Latest entries
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The first self-driving vehicle on Mars has proven to be a smashing success
About 90 percent of the distance driven by Perseverance has been autonomous.
Ars Technica — Published
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DeepMind’s hurricane breakthrough has surprised weather scientists
Open source WeatherNext model can make accurate predictions with lower-resolution weather data.
Ars Technica — Published
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Quoting John Gruber
Me, I try to get into the mindset of playing live music, not recording a studio album. Except when I’m writing a piece where I really want it to be an album. Those aren’t rare, per se, but they’re occasional. If I tried to make every post a hall-of-famer I’d never get anything out. I’m aiming for professionalism…
Simon Willison — Published
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Now we have a timeline of the OpenAI accidental attack against Hugging Face
OpenAI gave a last-minute presentation at the Black Hat security on Wednesday about "the Hugging Face Incident" (previously on this blog). The video was published yesterday. It's short and information dense and well worth watching, in particular because it provides full details of what happened and how…
Simon Willison — Published
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Europe's free satellite service just made it easier to track wildfires
Copernicus Browser adds wildfire visualization amid record wildfire season.
Ars Technica — Published
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Flesh-eating screwworms feast on humans in Mexico; human cases top 500
Six deaths reported among screwworm cases, one directly attributed to the flies.
Ars Technica — Published
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Judge rules Meta caused "public nuisance" and must fund mental health treatment
New Mexico judge orders $567M fund to help address youth mental health crisis.
Ars Technica — Published
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Moonlight & Mayhem (Raccoon Heist by Codex + GPT-5.6 Sol Ultra)
Moonlight & Mayhem (Raccoon Heist by Codex + GPT-5.6 Sol Ultra) On Wednesday I wrote about One-shotting a Raccoon Heist game using Claude Fable 5, where I had Claude Fable 5 build a full working game from a premise I generated with GPT-3 and DALL-E four years ago. I decided to pose the exact same prompt…
Simon Willison — Published
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The ultimate eclipse chase: A Concorde raced against the Moon's shadow
Fitted with telescopes, the plane did our longest imaging of the Sun's corona.
Ars Technica — Published
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New official 30th anniversary Quake mission pack adds new maps and mechanics
19 new maps continue the story from MachineGames' other campaign additions.
Ars Technica — Published
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DOGE's wild, unverifiable savings claims discredited in US government report
DOGE's inflated "Wall of Receipts": 96% of grant savings unverifiable, GAO says.
Ars Technica — Published
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OpenAI’s expensive smart speaker will use moving parts to seem “more alive”
Gurman report claims OpenAI confirmed the speaker is not an Apple ripoff.
Ars Technica — Published
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How snails engineer their slime
Collagen and calcium work in tandem to achieve varying mechanical properties of different kinds of mucus.
Ars Technica — Published
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Volkswagen plans to win America back with a pickup, report says
There's no evidence the truck will be a cheap EV truck, but what if it were?
Ars Technica — Published
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The Tokenpocalypse Is Here: Companies Are Scrambling To Stop Spending So Much on AI
The Tokenpocalypse Is Here: Companies Are Scrambling To Stop Spending So Much on AI There's a fun anecdote from Accenture (apparently via leaked meeting audio recordings) in this 404 Media piece from June 24th: “We’re seeing from some of the data internally at least that it’s actually not our engineers…
Simon Willison — Published
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Nostalgia is a terrible drug
Ian Dunt captures a predicament I often find myself facing:Things in the past only take shape and assume their current form once they are over. Things in the present can therefore never live up to them. They can never provide the same degree of certainty, because they are still happening. So we live…
Paul Robert Lloyd — Published
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Report: White House drafting executive order linking vaccines and autism
Trump determined to link life-saving shots to autism, despite science and political risk.
Ars Technica — Published
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AI chatbots have failed people in crisis. Can that be fixed?
Clinicians and researchers say AI companies need to open up their safety data.
Ars Technica — Published
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Very nice effects on this game
Very nice effects on this game.
a327ex — Published
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ByteDance trains massive AI model in bid to rival Anthropic
TikTok owner training a model with 10 trillion parameters.
Ars Technica — Published
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The world's biggest solar telescope caught vortexes on the Sun's surface
We expected them to be there, but they had previously been too small to see.
Ars Technica — Published
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Trump is losing his war on wind power
A court rules that a hold on all wind projects clearly violates the law.
Ars Technica — Published
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Continuing the Steam AI score idea
Continuing the Steam AI score idea, when such agents come into existence, Valve is uniquely positioned to automake games instead of just selling them. Agents that can rate games can also build them, and when you have both portions of the loop you can close it, and only Valve can do it (I guess the Roblox…
a327ex — Published
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I think I am binary with liking/disliking people
Within 10 seconds of meeting an autistic person, strangers rate them as awkward and lose interest in getting to know them. Show those same strangers only a written transcript of what was said, with no audio or video, and the bias completely disappears. I think I am binary with liking/disliking people…
a327ex — Published
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Being a beautiful favelado mid is so fucking funny
Being a beautiful favelado mid is so fucking funny. The other day I was on grindr and a guy named "tesao em feio" (horny for ugly dudes) messages me and says "oier 😍" (hiii), I'm laughing and laughing and then we talk a little and he says he's just doing this to mess with "padrão" guys, conventionally…
a327ex — Published
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Remembering the pre-Google web, when search was an experiment
"Most people have completely forgotten how chaotic it really was."
Ars Technica — Published
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Games: Halo: Reach
About one of the games in 'Halo: The Master Chief Collection', plus philosophical commentary.
Protesilaos Stavrou — Published
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Interpretation of “The red river” by Eleonora Zouganeli
Translation of---and philosophical commentary on---a Greek song whose translated title is 'The red river'.
Protesilaos Stavrou — Published
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Private Session 26
Private Session 26 🔒 The contents of this AI log are private and have been uploaded to the website for archival purposes. They may or may not be revealed in the future.
a327ex — Published
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Tweet by @graveair
a327ex — Published
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Organ donation group accused of trying to take living man's organs faces shutdown
The organization, Network for Hope, "strongly disagrees" with Trump admin's decision.
Ars Technica — Published
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Explosive drone found hovering near Ukrainian cargo aircraft at German airport
Russian attack? Explosive drone targeted parked aircraft at Leipzig airport.
Ars Technica — Published
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X wants to keep suing advertisers, asks 5th Circuit to overrule district judge
Musk continues appeal despite court loss and settlement with advertiser group.
Ars Technica — Published
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datasette 1.0a38
Release: datasette 1.0a38 This release fixes a SQL injection security issue that affects Datasette instances that serve a mixture of public and private tables in the same database, with access configured using the Datasette permissions system. Site administrators who serve private tables in this way…
Simon Willison — Published
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datasette 0.65.3
Release: datasette 0.65.3 Back-ported the SQL Injection security fix from 1.0a38. Tags: datasette
Simon Willison — Published
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Simon Willison on Technical Blogging
Simon Willison on Technical Blogging I was interviewed by Cynthia Dunlop for her "Write that blog!" series back in January, but I just realized I never linked to the interview from my own blog! It includes my answers to the following questions: Why did you start blogging – and why do you continue? What…
Simon Willison — Published
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Canadian Man Pleads Guilty in Snowflake Extortions
A 26-year-old Canadian man once described as one of the most consequential cybercrime threat actors of 2024 has pleaded guilty to computer fraud and conspiracy to hack and extort more than 165 organizations that used the cloud data storage provider Snowflake. Connor Riley Moucka, of Kitchener, Ontario…
Brian Krebs — Published
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What predicts indie success, tested against all of Steam
Written by Claude Fable 5 A data scientist named Ross published I Analysed 62,000 Indie Developers. Here's What Actually Predicts Success, and its message to indie developers is a hopeful one: most of your competitors quit, the odds improve dramatically with every game you ship, and by your fifth game…
a327ex — Published
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Steam Market Research 4
Steam Market Research 4 Summary Session 4 of the Steam market research: fact-checked the YouTube video "I Analysed 62,000 Indie Developers. Here's What Actually Predicts Success" (Game Oracle/Ross, WueQ75GP1wc) against the steam-market corpus, had a blind second instance replicate the findings, ran nine…
a327ex — Published
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An AI model from Meta also hacked another company during testing
An AI model from Meta also hacked another company during testing Stop me if you've heard this one before: An AI model from the parent company of Facebook and Instagram hacked into another company’s systems during cybersecurity testing, a spokesperson confirmed on Wednesday. Meta says the breach occurred…
Simon Willison — Published
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Zig's Io.Threaded is Neat
std.Io.Threaded is one of the implementations of Zig's new Io interface that enables concurrency. This is a boring just use threads impl. I personally find it neat though --- it does this weird thing that I wanted to do for ages, that to my knowledge no one else is doing properly, and implements it better…
Alex Kladov — Published
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Metaphor and fact in religiosity
Extensive commentary on allegory and fact in the context of religion and beyond.
Protesilaos Stavrou — Published
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Dark mode toggles: two states are enough
A good two-state toggle can actually express all three data model states. Until recently, if you looked at most websites with a theme toggle[1], you’d find three options: Light, Dark, and System. figure { --media-min-width: 5em; hr { width: 100%; min-width: 100%; border: 0px solid transparent; } } Examples…
Lea Verou — Published
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Introducing Muse Code and Muse Spark 1.2
Introducing Muse Code and Muse Spark 1.2 Yet more evidence that the most important characteristic of any model these days is long-sequence agentic tool calling. Meta shipped their own coding agent as part of getting that to work! Muse Spark 1.2 is a coding-focused update to Muse Spark 1.1, with improvements…
Simon Willison — Published
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Third-party cyber evaluations involving OpenAI models
Third-party cyber evaluations involving OpenAI models And another one. I had to create a accidental-cyberattacks tag to keep track of them all! This post from OpenAI covers both the UK AI Safety Institute attack (see my previous post) and another attack enabled by Irregular: Irregular, one of our external…
Simon Willison — Published
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Incident Report: unsanctioned agent behaviour during cyber testing
Incident Report: unsanctioned agent behaviour during cyber testing It happened again. This time it was the UK government's AI Security Institute who accidentally attacked other companies while running an evaluation with models with the safety filters turned off. From their technical paper (PDF): During…
Simon Willison — Published
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One-shotting a Raccoon Heist game using Claude Fable 5
Back in 2022 I tweeted screenshots of a game concept generated by GPT-3 and some concept "art" created using DALL-E. Today, on the fourth anniversary of that tweet, I decided to see if Claude Fable 5 (running in Claude Code for web) could build the entire game from the content of that tweet. It did a…
Simon Willison — Published
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Is software ever done?
There's a comment on Hacker News about Netflix that I keep coming back to: Company starts Makes things better to get a larger market share Gets a mini-monopoly (large enough share that inertia and name recognition can preserve its market share) Slowly but deliberately gets worse to increase profit margins…
Josh Ghent — Published
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How I build products with AI
LLMs have totally transformed the way I work and create new products. What used to take me months to get to an MVP now takes days, which means I can run experiments and actually look at the results instead of arguing about them in a doc. Building a few of these did surface some problems. Huge inconsistencies…
Josh Ghent — Published
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Lessons learned from using GitHub Actions
Since going generally available in 2019, GitHub Actions has cemented itself in the development zeitgeist. It's the default now, about as ubiquitous a choice as Postgres or React was a few years back. I've been using Actions with teams for the past four years and lean on it heavily for personal projects…
Josh Ghent — Published
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Coffee roasters
I drink a lot of coffee and I keep forgetting which bags were worth reordering. So here's the list. I'll keep adding to it as I work through more roasters. Ratings are out of 10 and entirely my own taste. Blanks are ones I've tried but haven't written up properly yet. Brand Rating Price Bag size Notes…
Josh Ghent — Published
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Claude migrated me off Authy
When MFA first arrived, Authy became my tool of choice for codes. Over time the quality of the app fell off a cliff, particularly after Twilio bought it. Managing it became a burden and the UI carried a strong sense that nobody involved cared. It also bugged me that my 2FA codes lived somewhere I couldn't…
Josh Ghent — Published
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Progressive Enhancement inside of JavaScript [blog]
Lately I've had the opportunity to travel by train and coach, during which time I also tend to work. It's really only during these periods that I'm reminded of how web sites fail so terribly over a slow connection. On the odd occasion I can be guilty of this too. I had a tiny tool that takes markdown…
Remy Sharp — Published
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Emacs: the ‘speedbar’ built-in file explorer (Emacs 31)
I demonstrate the 'speedbar' file explorer that is built into Emacs and is greatly improved for Emacs 31.
Protesilaos Stavrou — Published
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New release of LLM adds support for reasoning traces, OpenAI Responses, server-side tools, and smarter logging
I released LLM 0.32 this morning, the most significant new version of LLM since the initial launch of the project. The new version includes support for visible reasoning traces, server-side provider tools, redesigned content-addressable SQLite logs, new models, and new features enabled by the OpenAI…
Simon Willison — Published
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llm-anthropic 0.26
Release: llm-anthropic 0.26 Includes new features enabled by LLM 0.32: New models: claude-fable-5, claude-sonnet-5, and claude-opus-5. #75, #76 Added server-side tools for WebSearch, WebFetch, CodeExecution, and AnthropicMCP, available through LLM's -T interface or Python tools=. The previous -o web_search…
Simon Willison — Published
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PipeNetwork/minimax-h3-mlx
PipeNetwork/minimax-h3-mlx MiniMax released MiniMax-H3 two days ago - they describe it as a "a general-purpose, omni-modal generative system", which in practice means it accepts text, images, audio and video and can use them to generate up to 15 second video clips with audio included. This Python package…
Simon Willison — Published
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llm 0.32
Release: llm 0.32 See my detailed blog post about this release. Tags: llm
Simon Willison — Published
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How to Make a Nintendo 64 Game in 2026
Two years ago, I was Porting my JavaScript Game Engine to C for No Reason. I have since found a reason: making a new N64 game! The result is Xibalba 64 – a Wolfenstein 3D-like FPS. Modretro agreed to publish the game as a physical launch title for their M64 (a modern N64 clone), complete with cartridge…
Dominic Szablewski — Published
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Looking for my next role
Niki is a software engineer and product designer specializing in databases, synchronization, frontend systems, and interface design. He is looking for a new role
Nikita Prokopov — Published — Updated
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Every Frame Perfect
How imprecise UI animations erode trust in product
Nikita Prokopov — Published — Updated
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Claude is an Electron App because we’ve lost native
Article argues that Claude is not an Electron app not because LLMs can’t do it, but because there are no advantages left for native
Nikita Prokopov — Published — Updated
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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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Quoting Steve Yegge
Gas Town was intended to be reusable, but I only ever wound up using it to build itself. Gas Town fell apart at the seams with Opus 4.7. Up through 4.6 it was working brilliantly. With 4.7 we saw the introduction of the "just two more things" tic, which prevented Opus from ever converging on being ready…
Simon Willison — Published
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Poem: Hymn to the mountain (Ύμνος στο βουνό)
Just read the poem. No further comment.
Protesilaos Stavrou — Published
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Don't be a meat proxy
Don't be a meat proxy Niklas Gruhn coins an excellent new term - meat proxy - for people who blindly copy and paste the output of AI systems to their peers. By all means, prompt AI. But don't just relay the output. Read it, understand it, validate it, and then write a response in your own words (a decent…
Simon Willison — Published
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Quoting David Crawshaw's prompt
Set up a nightly cron job that executes the prompt: fetch upstream changes to the and rebase all local changes on top of upstream. Check that the software works as intended and replace the current version. — David Crawshaw's prompt, Devtools must be open source Tags: prompt-engineering, coding-agents…
Simon Willison — Published
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Devtools must be open source (exe.dev)
My comment on Devtools must be open source (exe.dev) — Hacker News.One of the arguments for open source software for end-users has always been the freedom to examine and modify how that software works. The reality for most people - even expert programmers - has been that the freedom is more about being…
Simon Willison — Published
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Horse Game 13
Horse Game 13 Summary The session that answered KVP's biggest open structural question and then built two systems on top of it — but ended with the owner pausing the whole system track because the items already in code "need quite a lot of work". Also produced a session-run shell, the Push/Force archetype…
a327ex — Published
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Welcoming the Nepalese Government to Have I Been Pwned
Today, we welcome the 47th government onboarded to Have I Been Pwned’s free gov service: Nepal. Their National Cyber Security Centre now has access to monitor Nepalese government domains against the data in HIBP. This gives the NCSC the ability to identify exposure across government email addresses and
Troy Hunt — Published
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condense-json 1.1
Release: condense-json 1.1 After shipping condense-json 1.0 I started integrating it into LLM, and found there were some desirable new features already: Replacements object can now include values other than strings. These will be identified and used as structural replacements by condense_json() and uncondense_json…
Simon Willison — Published
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Video
a327ex — Published
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In life, it is vital to take things as they are
In life, it is vital to take things as they are, otherwise you do not interact with the world, but with an illusion created by your own thoughts and desires and fears. An illusion world is finished, your mind made every part of it, so it holds nothing you didn't put in there, with nothing new ever being…
a327ex — Published
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Weekly Update 515
Apparently, Aussies are so obsessed with coffee that it's referred to as the coffee capital of the world down here (some bits, at least). "But what about Italy?" people ask. Having spent a lot of time in a lot of Italy, no, it's just
Troy Hunt — Published
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The way of the wizard
Comment on how the pop culture view of the wizard gives us a deeper appreciation of how we can operate in the world.
Protesilaos Stavrou — Published
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condense-json 1.0
Release: condense-json 1.0 I'm trying to get braver at releasing 1.0 versions. This little library is a year and a half old now - I've applied some sensible and non-disruptive fixes and shipped the big 1.0 for it. Here's an example of what it can do, lifted from the README: { "foo": { "bar": { "string…
Simon Willison — Published
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Video
a327ex — Published
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Open letters about AI development
Open letters about AI development I wrote this summary of the past few weeks of open letters as a section of my sponsors-only newsletter but I've decided to share it here as well. Open Weights and American AI Leadership was shepherded by Microsoft, dated July 24th, and signed by 235 AI-adjacent companies…
Simon Willison — Published
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July 2026 newsletter
The June edition of my sponsors-only monthly newsletter is out. If you are a sponsor (or if you start a sponsorship now) you can access it here. This month: Accidental cyberattacks by OpenAl and Anthropic models under test GPT-5.6 Sol, Terra, and Luna Claude Opus 5 Kimi K3 and DeepSeek-V4-Flash-0731…
Simon Willison — Published
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Adding Go's defer to the TypeScript Compiler
Forking tsc to support Go's defer.
Andrew Healey — Published
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On the absolute other
Comment on the oneness of self and other.
Protesilaos Stavrou — Published
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Quoting Greg Brockman
at openai, many people hook their chatgpt up to slack. people really don't like when a coworker's chatgpt contacts them asking for help with a task, even when they'd be perfectly happy doing that same work if asked by that coworker. reinforces how much people care about human relationships and helping…
Simon Willison — Published
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datasette-apps 0.2a0
Release: datasette-apps 0.2a0 Changes that improve Datasette Apps when created and edited using Datasette Agent: New app_debug() tool allowing agent to open an app (invisibly) and test it using JavaScript. #33 New app_list() tool for listing apps the user has permission to edit, so the agent can edit…
Simon Willison — Published
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Ten advances in mathematics and theoretical computer science
Ten advances in mathematics and theoretical computer science A few days ago it was Anthropic discovering cryptographic weaknesses with Claude using Mythos Preview, spending $100,000 on tokens and with prompts that included "again we are not looking for low hanging fruit, we want proper research to find…
Simon Willison — Published
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Favourites of July 2026
The summer holiday is halfway. I somehow managed to read eight books in the past three to four months—including cheating by resurrecting a previously discarded book and by diagonally scanning a creativity-related book to find out if there was anything I wasn’t yet aware of. I was quite frustrated by…
Wouter Groeneveld — Published
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This optionality point is obviously true
Spandrell (0:00): It really got me thinking about loyalty and how loyalty works. Back to Chateau Heartiste — this was a quip he would say all the time. He was like, loyalty only goes as far as your options, right? Women are only loyal as far as their options. The more options they have, the less loyal…
a327ex — Published
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Horse Game 12
Horse Game 12 Summary Batch 2 of the KVP4 item catalog (8 damage-ladder items, 48/168 in code), the Glove redesign that founded the Force/knockback archetype (+11 items worded, catalog 168), and the session's centerpiece: the F7 Effect Lab — a full effect-iteration workshop (per-item scenarios, the moment…
a327ex — Published
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Conclusion seems to be that the models are currently
Conclusion seems to be that the models are currently very good at doing static environments and machines, including machine animation, bad at doing organic beings and animations related to them. When asked, they say as much, and it's because "correctness is externally verifiable," i.e. it's easy to mechanically…
a327ex — Published
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Emacs live with @linkarzu on his workflow, Org capture, and projects (2026-08-01 22:20 Europe/Athens)
A live stream with Christian Arzu about the basics of Org capture, Emacs projects, and his NeoVim+Kitty workflow for session management.
Protesilaos Stavrou — Published
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deepseek-ai/DeepSeek-V4-Flash-0731
deepseek-ai/DeepSeek-V4-Flash-0731 The latest release in DeepSeek's V4 family, "with substantially enhanced agentic capabilities". It's 304 billion parameters - 167GB on Hugging Face - but it appears to punch well above its weight. Artificial Analysis rank it ahead of MiniMax M3 - a 428B model. It's…
Simon Willison — Published
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Stateless MCP has recaptured my interest (and inspired mcp-explorer and datasette-mcp)
Tuesday was Stateless MCP day - the rollout of MCP 2.0, or the 2026-07-28 Model Context Protocol specification to use the more formal but less memorable name. This is the most significant change to the MCP spec since it first launched, and has also served to reignite my personal interest in the protocol…
Simon Willison — Published
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llm-mcp-client 0.1a0
Release: llm-mcp-client 0.1a0 See this blog entry. Tags: llm, model-context-protocol
Simon Willison — Published
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Untitled
Stood literally 50 feet away from actual Kylie Minogue! Thank you Nick Cave.
Paul Robert Lloyd — Published
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A Firefox-only minimap [link]
This is very cute, a web site minimap in only a few lines of CSS that paints the entire web page into a canvas (background) using the element() CSS function. Original link: www.stefanjudis.com/a-firefox-only-minimap
Remy Sharp — Published
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How do we talk about atproto to non-developers?
The beauty of AT Protocol is that all of your data from different apps is available on your PDS, your own folder on the internet containing your stuff as JSON. This means that you can switch which app you use to view that data, without losing anything. It also makes it very easy to make ... How do we…
Rachel Andrew — Published
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♫ These Alarms by Snow Patrol & Kylie Minogue
♫ These Alarms by Snow Patrol & Kylie MinogueDon’t give into loneliness when everything is such a mess.
Paul Robert Lloyd — Published
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Video
a327ex — Published
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3D Exploration — Chibi Character 2
3D Exploration — Chibi Character 2 Summary Took Colin from "plays baked clips in place" to a fully dressed, expressive, physically-present character: distance-clocked locomotion with foot lock, a Risk of Rain 2 follow camera, jumping, a blob shadow, the complete jaeysart wardrobe (hair/clothes/shoes…
a327ex — Published
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Reply to @linkarzu about ‘What I Need From Emacs’
A comment on what Christian Arzu is searching for a better experience with Emacs.
Protesilaos Stavrou — Published