trying to reduce the amount…
Jim Nielsen — Published
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Apple Ruined My Mechanical Keyboard Experience (A NuPhy Halo75 Review)
My trusty external Apple Magic Keyboard disappeared into a drawer somewhere in the summer of 2024. It has never left that drawer until a few weeks ago, when I was so fed up with my inability to type correctly on the new mechanical keyboard that I decided it was time to go back to the Apple roots. The…
Wouter Groeneveld — Published
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We named them after the humans they were replacing.
“The word ‘computer’ only really slid over to mean ‘a machine’ in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, once we started building mechanical and then electronic devices to do that work instead [of people]. We did not name the machines after some abstract idea. We named them after the humans they were…
Jeffrey Zeldman — Published
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Eating Our Own Dogfood: What Running Report URI on Report URI Taught Us
Dogfooding is often talked about as a best practice, but I don't often see the results of such activities. For all new features introduced on Report URI, we are always the first to try them out and see how they work. In this post, we'll look
Scott Helme — Published
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Touching grass
An entry from my journal in which I comment on how the Internet can have a negative effect on one's outlook when not used in moderation.
Protesilaos Stavrou — Published
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One Human + One Agent = One Browser From Scratch
One Human + One Agent = One Browser From Scratch embedding-shapes was so infuriated by the hype around Cursor's FastRender browser project - thousands of parallel agents producing ~1.6 million lines of Rust - that they were inspired to take a go at building a web browser using coding agents themselves…
Simon Willison — Published
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Kimi K2.5: Visual Agentic Intelligence
Kimi K2.5: Visual Agentic Intelligence Kimi K2 landed in July as a 1 trillion parameter open weight LLM. It was joined by Kimi K2 Thinking in November which added reasoning capabilities. Now they've made it multi-modal: the K2 models were text-only, but the new 2.5 can handle image inputs as well: Kimi…
Simon Willison — Published
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Weekly Update 488
It's the discussion about the reaction of some people in the UK regarding their impending social media ban for under 16s that bugged me most. Most noteably was the hand-waving around "the gov is just trying to siphon up all our IDs" and "this means
Troy Hunt — Published
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Blocking Claude
Claude, a popular Large Language Model (LLM), has a magic string which is used to test the model’s “this conversation violates our policies and has to stop” behavior. You can embed this string into files and web pages, and Claude will terminate conversations where it reads their contents. Two quick notes…
Kyle Kingsbury — Published
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make.ts
Up Enter Up Up Enter Up Up Up Enter
Alex Kladov — Published
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The most important thing when working with LLMs
Okay, so you’ve got the basics of working with Claude going. But you’ve probably run into some problems: Claude doesn’t do what you want it to do, it gets confused about what’s happening and goes off the rails, all sorts of things can go wrong. Let’s talk about how to improve upon that. The most important…
Steve Klabnik — Published
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Some notes on starting to use Django
Hello! One of my favourite things is starting to learn an Old Boring Technology that I’ve never tried before but that has been around for 20+ years. It feels really good when every problem I’m ever going to have has been solved already 1000 times and I can just get stuff done easily. I’ve thought it…
Julia Evans — Published
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Emacs: ef-themes version 2.1.0
Information about the latest version of my colourful-yet-legible themes for GNU Emacs.
Protesilaos Stavrou — Published
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Tips for getting coding agents to write good Python tests
Someone asked on Hacker News if I had any tips for getting coding agents to write decent quality tests. Here's what I said: I work in Python which helps a lot because there are a TON of good examples of pytest tests floating around in the training data, including things like usage of fixture libraries…
Simon Willison — Published
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ChatGPT Containers can now run bash, pip/npm install packages, and download files
One of my favourite features of ChatGPT is its ability to write and execute code in a container. This feature launched as ChatGPT Code Interpreter nearly three years ago, was half-heartedly rebranded to "Advanced Data Analysis" at some point and is generally really difficult to find detailed documentation…
Simon Willison — Published
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You Can Just Say No to the Data
“The data doesn’t lie.” I imagine that’s what the cigarette companies said. “The data doesn’t lie. People want this stuff. They’re buying it in droves. We’re merely giving them what they want.” Which sounds more like an attempt at exoneration than a reason to exist. Demand can be engineered. “We’re giving…
Jim Nielsen — Published
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Journalling without the mental block
An essay on how I manage to write consistently even if I have to circumvent mental blocks.
Protesilaos Stavrou — Published
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the browser is the sandbox
the browser is the sandbox Paul Kinlan is a web platform developer advocate at Google and recently turned his attention to coding agents. He quickly identified the importance of a robust sandbox for agents to operate in and put together these detailed notes on how the web browser can help: This got me…
Simon Willison — Published
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Kākāpō Cam: Rakiura live stream
Kākāpō Cam: Rakiura live stream Critical update for this year's Kākāpō breeding season: the New Zealand Department of Conservation have a livestream running of Rakiura's nest! You’re looking at the underground nest of 23-year-old Rakiura. She has chosen this same site to nest for all seven breeding seasons…
Simon Willison — Published
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Emacs: tmr version 1.3.0
Information about the latest version of my TMR package for GNU Emacs.
Protesilaos Stavrou — Published
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Don't "Trust the Process"
Don't "Trust the Process" Jenny Wen, Design Lead at Anthropic (and previously Director of Design at Figma) gave a provocative keynote at Hatch Conference in Berlin last September. Jenny argues that the Design Process - user research leading to personas leading to user journeys leading to wireframes.…
Simon Willison — Published
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Quoting Jasmine Sun
If you tell a friend they can now instantly create any app, they’ll probably say “Cool! Now I need to think of an idea.” Then they will forget about it, and never build a thing. The problem is not that your friend is horribly uncreative. It’s that most people’s problems are not software-shaped, and most…
Simon Willison — Published
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AI tribalism
“Heartbreaking: The Worst Person You Know Just Made a Great Point” – ClickHole “When the facts change, I change my mind. What do you do, sir?” – John Maynard Keynes, paraphrased 2025 was a weird year for me. If you had asked me exactly a year ago, I would have said I thought LLMs were […]
Nolan Lawson — Published
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Keiji Yamagishi's Retro-Active Was Last Year's Most Played Album
Fans of retro games will no doubt recognise the name: the Japanese video game composer and programmer Keiji Yamagishi is famous for his work on Ninja Gaiden and many other great (S)NES soundtracks during from tenure at Tecmo. Yamagishi-san moved on to produce his own chiptune music together with Brave…
Wouter Groeneveld — Published
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While the moon grows I keep going
An entry from my journal in which I comment how I am inspired to always put my best self forward.
Protesilaos Stavrou — Published
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Wilson Lin on FastRender: a browser built by thousands of parallel agents
Last week Cursor published Scaling long-running autonomous coding, an article describing their research efforts into coordinating large numbers of autonomous coding agents. One of the projects mentioned in the article was FastRender, a web browser they built from scratch using their agent swarms. I wanted…
Simon Willison — Published
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Untitled
You don’t see this everyday.
Paul Robert Lloyd — Published
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Reading List 353
This reading list is courtesy of Vivaldi browser, who pay me decent money to fight for a better web and don’t moan at me for reading all this stuff. We build a browser that’s cream of the crop, not a stream of the Slop. Naked Power: Apple and Google’s mobile duopoly is held together with […]
Bruce Lawson — Published