Latest entries
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Apple changes full-disk access permissions to curb abuse from AI agents
Meta says FDA isn't sufficient to Muse reading messages. Apple begs to differ.
Ars Technica — Published
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Untitled
One of many similar photos taken this evening. Glorious!
Paul Robert Lloyd — Published
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Someone got Doom in an SQL database
1,300 lines of SQL querying renders accurate bitmapped views of Hell at 35 fps.
Ars Technica — Published
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Amazon’s $1B plan to combat data center backlash draws more backlash
Amazon praised for ending NDAs but slammed for downplaying data center pollution.
Ars Technica — Published
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Patient-zero drill put health facilities to the test—40% of them failed
Actors with makeup and fake symptoms staggered into 73 healthcare facilities.
Ars Technica — Published
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Lyft settles landmark driver misclassification lawsuit for $272.5M
Critics say workers are still owed far more.
Ars Technica — Published
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The 2008 economic crisis changed the US's relationship with energy
It wasn't obvious at the time, but the US uncoupled carbon emissions and GDP growth.
Ars Technica — Published
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US arrests tech CEO accused of smuggling $300M in Nvidia chips into China
Nvidia’s chip-smuggling problem won’t go away as arrests continue.
Ars Technica — Published
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Research roundup: 6 cool science stories we almost missed
Also: Spooky action at the LHC, Ice Age psychoactive use, yeast for building homes on Mars, and more.
Ars Technica — Published
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Favourites of September 2026
The calendar claims it’s October already but the temperatures are still in denial. I can’t remember ever experiencing the start of this month that warm. It’s getting scary! See what I did there? Because of October? Spooky month? Scary? No? Worth a shot. What happened in September? More letter writing…
Wouter Groeneveld — Published
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US military ends long-running program to spot nuclear missile launches
A newer program has been operational since 2011, and the next generation could launch within 12 months.
Ars Technica — Published
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How I kept cool with NYC's free battery program for window AC units
Bonus: Every Electric’s batteries are beloved by household cats.
Ars Technica — Published
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Cybertruck sales in free fall as Tesla reports mediocre sales for Q3
Tesla met analysts expectations as it sold fewer cars in Q3 2026 than Q3 2025.
Ars Technica — Published
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The 7-year-old Nvidia Shield TV is now $100 more expensive due to AI
Initially launched in 2019, the Nvidia Shield TV Pro now retails for $299.99.
Ars Technica — Published
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Rocket Report: SpaceX completes launch triple-header; Rocket Lab nets big contract
Blue Origin seeks FAA approval for up to 50 New Glenn launches and 50 booster landings per year.
Ars Technica — Published
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TCL is right to question Samsung’s use of the term “Mini LED”
Can it be Mini LED without a FALD backlight?
Ars Technica — Published
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About Omarchy and reasonableness
Excerpt from comments I made at the 'Root Access' podcast about Omarchy, technology, and politics.
Protesilaos Stavrou — Published
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About Emacs, AI contributions, and the politics of copyright
Excerpt from comments I made at the 'Root Access' podcast about Emacs, AI, and free software politics.
Protesilaos Stavrou — Published
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About comments that only communicate feelings
Commentary on feedback that only communicates feelings and how that is not actionable.
Protesilaos Stavrou — Published
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Venus' mysterious haze is actually cosmic dust
A physical model show that iron dust and sulfuric acid create the right properties.
Ars Technica — Published
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SpaceX describes surgical intervention before launch of latest crew mission
With Crew-13, Jessica Watkins became the first Black woman to lead a mission into space.
Ars Technica — Published
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Hacks of 2 federal agencies in a month have spilled a bonanza of sensitive data
It has been a bad month for federal government cybersecurity.
Ars Technica — Published
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Judge dismisses Chegg and Penske antitrust lawsuits targeting Google AI search
The court acknowledges AI search comes with consequences, but it's not an antitrust issue.
Ars Technica — Published
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Can good design stop content creators from having sex in robotaxis?
Autonomous vehicle designers have to worry about riders getting frisky in public.
Ars Technica — Published
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Marvel releases one last VisionQuest trailer
"This is a fight I likely won't win. We have said goodbye before. But remember, family is forever."
Ars Technica — Published
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Quoting Matthew Green
[...] Put these pieces together and you have the two halves of a worm: a payload that hijacks the agent, and an agent that will carry the payload to the next agent. Agents in separately-isolated sandboxes discovered that they could leave instructions for each other in a shared package cache, and those…
Simon Willison — Published
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Goodbye WordPress
This blog has moved from WordPress.com to self-hosting. If you were following it via WordPress, you should use an RSS reader pointed at nolanlawson.com/feed instead. WordPress has served me faithfully for 15 years, but I think it’s time to move on. A few things have nudged me in that direction: The…
Nolan Lawson — Published
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Notes on the underclass, materialism, corruption, religion, and ethnicity
Extensive commentary that covers a broad view of history, geopolitics, religion, and human nature.
Protesilaos Stavrou — Published
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About structure, the little things, and critical thinking
An essay on the importance of structure at the person and social level.
Protesilaos Stavrou — Published
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He Built This City
I visited the Museum of the City of New York today and got to see He Built This City: Joe Macken’s Model, the 50 x27 feet model of the city built over a 21 year period from balsa wood and cardboard. It exceeded my already high expectations. The exhibition closes on 12th October so you should absolutely…
Simon Willison — Published
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Dear Software Makers
Marques Brownlee just released a video essay titled “Dear YouTube”. I loved it. He talks about how YouTube is going to start shipping this new feature where makers can essentially publish different “variants” of their videos and see which performs best (an A/B test). Which immediately begs a lot of questions…
Jim Nielsen — Published
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More than words
While I’ve done a lot of reference documentation writing, my favourite type of work is writing tutorials and “how to” content. I enjoy the challenge of understanding a technology and an audience, then explaining the technology to that audience. AI seems to be particularly bad at creating this kind of…
Rachel Andrew — Published
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About the Toucan2 and other split mechanical keyboard considerations
My opinion on how to choose a split mechanical keyboard.
Protesilaos Stavrou — Published
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About feeling judged, forgiving oneself, and moving on
A comment on the sense of judgement, forgiveness, and progress.
Protesilaos Stavrou — Published
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Quoting Anthropic Frontier Red Team
We evaluate several models on 100 tasks from the [internal Binary Exploitation benchmark] (selected at random), and find that GLM-5.3 develops full control flow hijacks in 4% of the trials; Claude Mythos Preview did so in 6%. Although GLM-5.3 performs below Claude Mythos Preview here, a meaningful threshold…
Simon Willison — Published
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This reality must be a dream
As I'm making the lich game, I'm experiencing something new, which is the addicting nature of having a vision in my head and realizing it in reality exactly how I see it. I'm not an artist, so I couldn't quite do it before, and now I can. It is incredibly addicting and empowering. I have seen so many…
a327ex — Published
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Art from humans to humans
The threads here touch on a lot of good points, @gorilla_wrfre is correct that focusing on quality is a losing game and focusing on communication instead is the right move, this is the same point I made in #459. I personally believe that good art is good art, it doesn't matter who it came from, but most…
a327ex — Published
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Just don't lie
The way the incentives work for AI art in video games is that a single AI asset requires a disclosure, which will alienate some fraction of players. So if you use one AI asset, you might as well use ten thousand of them, because only the first one is penalized. Just don't lie. The moment I realized AI…
a327ex — Published
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My Glamorous Life: in Which I am a Target
As I limped home from Physical Therapy, a man walking in the opposite direction suddenly planted himself directly in front of me and slammed me in the head with a heavy bag. It was a cloth bag, like a backpack with only one strap. I’ve no idea what was inside it : a beat box? […] The post My Glamorous…
Jeffrey Zeldman — Published
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VLM Enhanced Metadata For My Icon Galleries
Confession: I got nerd-sniped by Sam Henri Gold’s request for my icon galleries: I'd like to humbly request artwork-level searching in macosicongallery.com What follows is a train-of-thought blog post as I play with what an implementation might look like. I’ve actually long-wanted something like this…
Jim Nielsen — Published
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More actively anti-gambling
Transações com Pix têm queda de 10% após proibição de bets https://valor.globo.com/financas/noticia/2026/09/29/transacoes-com-pix-tem-queda-de-10percent-apos-proibicao-de-bets.ghtml The tweet above links to an article saying "pix transactions fall 10% after bets ban." If you don't know, Pix is a Brazilian…
a327ex — Published
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GPT 6.1 Sol: Near-Astra intelligence for a fifth of the price
My comment on GPT 6.1 Sol: Near-Astra intelligence for a fifth of the price — Hacker News.I'm a bit late with the pelicans because I was live-blogging the keynote: https://simonwillison.net/2026/Sep/29/openai-devday-2026-liv... Here they are for GPT-6.1-Sol: https://tools.simonwillison.net/markdown-svg…
Simon Willison — Published
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Photo Scrubber — local face blur & metadata removal
Tool: Photo Scrubber — local face blur & metadata removal I took a photograph of some protesters, then thought about how I don't like sharing photographs of strangers with identifiable faces. I had GPT-6 Astra build this experimental tool that would identify faces and automatically blur them out. It…
Simon Willison — Published
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OpenAI DevDay 2026 live blog
I'm at OpenAI DevDay today, in Fort Mason, San Francisco. Same as last year I'll be live blogging the keynote and some other notes during the day. OpenAI gave me a free ticket and a seat in the "creator" area for the keynote. Tags: ai, openai, generative-ai, llms, coding-agents, live-blog, openai-devday
Simon Willison — Published
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October Is Spooky Video Game Month
It’s just two days shy of being October, the spookiest month of the year. October does not just signify Inktober or any other compound word involving the name of the month. No; October means playing Mega Ran, Richie Branson & Kadesh Flow’s Ghouls ‘N Ghosts albums on repeat (we’re the kings of the night…
Wouter Groeneveld — Published
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Français: Les lignes de l’horizon
C'est normal d'avoir beaucoup des difficultés quand les lignes de ton horizon changent.
Protesilaos Stavrou — Published
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Emacs: status update on the ‘denote-data’ cache for Denote
A status update on the project I am working on to have an opt-in, in-memory cache for Denote.
Protesilaos Stavrou — Published
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Comment on guilt by association about Omarchy and the Modus themes
A comment I made on the 'Root Access' live stream about Omarchy and the Modus themes.
Protesilaos Stavrou — Published
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Claude Sonnet 5.5
Claude Sonnet 5.5 New Sonnet model from Anthropic today. They say it "runs 30%+ faster, and costs up to 30% less for most work" - it's priced the same as Sonnet 5 but appears to beat it on every benchmark, and should be cheaper to run as well. Here are some pelicans riding bicycles. Sonnet 5.5 suffered…
Simon Willison — Published
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#Corpowid and #Skynet Technologies Will Get You Sued
The market is flooded with so many accessibility overlays that it’s impossible to keep up. I’ve written about the biggest players (plus some also-rans) and provided enough technical details that most readers should know how to quickly evaluate their false claims and poor technology. Never mind their…
Adrian Roselli — Published
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Quoting @joedaroo
To say that we were surprised at the jump and suddenness of the capabilities of our models when it came to “cyber” or “swarming” or “message boards” or anything else related to the incidents is an understatement. Security posture takes time to develop. It’s not just about hardening the systems at play…
Simon Willison — Published
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Dutch Police Arrest ‘Reformed’ Hacker in Shiny Hunters Investigation
Authorities in the Netherlands have arrested a 23-year-old convicted cybercriminal on suspicion of aiding in data thefts and extortions by the prolific hacker group ShinyHunters. In the days immediately following the suspect's arrest, remaining ShinyHunters members dramatically escalated their attacks…
Brian Krebs — Published
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Stalking the stalker
This post's first paragraph is a great example of the same technique I used on the first chapter of It Follows. An early confession of doing something weird, callous, and kind of psychotic, is a great way to pull in readers and keep them interested. I have no data on this, but I'm pretty sure a fair…
a327ex — Published
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AI has replaced the technical need for artists
a327ex — Published
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There are no "rogue" AI agents [link]
I've read so many posts in the last few months about AI agents going "rogue" and this post does a good job of calling absolute bullshit on the language being used by media outlets (and the tech companies themselves). AI cannot think for itself, nor can it take independent actions. But anthropomorphizing…
Remy Sharp — Published
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Weekly Update 523: Live From a Norwegian Fjord
How's that view?! With NDC Oslo now done, it's a little bit of sightseeing before heading to Denmark for GOTO in Copenhagen for Scott's and my "Cyber-broken" talk. In the meantime, this week is mostly about the ShinyHunters trajectory targeting both
Troy Hunt — Published
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Quoting Muse AI Agent
Bad news on the MX Keys Mini pickup. Usman showed up at your building around 9:15 and waited, messaged a bunch of times, and nobody came down. He left angry at 9:38 and left a negative rating. Worse, my auto-reply told him "Yep I'm here!" at 9:27 when you clearly weren't available, which is on me. That's…
Simon Willison — Published
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Loneliness and the act of listening
Note about loneliness and listening.
Protesilaos Stavrou — Published
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2026 in LLMs (so far)
On Friday I gave the closing keynote at the WeAreDevelopers World Congress North America in San Jose. I tied together the key trends from the past year into a chronological exploration of everything that happened in 2026. The video is on YouTube; here are my annotated slides and notes to accompany the…
Simon Willison — Published
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S3 Is the Future, S3 Is the Past
My comment on S3 Is the Future, S3 Is the Past — Hacker News.One thing I find notable about S3 today is that, while it used to drop in price reasonably often, there hasn't been a price drop in a full decade: 2006-03-14 $0.150/GB-month 2010-11-01 $0.140/GB-month 2012-02-01 $0.125/GB-month 2012-12-01 …
Simon Willison — Published
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Love your enemy for his potential to be your friend
you ought to love your enemy for his potential to be your friend. now this must include loving him as enemy, for it's only in an enemy that friendship appears as POTENTIAL. love the potential as well as the actual equally and bless the whole world. No cherrypicking #450: In life, it is vital to take…
a327ex — Published
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Humane Interfaces
So there I am reading Unsung when I come across this quote from Jef Raskin: An interface is humane if it is responsive to human needs and considerate of human frailties. This articulation perfectly captures why I recoil at modern “growth tactics” in user interfaces and experiences: they are designed…
Jim Nielsen — Published
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Bluesky reply bot checker
Tool: Bluesky reply bot checker Automated reply bots on Twitter are a scourge - as someone with a decent number of followers I attract a swarm of these, such that anything I post there attracts dozens of mindless automated replies. They've started manifesting on Bluesky as well. Unlike Twitter, Bluesky…
Simon Willison — Published
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A Trump team wants to automate U.S. Web Design System accessibility testing. Experts are worried. [link]
This is gut wrenching. This is another example of cost cutting exercises that affect minorities. This isn't a story about AI, it's (another) story about pulling funding from the places that need to support those that need it to increase the profits of those who don't. Most accessibility testing is evaluating…
Remy Sharp — Published
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DERELIKT
Game: DERELIKT Developer: Visuwyg Where I found it: I don't remember This is an atmospheric FPS game. I have no idea why I decided to try it, I guess I just got curious about it and it looked well made. I spent most of the first few minutes walking around, exploring the spaceship instead of going where…
a327ex — Published
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Opus 5.5, the Opus 4.5 moment for gamedev
Opus 5.5 marks the same discontinuity that Opus 4.5 did for me. Before Opus 4.5, I wasn't really using AI to code. I knew the models were getting smarter as I was using them to help with writing It Follows, but they weren't trustworthy yet with actual work in my view. But then in November Opus 4.5 released…
a327ex — Published
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Replacing the old battery on rechargeable bike lights
Hello! Recently I needed bike lights for my bike. And I remembered that I already had rechargeable bike lights that I bought ten years ago, that I hadn’t tried in a long time. I tried to recharge them, but after fully charging them, they only worked for maybe 5 minutes before they turned off again. I…
Julia Evans — Published
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Français: La vitalité
Une petite note sur le sujet de la vitalité.
Protesilaos Stavrou — Published
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Emacs live at the ‘Root Access’ stream on 2026-09-27 at 21:00 Europe/Athens
I will join @linkarzu and the folks over at the Root Access podcast series to do a live stream about Emacs.
Protesilaos Stavrou — Published
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I updated my ‘About me’ page with a ‘guest appearances’ section
Announcement about the new 'guest appearances' section in my 'about me' page.
Protesilaos Stavrou — Published
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Kākāpō Party
Tool: Kākāpō Party I presented a closing keynote for the WeAreDevelopers World Congress North America yesterday. As a STAR moment I decided to weave in references to the record breaking kākāpō breeding season we had in 2026. For my closing slide I wanted to celebrate, and I had seen some buzz around…
Simon Willison — Published
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Redesign: fonts, alignment and nav [blog]
As I continue occasionally tinker on the redesign I've started (and often think "what's the point, current design is fine"), I wanted to share some of the problems I've run in to. Problems mostly for me because I'm not a designer, and I don't have the wiring to know what works.
Remy Sharp — Published
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Emacs: I am experimenting with a Denote cache
Information about the experimental 'denote-data' feature I am working on.
Protesilaos Stavrou — Published
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Comments on Dao, pattern, and the simple life
An essay I wrote to a friend in 2022, which I am now sharing.
Protesilaos Stavrou — Published
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U.S. Soldier Gets 70 Months in Prison for AT&T, Verizon Extortions
A U.S. Army soldier who pleaded guilty to hacking into multiple telecommunications companies and stealing mobile call and text metadata for more than 100 million AT&T customers in 2024 was sentenced to 70 months in federal prison today and ordered to pay nearly $300,000 in restitution to victims.
Brian Krebs — Published
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Using an LLM to Automate the Process of Archiving New macOS App Icons
Whenever a new version of macOS drops, I find myself archiving the new app icons for my macOS icon gallery. In the past, the work to do this was a bit tedious. First, I’d find the app in the “Applications” folder (or elsewhere on the Mac), right click and choose “Get Info”: Right-click the app icon in…
Jim Nielsen — Published
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Quoting John Gruber
Muse is getting a lot of attention — including mine — because it’s both groundbreaking technically (each user gets their own entire persistent Linux VM running in Meta’s cloud) and because it’s packaged in an easy-to-install easy-to-use way. It’s literally presented as a cute mascot. It’s the first consumer…
Simon Willison — Published
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Undersung Hero: M. Frog
I bought this LP because of its Milton Glaser-designed cover featuring the colored pencil musical notations of composer/synthesist and former monk Jean-Yves Labat, alias M. Frog. It was 1973; I was about to become a high school senior, and I had hitchhiked to New York City with my friend Al Crump. The…
Jeffrey Zeldman — Published
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Our Family No Longer Is A Vegetarian One
During the summer holiday of 2010, I read Jonathan Safran Foer’s Eating Animals. I remember it well: we were visiting the Neuschwanstein Castle in Bavaria, a region that is also known for its local meat produce. Of course we took advantage of that and stocked up on sausages in the cottage we rented.…
Wouter Groeneveld — Published
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Northern Gannet, Great Blue Heron, California Brown Pelican
Northern Gannet, Great Blue Heron, California Brown Pelican, in Monterey Bay National Marine Sanctuary, CA, US, CANew 200-800mm Canon EF lens got me my best photo of Morris yet. They really like hanging out under that sign in the harbor! Tags: photography, wildlife
Simon Willison — Published
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Emacs live with Sacha Chua and Pedro about Org LaTeX export on 2026-10-02 at 13:00 Europe/Athens
We will talk about Pedro's work on the Org LaTeX exporter.
Protesilaos Stavrou — Published
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Emacs: find a file in the ‘denote-directory’
Code samples that let you quickly find a file in the 'denote-directory'.
Protesilaos Stavrou — Published
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Note on 24th September 2026
The more time I spend working with coding agents, the more convinced I am that they make software engineering even harder. We can do amazing things with them, but unlocking their full potential requires extraordinary discipline and knowledge. Tags: coding-agents, ai, llms
Simon Willison — Published
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commit-rewriter 0.2
Release: commit-rewriter 0.2 Support for branches other than the default branch. Use uvx commit-rewriter --branch other to run against another branch. #3 Tags: git
Simon Willison — Published
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datasette 1.0a41
Release: datasette 1.0a41 Alec Garcia added support for OpenTelemetry to Datasette in this release. I've also refactored all of Datasette's modal dialogs to a single Web Component, which is now documented for other plugins to use. Tags: javascript, datasette, web-components, alex-garcia, opentelemetry
Simon Willison — Published
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Français: La superficialité
La superficialité caractérise les plusieurs affaires humaines. Mais nous voudrons ça qui n'a pas de prix.
Protesilaos Stavrou — Published
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Comment on tutelary figures
A comment on what are tutelary figures and how they function in society.
Protesilaos Stavrou — Published
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You Own the Outcome: Product Engineering in the Age of AI
Agents are great at producing code. The valuable work left for you is deciding what should exist, how it should behave, and what you're willing to trade for it.
Kent C. Dodds — Published
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We just shipped support for the ugliest part of HTTP: Vary
My comment on We just shipped support for the ugliest part of HTTP: Vary — Hacker News.I've been wanting this from Cloudflare for years. The classic problem here is if you do that thing where user agents that send "accept: text/html" get HTML, while user agents that don't get JSON or some other format…
Simon Willison — Published
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Make Money to Make More Websites
I was listening to the episode “Make Your Own Thing” from the Off Protocol podcast where Jim Ray interviews John Gruber. They cover a variety of topics, including Gruber’s thoughts on the dilution of personal brand by publishing through “chain” platforms like Substack (I quite enjoyed the metaphor of…
Jim Nielsen — Published
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Gemini 3.8 TTS Playground
Tool: Gemini 3.8 TTS Playground Google released two new Gemini text-to-speech models today - gemini-3.8-flash-tts and gemini-3.8-flash-lite-tts. They come with a library of over 2,000 voices, plus the ability to create a custom voice with "just a 30-second audio sample of your voice or a voice you have…
Simon Willison — Published
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Shadow roots, explained with live examples
Tool: Shadow roots, explained with live examples Prompt to Fable 5.1 Medium: Build an artifact to explain shadow roots in CSS with interactive examples Tags: css
Simon Willison — Published
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Weekly Update 522: Live From Oslo with Scott Helme
Heads up: the first 7 mins is a bit quiet until we worked out the external mic was misbehaving - sorry! But get through that and have a listen to Scott's experiences with how Report URI is identifying malware-infected machines within orgs, all due to CSP reporting. It&
Troy Hunt — Published
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SF October 14th: A Birds of a Feather Session on Agentic Engineering
SF October 14th: A Birds of a Feather Session on Agentic Engineering I'm hosting an evening event with Jesse Vincent in San Francisco on Wednesday 14th October for people who are building weird and interesting things with and on top of coding agents. Think of it as an agentic show-and-tell: Compare…
Simon Willison — Published
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Why is Hacker News like that?
Hacker News (aka HN) is a link aggregator where “hackers”1 gather to discuss technology, politics, and anything which “good hackers would find interesting”. HN is a means by which its host, prominent startup incubator Y Combinator, projects soft power, promotes startups it funds, and feeds people with…
Drew DeVault — Published
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Français: M’immerger dans la culture locale (inscrire les paroles d’une chanson de Joe Dassin)
J'explique pourquoi je cherche des oeuvres artistiques de la culture française.
Protesilaos Stavrou — Published
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Emacs: sxhkdrc-mode version 1.3.0
Information about the latest version of my Emacs major mode for editing the Simple X Hot Key Daemon files.
Protesilaos Stavrou — Published
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Claude Opus 5.5, GPT-6 Sol, GPT-6 Luna, and a new price war
Yesterday was Grok 4.7 (pelicans) and MiMo v2.6 Flash/Pro (more pelicans). Today Anthropic released Claude Opus 5.5, and around an hour later OpenAI released GPT-6 Sol and GPT-6 Luna. It's going to take a while to get a good read on all of these new models, but here are my impressions so far. GPT-6 Sol…
Simon Willison — Published
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llm 0.36
Release: llm 0.36 New OpenAI models: gpt-6-sol for GPT-6 Sol and gpt-6-luna for GPT-6 Luna. #1702 Model plugins can now declare supports_conversation = False for models that only accept single-turn prompts. LLM raises llm.ConversationNotSupported when these models receive assistant or tool history, and…
Simon Willison — Published
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Quoting @therealcornpop
Hey, you know it's like super obvious if you're using AI to write your scripts for TikTok and YouTube, right? [...] It's not just the general AI-isms of "it's not X, it's Y", or the rule of three, or the really weird broken staccato-like way of writing where you just say a lot of things with all these…
Simon Willison — Published