Latest entries
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MAHA lost bigly in the midterms—is it at death's door?
RFK Jr.'s Make America Healthy Again movement was in trouble before voting began.
Ars Technica — Published
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Gamers go to ridiculous lengths to "improve" GTA VI with Nvidia's DLSS 5
Using a capture card and open source software to run PS5 video through a PC GPU.
Ars Technica — Published
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Quoting Paul Ford
The web browser is very, very, very powerful software for applications, and the cost of accessing that power is going down seemingly every day. — Paul Ford, The Web Is More Than Enough Tags: browsers, paul-ford, web-development
Simon Willison — Published
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♫ You Can’t Always Get What You Want by Rolling Stones
♫ You Can’t Always Get What You Want by Rolling StonesBut if you try sometimes, you’ll find you get what you need.
Paul Robert Lloyd — Published
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Statehouse wins give Democrats new power to push clean energy
Democrats erased the GOP’s trifecta edge and gained new power over energy policy.
Ars Technica — Published
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Motorola's new Signature 27 has it all if you can stomach the $1,600 price tag
It has all the bells and whistles (and cameras).
Ars Technica — Published
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Agility Robotics' Nasdaq debut invites scrutiny of humanoid robot market
US leader in deploying humanoid robots goes public on the Nasdaq stock exchange.
Ars Technica — Published
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2026 iPad mini review: Maximizing the mini
It's more compelling than ever, but also more expensive.
Ars Technica — Published
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Mercedes-AMG GT 4-Door Coupe first drive: Where tech and fun collide
The spirit of AMG is alive via three axial flux electric motors.
Ars Technica — Published
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Sometimes, Look at the Keys
I wrote a post several years ago called Don’t Look at the Keys. I wrote it after having a minor breakthrough when starting to get back into a regular piano practice. When I was quite young, my first piano teacher used to tell me: “Don’t look at the keys when you’re playing the piano.” At the time I wrote…
Ben Congdon — Published
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Want to Rent an Internet Address at the White House?
Several staffers at the White House are using computers or mobile devices equipped with residential proxy services that render their internet address available for others to rent, security experts warned today. One of the proxy services is a Russian company whose founder's web hosting business was ground…
Brian Krebs — Published
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Untitled
10 long months of torturing myself. Enough. Enough now.
Paul Robert Lloyd — Published
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We can do better than line-buffered output
Buffered output typically comes in two flavors: fully buffered and line buffered. If output goes to a terminal then the implementation automatically selects line buffering, flushing its buffer when a line is completed so that it reaches the user immediately. Otherwise it fully buffers, holding output…
Chris Wellons — Published
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Français: Pour toi et moi
Un petit note en sujet de communication.
Protesilaos Stavrou — Published
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Nintendo's biggest ROM chip supplier is bowing out of the business
And what that could mean for physical Switch game costs.
Ars Technica — Published
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Hackers exploited iOS and Android flaws to infect phones
Researchers say group may have been Kremlin-sponsored in search of diplomatic targets.
Ars Technica — Published
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Uranium cubes reveal why the German nuclear project failed
"Our calculations suggest Heisenberg significantly underestimated the materials required."
Ars Technica — Published
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VMware releases vSphere Express for virtualization on up to 128 cores
“We started listening to a lot of our lower-end customers," VMware exec says.
Ars Technica — Published
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AMD's record quarter: Data center business doubles, while gaming craters
AMD's gaming revenue fell 40 percent in an otherwise record $13.4 billion quarter.
Ars Technica — Published
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Big Tech claims voters’ AI backlash is “anti-Trump” not “anti-tech”
Tech industry in denial as US overwhelmingly votes to restrict AI, data centers.
Ars Technica — Published
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After Texas' blue wave, what happens to Elon Musk and SpaceX?
"Data centers in space looking pretty appealing right now."
Ars Technica — Published
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Ted Cruz aims to stack FCC with Republicans before Democrats take Senate control
Cruz and Trump seem to have no plans to fill FCC's empty Democratic seat.
Ars Technica — Published
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“It Gives Great Demo”
There’s that famous video of Steve Jobs explaining why they don’t didn’t make touchscreen MacBooks: We thought about [a touch screen MacBook] years ago. We’ve done tons of user testing on this and it turns out it doesn’t work! Touch surfaces don’t want to be vertical. It gives great demo. But after a…
Jim Nielsen — Published
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People say they want small smartphones—the Enough Phone will put that to the test
It won't win the specs race, but it will actually fit in your hand.
Ars Technica — Published
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Binance says hackers who stole billions in crypto spent months planning heist
Techniques included laptop infections, compromised internal tooling, and fake job interviews.
Ars Technica — Published
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What I learned driving the Slate electric truck prototype
After 45 minutes behind the wheel, I am more optimistic about the $25,000 EV.
Ars Technica — Published
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datasette-llm 0.1a10
Release: datasette-llm 0.1a10 Fixes a bug that affected my agent.datasette.io demo site, where the set of available LLM models was not correctly restricted to just those in the configuration. Tags: datasette, llm
Simon Willison — Published
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The DEA banned a drug some opioid users called a miracle
Researchers say the Schedule I ban could kill studies of a promising opioid treatment.
Ars Technica — Published
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Favourites of October 2026
Boo! Happy Halloween. See you next year for another scare. In the meantime, life slogs, and sometimes rushes, on. We’ve had the pleasure to experience the grand opening of the flu season resulting in more sleep deprivation whilst trying to take care of the sick kids. As you can imagine, dodging sickness…
Wouter Groeneveld — Published
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Voice is Underutilized
Speech is a useful medium for communicating with AI, both as an input/output channel and as back-and-forth. Over 2026 I’ve been increasing the amount of speech I/O and have collected a fair number of use cases. Input Voice is, of course, great for rambling at coding agents. Oftentimes the transactional…
Ben Congdon — Published
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#1's smell
All attempts in It Follows were based on real encounters I had in real life. Most of them were changed to serve the story better and fit the curse's rules, but I tried to keep them as close to reality as possible. For example, attempt #17, which I believe was the rape, happened in real life up to the…
a327ex — Published
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datasette-apps 0.3a0
Release: datasette-apps 0.3a0 Datasette Apps adds support for hosting and editing custom HTML applications inside of Datasette. These can be created by hand, but it's easier to create them using LLMs via Datasette Agent. This release improves that integration: Apps can now be tagged in Datasette Agent…
Simon Willison — Published
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Fortune Telling and Speculative Design
Practical tools for design engineers to explore possible futures through speculative design
Maggie Appleton — Published
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From European austerity to warmongering
Analysis of the politics of the Euro Area and how those create incentives for Europe to go to war with Russia and other countries.
Protesilaos Stavrou — Published
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Reply to Emacs questions about configuration, Evil, and more
A detailed response to questions about my Emacs configuration and various preferences thereof.
Protesilaos Stavrou — Published
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datasette-agent 0.5a0
Release: datasette-agent 0.5a0 This is a significant release of Datasette Agent. The most notable new feature is called the panel - it lets the agent chat open and then sit next to pages from Datasette, for example a table or query page. When combined with datasette-apps this means you can prompt a database…
Simon Willison — Published
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California fights "preposterous" Trump admin demand to scrap state broadband laws
State tries to obtain broadband funds despite rejecting Trump admin condition.
Ars Technica — Published
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llm 0.37.1
Release: llm 0.37.1 A bugfix release for LLM, with contributions from Steven Huang, Tao An, Arjan Mossel, and XQ. Tags: llm
Simon Willison — Published
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Qwen 3.8 27B on my laptop can interpret model weights, too
Yesterday's hot paper was Sparks of Weight-Space Programming: LLMs can natively read & write neural network weights by Rikiya Takehi, Jayden Teoh, Alex Zhang, and Omar Khattab. The paper (OK, the authors classify is as a "blog post", but it's paper-shaped) found that frontier models, in particular GPT…
Simon Willison — Published
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Why this Obscure Audio Codec is a Perfect Fit for the N64
Sorry for the clickbait title. I promise this post delivers: 44100 Hz stereo with near-Opus bitrates using about 4% of the N64’s CPU time. But first, some history: The options for playing and storing audio data on the N64 were dire. The PlayStation could just stream uncompressed redbook audio straight…
Dominic Szablewski — Published
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Why Review AI-Generated Code?
AI can generate a lot of code quickly. There’s a thought that we can catch its mistakes or other issues by reviewing that code. In theory, this may be true; code review can catch bugs. In practice, it only works if the reviewer knows what to look for, has some context and, well, gives a shit. There's…
David Bryant Copeland — Published
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I discovered a sound that leaks your exact location (and it's everywhere) - YouTube
I discovered a sound that leaks your exact location (and it's everywhere) - YouTube Genius piece of OSINT by Colsto, who demonstrates how you can take almost imperceptible background noise of planes from a video soundtrack, figure out their Doppler curves, then cross reference them against ADS-B data…
Simon Willison — Published
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October sponsors-only newsletter
I sent out the October edition of my sponsors-only monthly newsletter. If you are a sponsor (or start a sponsorship now) you can access it here. This month: The October inflection point for vibe game development The vulnerability apocalypse gets hot LLM releases API credits for $100+/month subscriptions…
Simon Willison — Published
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Interpolative Software
Much of the excitement around AI coding is downstream of the fact that a lot of software is interpolative. This has become especially true as of late, with the release of Opus 5.5, which is, I’d argue, superhumanly good at generating mass amounts of high-quality interpolative software.1 This post is…
Ben Congdon — Published
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Tech Firms Dismantle Botnet That Turned 1.3M TV Boxes Into Proxies
Google said today it worked with industry partners to dismantle a botnet made up of more than 1.3 million Android TV set-top boxes that ship with malicious software which secretly rents the user's Internet connection out to strangers and conducts advertising fraud. Experts involved in the takedown say…
Brian Krebs — Published
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Welfare versus warfare considerations in Europe
Essay on the trade-offs that are involved in policy orientations between welfare and warfare.
Protesilaos Stavrou — Published
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llm 0.37
Release: llm 0.37 There's a lot of stuff in this new release of my LLM CLI tool and Python library, representing around two months of accumulated features and fixes. I added gpt-6.1-sol and gpt-6.1-terra, plus a new llm openai endpoint add command to make it easier to configure additional models that…
Simon Willison — Published
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Making features generic in CSS
CSS has two new positional alignment keywords as part of CSS Box Alignment Level 3: flow-start and flow-end. These are defined as aliases for the existing flex-start and flex-end keywords. Therefore, in a supporting browser, the following two lines should align flex items to the end of the flex container…
Rachel Andrew — Published
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The U.S. Census Bureau and “Super Intelligence”
I was reminded today of AI Adoption Rate Trending Down for Large Companies, a chart produced by Apollo Global Management in September 2025, which appeared to show a slowdown in U.S. corporate AI adoption based on numbers collected by the U.S. Census Bureau. At the time I used that chart to demonstrate…
Simon Willison — Published
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If in doubt, delete the uv.lock file
I've been getting the occasional confusing Python dependency error since switching over to Python 3.15 and the rule I'm having to remember is: If in doubt, delete the uv.lock file Most of my projects are libraries which don't include a uv.lock file, since it's rude for a library dependency to lock versions…
Simon Willison — Published
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Book Number Nineteen
When I said my farewells to Book Number Eighteen that for me just didn’t have the right proportions, I didn’t expect to fill Number Nineteen so quickly. That’s 245 unlined Leuchtturm pages from April to October 2026 which must have been a new record! I’m happy to have picked up the pace again after months…
Wouter Groeneveld — Published
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Quoting Kyle Kingsbury
More broadly, the use of LLMs erodes trust in documentation, in software, and in the organizations which produce them. Perhaps engineers will begin to treat any new software project with suspicion—the signals we used to rely on as markers of a mature system are now easier to counterfeit. [...] In the…
Simon Willison — Published
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The smartphoneless NEET shut-in
So true, I resisted getting a smartphone for as long as I reasonably could, especially because after college I was pretty much a NEET shut-in for a good while, but eventually, if you want to interact with society at all, you need it, and I gave in because my life was becoming more inconvenient without…
a327ex — Published
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Computer Use is Useful Now
The ability for models to steer browsers is now past the threshold of being clearly useful. LLM providers have been advertising computer use capabilities for a couple of years1, but in the times I’d tried, the results were more of a clunky curiosity than something I’d actually use on a daily basis. The…
Ben Congdon — Published
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Untitled
There’s possibly nothing more painful than wanting something you already have.
Paul Robert Lloyd — Published
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Weekly Update 528: Reading AI-generated Code & the Economics of Solar
By pure timing coincidence, the Proton CEO's AI @ Proton, Engineering Manifesto made headlines around the same time as this week's video. The guy's management style and choice of language have really rubbed a lot of people up the wrong way, and deservedly so, IMHO.
Troy Hunt — Published
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Could a modern chess engine on a Pentium have defeated Kasparov in 1996?
A fun experiment where I back-port all the improvements we've made to chess engines over the last 30 years and run it on a 1996 Pentium Pro to see what we could have done if only we knew more at the time.
Nicholas Carlini — Published
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My Slow Return to a Swift Career
I recently gave this talk at the SwiftRockies conference in Calgary. This blog post expands on a few points that I didn’t have time for in the presentation, as well as some updates since then. The talk is here. Because I’ll be discussing my work with...
Ash Furrow — Published
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The Memory Police [book]
A weird story. Not quite sure what to make of it! Definitely surreal, and unlike any story I’ve read before. I did find I was trying to make sense of it, wondering if the protagonist was stuck in purgatory, but as the book finished, I don't think that was that was the point. It’s a good story, and engagingly…
Remy Sharp — Published
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Aristotle Nicomachean Ethics: society of spirit and “Prot’s glasses’s”
In this 1-hour video I talk at length about ethics, wellness, goals, rationality, and interpersonal affairs.
Protesilaos Stavrou — Published
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How We Took Over ChatGPT Accounts
How We Took Over ChatGPT Accounts Parameter Labs describe an exploit they found against ChatGPT's implementation of the artifacts pattern (OpenAI used to call this "Canvas" but it looks like the latest revision is called HTML previews), where interactive custom HTML apps are displayed in a sandboxed…
Simon Willison — Published
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datasette-llm 0.1a9
Release: datasette-llm 0.1a9 I have some big upgrades to Datasette Agent in the pipeline, but in the meantime here's a tiny user experience improvement to the underlying datasette-llm plugin. It now picks up the default model used by LLM, which means you can start using Datasette Agent without needing…
Simon Willison — Published
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Prospero: a new coding harness for a more civilized age
I’ve been fascinated with local LLMs for a couple of years now. The better open weight models, including some that inference on regular, higher-end consumer hardware at tolerable speeds, are now reliable enough to handle simpler programming tasks. This requires a coding harness, but so far this year…
Chris Wellons — Published
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Emacs live new Halloween theme for ‘ef-themes’ at 2026-10-31 14:00 Europe/Athens
I will develop at least one new theme for my 'ef-themes' package which will be in the spirit of Halloween.
Protesilaos Stavrou — Published
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Emacs: ef-halloween-dark is in ef-themes.git
I added a new dark theme to my 'ef-themes' package for Emacs.
Protesilaos Stavrou — Published
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dbreunig/nesformer
dbreunig/nesformer Inspired by qwenputer by Divyansh Agrawal, Drew Breunig baked a working emulator for a Nintendo Entertainment System 6502 CPU into the weights of Qwen3.5-4B. You can now play NES ROMs such as Super Mario Bros (very slowly) running inside Qwen! In a comment on Hacker News Drew reveals…
Simon Willison — Published
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Emacs live refinements for Denote at 2026-10-30 14:45 Europe/Athens
I am doing a live stream where I will make some refinements to Denote.
Protesilaos Stavrou — Published
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API credits benefit for eligible ChatGPT subscriptions
API credits benefit for eligible ChatGPT subscriptions Earlier this month Anthropic announced a generous new benefit for their Max and Team subscriptions: $100, $200, and $500 per month subscribers would get the equivalent quantity of (expiring) credits to use with the Anthropic API. OpenAI have now…
Simon Willison — Published
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Celebrating SIM Cards
It’s time to celebrate a little win. The other day, my mom contacted me saying her 10-year-old iPhone wouldn’t turn on. After getting a hold of the device and doing some family IT support, I concluded the battery was dead. So I bought her a new (old) one on Walmart (SE 3rd gen., if you must know). Her…
Jim Nielsen — Published
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Building a multiplayer game world with autonomous Fable-class models
How I Built the Most AI-Pilled Company in the World Don't be put off by the clickbait headline, this piece by Jacob Sansbury describing how they are building Spawn is a fascinating exploration of the bleeding edge of what's possible with agentic engineering against frontier models. Spawn is a massively…
Simon Willison — Published
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The Day the Focus Died
If we failed to do this, I feared, we would stop leading the industry and turn into “merely the CSS trick of the week.” The post The Day the Focus Died appeared first on Jeffrey Zeldman Presents.
Jeffrey Zeldman — Published
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Twenty Years of Retronauts (And Me)
Episode 800 of the Retronauts podcast recently released , celebrating twenty years of floating around in the podcast-o-sphere. Twenty years of making podcasts and eight hundred episodes, not counting the ones Jeremy and co. did for 1UP! That’s a remarkable achievement considering most other podcasts…
Wouter Groeneveld — Published
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Quoting Ben Hylak
every product i use should just be a headless mcp, that feeds into an agent, where i never have to think about anything underneath. except for our product, of course. in our product, customers love the ui and love us very much. we're special that way. — Ben Hylak Tags: model-context-protocol, ai
Simon Willison — Published
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The ship is anchor’d safe and sound.
A favorite actor just passed away.
Ethan Marcotte — Published
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Avoid Public Functions Calling Other Public Functions
A small-scale rule of thumb. This article will land much better with a concrete example, but I am drawing a blank here, so you gotta just blindly trust my say so!
Alex Kladov — Published
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My 2027 Web Platform Feature Ranking [blog]
Like my peers, I've decided to publish my personal ranking preference for the 2027 interop project. I'm doing this from a phone, so I can't link to the others that have published theirs, but I think it's interesting to see and compare what we feel is important.
Remy Sharp — Published
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Emacs live refining ‘ef-themes’ Diff/Magit colours at 2026-10-29 18:00 Europe/Athens
I am doing a live stream where I will revise colours that are used for diff interfaces.
Protesilaos Stavrou — Published
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Quoting Ted Sanders
In general, LLM performance is incredibly multidimensional. There's no guarantee of a fixed ordering where the model that is best at math is also the model that's best at jokes. Despite that complexity, much of the variation in performance is explained by just a single variable: model size. In general…
Simon Willison — Published
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Compass-deadening big automated runs
Currently I'm working on SNKRX's update, this is the only project I work on almost every day and have been managing to keep it going for about a month, and then I explore other projects as I see fit, like Phylactery which I ended up finishing. So as I explore potential ideas and as Opus 5.5 is more capable…
a327ex — Published
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GitHub Octoverse 2026
GitHub Octoverse 2026 I'm at GitHub Universe today (GitHub gave me a free ticket through their "GitHub Stars" program). EVP Jay Parikh just announced this year's Octoverse report, and highlighted these numbers in particular: This is a pretty stark representation of the impact of agentic engineering on…
Simon Willison — Published
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The AI cost of JavaScript frameworks
One of my pet peeves with the web development community is that so many of the decisions we make are vibes-based. Frameworks are “blazing fast,” tools will “supercharge” your development, the right abstraction will benefit both you and your users (DX and UX all in one!). All of this breathless…
Nolan Lawson — Published
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The October inflection point for vibe game development
I've written before about how November 2025 was an inflection point for coding agents - the point where Opus 4.5 and GPT-5.1 crossed a tipping point that meant their respective coding agents became reliable daily drivers for software engineers. I think we've reached a new inflection point in October…
Simon Willison — Published
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Quoting Terk Terkowitz
If your work does not benefit from current AI tooling, that is a finding, not a failing. Document why, share it with your community of peers, bring it to your manager, and work to find solutions. An engineer who can explain where AI does not yet help their work is demonstrating the judgement we are asking…
Simon Willison — Published
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Last week was terrible. It didn't have to be
Last week saw the arrival of two CVEs for PHP, CVE-2026-109618 and CVE-2026-109619, each rated a staggering CVSS 9.2. For comparison, Heartbleed was rated 5.0 under CVSS version 2 and 7.5 under version 3.1. Soon after the news landed, the cyber security team and others at work were setting up war room…
Josh Ghent — Published
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Enterprise sales teams, please, I beg you, stop
At $dayJob we reached the seat limit on a SaaS product. I reached out to their sales team for a quote on a few more seats. We already pay for this software. I'm not a new customer. What I expected was an email saying: "Great, glad you want to use this more. It will cost £X." I needed that price because…
Josh Ghent — Published
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About the first criticisms
An entry from my journal in which I comment on some important instances of criticism that made me a better person.
Protesilaos Stavrou — Published
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Game Boy Color on My Conference Badge
Game Boy Color on My Conference Badge I'm at GitHub Universe this week and, similar to last year, the conference badge is a full-blown color screen computer. I've been hacking around with it again, and then I ran into with Steve Francia... who worked with Gemini to get a full NES emulator working on…
Simon Willison — Published
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The game theory of dating as a race to the bottom
a327ex — Published
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Weekly Update 527: Cybergeddon News v. Reality
As the news from last week has settled down, it would seem this headline was pretty spot on. The foretold apocalypse didn't eventuate, and there were no internet-destroying outages. In fact, it took days before I could find a single story of PHP2Shell being reliably attributed back
Troy Hunt — Published
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As You Wake, Break the Shell [book]
Love, grief, connection and plants. This was a really endearing story of love unfolding. Sure, it's a bit twee, but it's a nice change from doom. Solarpunk I think. It makes me smile when I read the touching moments between Cora and Signey. There's a nice technical feature of this book that I've not…
Remy Sharp — Published
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Poem: As robins do
Just read the poem. No further comment.
Protesilaos Stavrou — Published
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GPT-6.1 Terra
GPT-6.1 Terra It's always interesting to note which aspects of a new model are emphasized in the release announcement. In the case of GPT-6.1 Terra, OpenAI went with visual reasoning and computer use: We’re introducing GPT-6.1 Terra, a fast, efficient model that combines detailed visual reasoning and…
Simon Willison — Published
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Quoting Jason Koebler
Because big tech platforms essentially do not have customer support and make it impossible for their users to contact a human, many people experiencing run-of-the-mill tech problems have turned to ChatGPT. And, increasingly, ChatGPT is telling people that have normal tech support problems that they have…
Simon Willison — Published
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400-parameter eyes
This is a good example of what I meant in #629 regarding small games still being the favorable thing to do. You can now go really hard on specific things in a way that wasn't as possible before for an individual. Imagine applying the same level of detail like this not only to eyes but to an entire face…
a327ex — Published
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webframe: evaluated as a scraper and a sandbox
Research: webframe: evaluated as a scraper and a sandbox webframe is a neat little project from Jeff Lindsay which lets you "run a web page like a program" - you point it at a URL or file and it executes it in a hidden headless web view and outputs console.log() to standard output and any exceptions…
Simon Willison — Published
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Hello? Where Is Everybody?
The shopping centre we find ourselves in also has an IKEA nearby. My daughter & I pop in to walk through the isles that house the teddy bears. She picks out a giraffe that now lives by the name Giraffa or just Raffa. For once, we don’t really need anything else in this lovely Swedish store so we head…
Wouter Groeneveld — Published
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Aristotle Nicomachean Ethics: criticism, happiness, good-spirit-ness
In this video I comment at length on Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics. This is the second episode in the series.
Protesilaos Stavrou — Published
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Of trance, exploration, and rationality
An entry from my journal in which I comment on trance music and then more abstract matters.
Protesilaos Stavrou — Published
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Watch trap
My decision earlier this year to wear a watch again is reflective of my growing preoccupation with time.
Paul Robert Lloyd — Published
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Why My Dad Didn’t Have a Cell Phone
Here’s Dave Rupert writing about all those emails, texts, phone calls, etc. we’re getting these days: Once upon a time it had utility, now it’s all noise and grifter slop demanding our attention and giving us to-dos That last part really hit: “giving us to-dos”. I feel this. So many of the messenger…
Jim Nielsen — Published