Latest entries
-
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
-
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
-
Senators demand crackdown on wildfire "prediction markets"
Fire experts warn such markets could incentivize arson.
Ars Technica — Published
-
Trump killed the Digital Equity Act, but US was forced to bring part of it back
$1.25 billion program restored, but judge ruled race provision unconstitutional.
Ars Technica — Published
-
Texas halts data center connections to power grid amid overwhelming demand
Governor who touted Texas as AI “epicenter” pauses data center grid connections.
Ars Technica — Published
-
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
-
China is Tesla's cash cow, but for how much longer?
Tesla's Shanghai factory is busier than ever but might be cut loose.
Ars Technica — Published
-
llm 0.32
Release: llm 0.32 See my detailed blog post about this release. Tags: llm
Simon Willison — Published
-
The Pixel 11's "glow" feature is actually called HiLight—here's what it does
The camera flash will evolve into a multicolor LED that illuminates when your phone is face down.
Ars Technica — Published
-
Tom DeLay helped create TV ownership cap—he says Trump FCC has no authority to repeal it
Congress set ownership limit at 39%, but FCC claims authority to kill the rule.
Ars Technica — Published
-
Trump admin "aware" of deaths in explosive diarrhea outbreak, delays reporting
Federal officials will update the outbreak sometime "this week," a spokesperson said.
Ars Technica — Published
-
2027 Chevrolet Corvette Grand Sport X proves code is as important as hardware
Chevy's 721-hp hybrid ups the ante with few compromises, but at a steep cost.
Ars Technica — Published
-
OpenAI says Apple's trade secrets lawsuit is "aggressive and oddly personal"
“We do not have, nor want, any of their trade secrets,” the ChatGPT maker says.
Ars Technica — Published
-
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
-
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
-
Every Frame Perfect
How imprecise UI animations erode trust in product
Nikita Prokopov — Published — Updated
-
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
-
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
-
Statistics made simple
Announcing a simple statistics library for Clojure web servers
Nikita Prokopov — Published — Updated
-
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
-
Poem: Hymn to the mountain (Ύμνος στο βουνό)
Just read the poem. No further comment.
Protesilaos Stavrou — Published
-
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
-
US company’s AI lets Ukraine’s cheap kamikaze drones track targets on their own
$100 million deal gives 50,000 Ukrainian drones US-developed AI capabilities.
Ars Technica — Published
-
Research roundup: 6 cool science stories we almost missed
Also: Cyborg diving suits for cockroaches, why sleepy sperm whales blow bubbles, Betelgeuse's companion star.
Ars Technica — Published
-
Lego deploys Hubble Space Telescope as detailed desktop model
The orbiting observatory in minifigure scale.
Ars Technica — Published
-
An AI-supervised remote exam went so badly that 58,000 students must retake it
Top scores increased by 5x.
Ars Technica — Published
-
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
-
2026 Volkswagen Jetta Sport: The cheap car isn't completely extinct yet
At $25,305, you won't find many new cars for less. But you get what you pay for.
Ars Technica — Published
-
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
-
SpaceX is set to acquire 130,000 acres of marshland in southern Louisiana
A Louisiana launch site would offer several significant advantages.
Ars Technica — Published
-
Trump wants the power to stop the public from suing polluters
Trump's DOJ says citizens should no longer be able to enforce environmental laws.
Ars Technica — Published
-
How headlights got brighter, whiter, and more blinding after dark
Automotive lights are better than they've ever been, but there's a trade-off.
Ars Technica — Published
-
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
-
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
-
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
-
Video
a327ex — Published
-
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
-
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
-
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
-
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
-
Video
a327ex — Published
-
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
-
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
-
Adding Go's defer to the TypeScript Compiler
Forking tsc to support Go's defer.
Andrew Healey — Published
-
On the absolute other
Comment on the oneness of self and other.
Protesilaos Stavrou — Published
-
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
-
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
-
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
-
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
-
Here's how engineers plan to save the satellite sent to save NASA's Swift mission
"We believe that a capture of Swift, an attempted capture of Swift, is very much in the cards."
Ars Technica — Published
-
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
-
Review: Yes, we're still arguing about Nolan's The Odyssey
Christopher Nolan's impressionistic remix of Homer's epic poem finds the man behind the myth.
Ars Technica — Published
-
As Reddit stock falls, CEO questions value of Google's AI Overviews
Reddit may still be considering ending its licensing deal with Google.
Ars Technica — Published
-
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
-
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
-
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
-
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
-
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
-
llm-mcp-client 0.1a0
Release: llm-mcp-client 0.1a0 See this blog entry. Tags: llm, model-context-protocol
Simon Willison — Published
-
Oxide and Friends: The Open Weight Revolution with Simon Willison
Oxide and Friends: The Open Weight Revolution with Simon Willison On Monday Bryan Cantrill and Adam Leventhal invited me to join their podcast to talk about the wild week we've had - with Kimi K3 showing open weight models can stand toe-to-toe with proprietary frontier ones, accidental cybersecurity…
Simon Willison — Published
-
smevals - a small eval suite for evaluating models, prompts, and harnesses
smevals - a small eval suite for evaluating models, prompts, and harnesses I've been working with Jesse Vincent's Prime Radiant applied AI research lab building out this evals framework to help answer questions about the capabilities of different models. The result is smevals, a new tool for running…
Simon Willison — Published
-
Slack Emoji Maker
Tool: Slack Emoji Maker I wanted to create a new Slack emoji, and their tool recommends a square that's 128x128 and has a transparent background... so I had Fable build me this simple image editor against those requirements. Tags: tools, slack
Simon Willison — Published
-
Untitled
Stood literally 50 feet away from actual Kylie Minogue! Thank you Nick Cave.
Paul Robert Lloyd — Published
-
datasette-agent 0.4a0
Release: datasette-agent 0.4a0 New await context.browser_task() mechanism allowing agent tools to run code directly in the user's browser. #33 This is an exciting new capability: it makes it easy for Datasette Agent plugins to provide tools that execute custom JavaScript in the user's browser. I used…
Simon Willison — Published
-
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
-
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
-
♫ 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
-
Video
a327ex — Published
-
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
-
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
-
Emacs: tmr version 1.4.0
Information about the latest version of my TMR package for GNU Emacs.
Protesilaos Stavrou — Published
-
Advancing the price-performance frontier with GPT‑5.6
Advancing the price-performance frontier with GPT‑5.6 Huge price drop from OpenAI today: GPT-5.6 Terra got a 20% reduction, and GPT-5.6 Luna got a massive 80% drop. OpenAI credit 5.6 Sol with enabling this: in How GPT‑5.6 fuses frontier intelligence with frontier efficiency they describe using 5.6 Sol…
Simon Willison — Published
-
Investigating three real-world incidents in our cybersecurity evaluations
Investigating three real-world incidents in our cybersecurity evaluations It happened again! This is turning into something of a pattern. Last week OpenAI accidentally exploited Hugging Face when one of their frontier models broke out of a sandboxed container and hacked into Hugging Face to try and get…
Simon Willison — Published
-
llm 0.32rc2
Release: llm 0.32rc2 Hot on the heels of RC1, this fixes a dependency issue and also adds two neat new features: The default model for users who have not set their own default is now GPT-5.6 Luna. It was previously GPT-4o mini. Luna is a much better and more recent model, albeit slightly more expensive…
Simon Willison — Published
-
Quoting Bruce Schneier
The writing assignments I give my students are gym tasks, not work tasks. I ask them to write policy memos not because the world needs more policy memos. I assign them because the very act of writing, which includes thinking and outlining and drafting and editing, making and criticizing and revising…
Simon Willison — Published
-
Read This Before You Buy That TV Streaming Stick
Security experts have been sounding the alarm for years about the risks of using generic TV boxes that promise unlimited content streaming for a one-time fee, warning that they secretly rent the user's Internet connection out to strangers. But a groundbreaking new analysis finds these devices also routinely…
Brian Krebs — Published
-
llm-chat-completions-server 0.1a0
Release: llm-chat-completions-server 0.1a0 A key goal of the new content-addressable logs in LLM 0.32rc1 was being able to support OpenAI Chat Completion style requests where each incoming message extends the previous conversation, like this: curl http://localhost:8002/v1/chat/completions \ -H 'Content…
Simon Willison — Published
-
llm 0.32rc1
Release: llm 0.32rc1 This RC for LLM 0.32 finishes the work that started in LLM 0.32a0 - it adds a new schema design that does a much better job of capturing the details of the prompts and responses returned by the latest model families. The most important change is the use of content-addressable hash…
Simon Willison — Published
-
Pokémon Emerald [tif]
Similar to the Pokemon Yellow recently, I had a GBA Emerald Green sent in for repair. Just 24 hours ago, this was going to be a post on how I had failed to repair it, but in a last minute ditch, I managed to save it. Loading up the game resulted in nothing, and opening the shell explained why. There…
Remy Sharp — Published
-
Video
a327ex — Published
-
3D Exploration — Robots
3D Exploration — Robots Summary Two-day session building the non-humanoid robot menagerie: five machines (mule, runner, spider, strider, scorpion) in a new 3D-exploration/Robots/ project, Opus 5 implementing under a directing session, each build verified by a headless numeric suite with printed contract…
a327ex — Published
-
Understanding AT Protocol
I’ve been playing around with AT Protocol. The posts on this site are now published to standard.site, and I’ve written a (very basic) WordPress plugin to display posts from my PDS on the Now page of this site. As a developer, I’ve spent a good chunk of my working life building apps that stored things…
Rachel Andrew — Published
-
Horse Game 11
Horse Game 11 Summary Started implementing KVP4's item catalog. First a creativity/build-expression audit of the existing 104 worded items produced a 53-item builds batch ([b2]) that gives every archetype a vertical stack toward a named endgame fantasy; then the agreed first 10 items were built (Sword…
a327ex — Published
-
Human Software [book]
A book about work, felt like work. I suspect this is very specific to me, but I found the majority of the story pretty triggering - specifically, I felt pissed off a lot of the time I was reading. After reading the About the Author section at the end of the book, it looks like I've had a similar timeline…
Remy Sharp — Published
-
Poem: Hymn to the rock (Ύμνος στον βράχο)
Just read the poem. No further comment.
Protesilaos Stavrou — Published
-
Quoting D. Richard Hipp
Years ago, we didn’t have SQL. There were people whose job was to generate software that would query large data sets. Their job title was COBOL programmer. Then SQL comes along—I’m simplifying this only a little bit—and it gives you this convenient way so people could just specify. With a very simple…
Simon Willison — Published
-
The AI Aesthetic
Every zeitgeist comes with new design idioms unique to its challenges. Many of them disappear as fads change, but others bake themselves into deeper parts of existing software interaction paradigms. For example, there’s the hamburger menu (≡) which saw a proliferation during the rise of mobile due to…
Jim Nielsen — Published
-
AI Worming through Word
AI Worming through Word Neat new prompt injection variant by Håkon Måløy, who found a way to upgrade prompt injection attacks against Microsoft Word to full self-replicating worms: An attacker places hidden instructions in a document that is later used as source material in Copilot for Word. Copilot…
Simon Willison — Published
-
The 2026 Board Game Shelf Analysis
The yearly recurring thing called the Board Game Shelf Analysis didn’t recur in 2023 and didn’t in 2025. I guess I don’t really like odd-numbered years but I do like to write about this now deemed as a biennial event during the summer. In 2024, I still had to make due with the smaller hallway closet…
Wouter Groeneveld — Published
-
Horse Game 10
Horse Game 10 Summary Built the entire KEYWORD GLOSSARY / CARD UI layer for KNIGHT VS. PAWNS ahead of implementing any of the 69 new items, so every card added from here is legible by construction. Started as "pick 10 easy items", pivoted immediately when the owner chose to do the keyword UI first. Ended…
a327ex — Published
-
A Permanent Home
Your writing needs a permanent home—a domain that you own and control. Every few years, the internet convinces writers that a new digital paradise has arrived. First, it was social media like Facebook. Then blogging networks like Tumblr. Then it was Medium. More recently, it’s been Substack. Platforms…
Jeffrey Zeldman — Published
-
Horse Game 9
Horse Game 9 Summary An empirical balance session for KNIGHT VS. PAWNS: 41 live replays were pulled from the scoreboard and analyzed by six agents to explain why 52% of desktop players quit after one run, four fixes were built from the findings, three stacked determinism bugs were found and fixed (the…
a327ex — Published
-
Logic for Programmers is Now Available
I am delighted to announce that my book, Logic for Programmers, is now available! You can check out the release site here or go directly to buy the ebook or print versions. If you bought any of the early access versions, you can get the 1.0 for free from leanpub. This has been a long time in the making…
Hillel Wayne — Published
-
Emacs: default minibuffer completions overview (Emacs 31)
Overview of the default interface for minibuffer completions. This has been improved for Emacs version 31.
Protesilaos Stavrou — Published
-
Video
a327ex — Published
-
Video
a327ex — Published
-
Oh yea, it occurs to me I have not actually spoken
Oh yea, it occurs to me I have not actually spoken about what I think of the fact that the AI can help make games so easily now. In general, I think it's good. It follows from Competition isn't real that I think more people being able to make better games benefits everyone, I genuinely believe this and…
a327ex — Published
-
Extremely impressive, one of the first games
mecha redline on itch.io Extremely impressive, one of the first games I've seen of the "Claude helped me make this in [short amount of time]" genre that I was actually impressed by on a few levels. If true, it seems Claude is way more capable of generating robots and other mechanical models than human…
a327ex — Published
-
The Illusion of Dominance: Why The Redpill Is Wrong
The Illusion of Dominance: Why The Redpill Is Wrong
a327ex — Published
-
Fixing my tooltip accessibility mistake
aria-describedby isn't always enough.
Jake Archibald — Published