Latest entries

  1. Exploring the science of "tundra tongue"

    Highest risk of part of tongue being torn off is with temps between -5° and -15° C (23° to 5 °F).

    Ars TechnicaPublished

  2. Quantum computing meets the Möbius molecule

    A complex structure with multiple electrons is within reach of today's hardware.

    Ars TechnicaPublished

  3. 25 Years Of ADSL Speed

    Twenty-five years ago, I captured a screenshot of my FTP client showcasing the download of a SuSE Linux gcc compilation package at the dazzling rate of 439,36 KB/sec: Downloading the gcc cross-compiler for s390x through the ftp.belnet.be mirror. Note the then very new Windows XP Olive theme. For some…

    Wouter GroeneveldPublished

  4. Microsoft Patch Tuesday, March 2026 Edition

    Microsoft Corp. today pushed security updates to fix at least 77 vulnerabilities in its Windows operating systems and other software. There are no pressing "zero-day" flaws this month (compared to February's five zero-day treat), but as usual some patches may deserve more rapid attention from organizations…

    Brian KrebsPublished

  5. Reentry of NASA satellite will exceed the agency's own risk guidelines

    "Due to late-stage design changes, the potential risk of uncontrolled reentry increased."

    Ars TechnicaPublished

  6. AI should help us produce better code

    Agentic Engineering Patterns > Many developers worry that outsourcing their code to AI tools will result in a drop in quality, producing bad code that's churned out fast enough that decision makers are willing to overlook its flaws. If adopting coding agents demonstrably reduces the quality of the code…

    Simon WillisonPublished

  7. FDA contradicts Trump admin, declines to approve generic drug for autism

    In the end, the FDA only approved the drug for a rare genetic condition with clearer data.

    Ars TechnicaPublished

  8. AI can rewrite open source code—but can it rewrite the license, too?

    Is it clean "reverse engineering" or just an LLM-filtered "derivative work"?

    Ars TechnicaPublished

  9. Meta acquires Moltbook, the AI agent social network

    The viral social network project was created with OpenClaw.

    Ars TechnicaPublished

  10. After complaints, Google will make it easier to disable gen AI search in Photos

    One toggle for "fast classic search."

    Ars TechnicaPublished

  11. Anthropic sues US over blacklisting; White House calls firm "radical left, woke"

    Anthropic says it was blacklisted for opposing autonomous weapons, mass surveillance.

    Ars TechnicaPublished

  12. Trump's divisive FDA vaccine regulator self-destructs, will exit agency (again)

    It's unclear what Prasad's FDA exit means, but some drug makers are happy to see him go.

    Ars TechnicaPublished

  13. NASA and SpaceX disagree about manual controls for lunar lander

    "NASA’s tracking of SpaceX’s manual control risk indicates a worsening trend."

    Ars TechnicaPublished

  14. Gemini burrows deeper into Google Workspace with revamped document creation and editing

    Gemini can now pull context from your files, emails, and more to create and edit documents.

    Ars TechnicaPublished

  15. XSS Ranked #1 Top Threat of 2025 by MITRE and CISA

    Look who's back! After we completed 2024, XSS managed to get itself ranked as the #1 top threat of the year. I wrote about that, and at the end of the blog post I said "Let's make sure that XSS isn't #1 in

    Scott HelmePublished

  16. Ig Nobels ceremony moves to Europe over security concerns

    Marc Abraham: “During the past year, it has become unsafe for our guests to visit the country."

    Ars TechnicaPublished

  17. These new winter tires have studs that retract as it warms up

    Clever polymer science and a little robotic precision created the Hakkapeliitta 01.

    Ars TechnicaPublished

  18. After outages, Amazon to make senior engineers sign off on AI-assisted changes

    AWS has suffered at least two incidents linked to the use of AI coding assistants.

    Ars TechnicaPublished

  19. Apple MacBook Neo review: Can a Mac get by with an iPhone’s processor inside?

    8GB of RAM is a bummer, but this $599 laptop cuts most of the right corners.

    Ars TechnicaPublished

  20. Weekly Update 494

    Since starting HIBP a dozen and a bit years ago, I've loaded an average of one breach every 4.7 days. That's 959 of them to date, but last week it was five in only two days. That's a few weeks' worth of

    Troy HuntPublished

  21. Examples for the tcpdump and dig man pages

    Hello! My big takeaway from last month’s musings about man pages was that examples in man pages are really great, so I worked on adding (or improving) examples to two of my favourite tools’ man pages. Here they are: the dig man page (now with examples) the tcpdump man page examples (this one is an update…

    Julia EvansPublished

  22. Migrating to Workspaces and Nx

    The interesting part of moving kentcdodds.com to npm workspaces was not the file moves. It was everything the file moves broke.

    Kent C. DoddsPublished

  23. A Designer’s Thoughts About This Moment in AI

    I was walking my dog in the woods and decided to share my thoughts about the state of AI and the tension between the trajectory of AI companies and the designers/creators/makers of the world who are under a tremendous deal […]

    Brad FrostPublished

  24. After falling far behind the rest of industry, Blue Origin creates new stock option plan

    "It's a big fat middle finger for those that thought they had something."

    Ars TechnicaPublished

  25. Quad Cortex mini amp modeler: All the power, half the size

    A warehouse of guitar gear in the palm of your hand.

    Ars TechnicaPublished

  26. Testing Apple's 2026 16-inch MacBook Pro, M5 Max, and its new "performance" cores

    M5 Pro Max's "performance" CPU cores definitely aren't just rebranded E-cores.

    Ars TechnicaPublished

  27. US blindsides states with surprise settlement in Live Nation/Ticketmaster trial

    States seek mistrial, saying "sudden disappearance" of US will influence jury.

    Ars TechnicaPublished

  28. An unlikely set of clues helps reconstruct ancient Chinese disasters

    Shang Dynasty oracle bones and modern weather models feature in the same study.

    Ars TechnicaPublished

  29. Production query plans without production data

    Production query plans without production data Radim Marek describes the new pg_restore_relation_stats() and pg_restore_attribute_stats() functions that were introduced in PostgreSQL 18 in September 2025. The PostgreSQL query planner makes use of internal statistics to help it decide how to best execute…

    Simon WillisonPublished

  30. Perhaps not Boring Technology after all

    A recurring concern I've seen regarding LLMs for programming is that they will push our technology choices towards the tools that are best represented in their training data, making it harder for new, better tools to break through the noise. This was certainly the case a couple of years ago, when asking…

    Simon WillisonPublished

  31. pwa.support and the Mediocre State of PWAs

    I created pwa.support as a way to both examine any website to see if it can be isntalled as a progressive web app, but also to capture in some detail the depressing state of support for this concept across major browsers and operating systems. I’ve been revisiting desktop Linux since my last attempt…

    David Bryant CopelandPublished

  32. How to win a best paper award

    An opinionated perspective on how to do important research that makes a difference (and sometimes win awards).

    Nicholas CarliniPublished

  33. This Thursday I will talk about Emacs @ OxFLOSS (FLOSS @ Oxford)

    In this upcoming event I will introduce GNU Emacs to people at the University of Oxford.

    Protesilaos StavrouPublished

  34. Offloading FFmpeg with Cloudflare

    How I moved Call Kent podcast episode processing off my primary Fly.io app server and onto Cloudflare Queues and Containers: what broke, what I missed, and whether it was worth the complexity.

    Kent C. DoddsPublished

  35. How AI Assistants are Moving the Security Goalposts

    AI-based assistants or "agents" -- autonomous programs that have access to the user's computer, files, online services and can automate virtually any task -- are growing in popularity with developers and IT workers. But as so many eyebrow-raising headlines over the past few weeks have shown, these powerful…

    Brian KrebsPublished

  36. Two of My Favorite Things Together at Last: Pies and Subdomains

    I like pie. And I’ve learned that if I want a pie done right, I gotta do it myself. Somewhere along my pilgrimage to pie perfection, I began taking a photo of each bake — pic or it didn’t happen. Despite all my rhetoric for “owning your own content”, I’ve hypocritically used Instagram to do the deed…

    Jim NielsenPublished

  37. Quoting Joseph Weizenbaum

    What I had not realized is that extremely short exposures to a relatively simple computer program could induce powerful delusional thinking in quite normal people. — Joseph Weizenbaum, creator of ELIZA, in 1976 (via) Tags: ai-ethics, ai, computer-history, internet-archive

    Simon WillisonPublished

  38. A Note On Shelling In Emacs

    As you no doubt know by now, we Emacs users have the Teenage Mutant Ninja Power. Expert usage of a Heroes in a Hard Shell is no exception. Pizza Time! All silliness aside, the plethora of options available to the Emacs user when it comes to executing shell commands in “terminals”—real or fake—can be…

    Wouter GroeneveldPublished

  39. New coaching prices to reflect the current market

    I have lowered the price of my coaching services to 10 EUR per hour.

    Protesilaos StavrouPublished

  40. Codex for Open Source

    Codex for Open Source Anthropic announced six months of free Claude Max for maintainers of popular open source projects (5,000+ stars or 1M+ NPM downloads) on 27th February. Now OpenAI have launched their comparable offer: six months of ChatGPT Pro (same $200/month price as Claude Max) with Codex and…

    Simon WillisonPublished

  41. Emacs: four new themes are coming to the ‘doric-themes’

    I am developing four new themes for my minimalist 'doric-themes' package.

    Protesilaos StavrouPublished

  42. Quoting Ally Piechowski

    Questions for developers: “What’s the one area you’re afraid to touch?” “When’s the last time you deployed on a Friday?” “What broke in production in the last 90 days that wasn’t caught by tests?” Questions for the CTO/EM: “What feature has been blocked for over a year?” “Do you have real-time error…

    Simon WillisonPublished

  43. Colorado SB26-051 Age Attestation

    Colorado is presently considering a bill, SB26-051, patterned off of California’s AB1043, which establishes civil penalties for software developers who do not request age information for their users. The bills use a broad sense of “Application Store” which would seem to encompass essentially any package…

    Kyle KingsburyPublished

  44. Anthropic and the Pentagon

    Anthropic and the Pentagon This piece by Bruce Schneier and Nathan E. Sanders is the most thoughtful and grounded coverage I've seen of the recent and ongoing Pentagon/OpenAI/Anthropic contract situation. AI models are increasingly commodified. The top-tier offerings have about the same performance,…

    Simon WillisonPublished

  45. Reading List 355

    This reading list is courtesy of Vivaldi browser, who pay me decent money to fight for a better web and don’t moan at me for reading all this stuff. We’ve just released a Vivaldi desktop snapshot, with a new onboarding step for people who have visual impairments, require keyboard-only access or use assistive…

    Bruce LawsonPublished

  46. Agentic manual testing

    Agentic Engineering Patterns > The defining characteristic of a coding agent is that it can execute the code that it writes. This is what makes coding agents so much more useful than LLMs that simply spit out code without any way to verify it. Never assume that code generated by an LLM works until that…

    Simon WillisonPublished

  47. Clinejection — Compromising Cline's Production Releases just by Prompting an Issue Triager

    Clinejection — Compromising Cline's Production Releases just by Prompting an Issue Triager Adnan Khan describes a devious attack chain against the Cline GitHub repository, which started with a prompt injection attack in the title of an issue opened against the repo. Cline were running AI-powered issue…

    Simon WillisonPublished

  48. Taking it easy

    An entry from my journal where I comment on how I do not worry about what will happen to this world.

    Protesilaos StavrouPublished

  49. Introducing GPT‑5.4

    Introducing GPT‑5.4 Two new API models: gpt-5.4 and gpt-5.4-pro, also available in ChatGPT and Codex CLI. August 31st 2025 knowledge cutoff, 1 million token context window. Priced slightly higher than the GPT-5.2 family with a bump in price for both models if you go above 272,000 tokens. 5.4 beats coding…

    Simon WillisonPublished

  50. Untitled

    This is a low.

    Paul Robert LloydPublished

  51. Can coding agents relicense open source through a “clean room” implementation of code?

    Over the past few months it's become clear that coding agents are extraordinarily good at building a weird version of a "clean room" implementation of code. The most famous version of this pattern is when Compaq created a clean-room clone of the IBM BIOS back in 1982. They had one team of engineers reverse…

    Simon WillisonPublished

  52. Your Browser Can Already Speak a Page

    Users can customize the features built into the browser, something not often available from third-party approaches. Is an “AI” company offering to provide spoken versions of your pages for users? Is an overlay company promising to make your content more accessible by its overlay speaking it? Is some…

    Adrian RoselliPublished

  53. My brother, the rhythmic conceptualist

    Remembrance of beats passed. The post My brother, the rhythmic conceptualist appeared first on Jeffrey Zeldman Presents.

    Jeffrey ZeldmanPublished

  54. JJ LSP Follow Up

    In Majjit LSP, I described an idea of implementing Magit style UX for jj once and for all, leveraging LSP protocol. I've learned today that the upcoming 3.18 version of LSP has a feature to make this massively less hacky: Text Document Content Request

    Alex KladovPublished

  55. I talk with Joshua Blais about Emacs and life issues

    I had a ~2-hour chat with Joshua Blais, a fellow Emacs user, about Emacs and philosophy.

    Protesilaos StavrouPublished

  56. Anti-patterns: things to avoid

    Agentic Engineering Patterns > There are some behaviors that are anti-patterns in our weird new world of agentic engineering. Inflicting unreviewed code on collaborators This anti-pattern is common and deeply frustrating. Don't file pull requests with code you haven't reviewed yourself. If you open a…

    Simon WillisonPublished

  57. Something is afoot in the land of Qwen

    I'm behind on writing about Qwen 3.5, a truly remarkable family of open weight models released by Alibaba's Qwen team over the past few weeks. I'm hoping that the 3.5 family doesn't turn out to be Qwen's swan song, seeing as that team has had some very high profile departures in the past 24 hours. It…

    Simon WillisonPublished

  58. Favourites of February 2026

    A sudden burst of Japanese cherry flowers sparkling in the sun brings much-needed lightheartedness into our late February lives. Before we know it, the garden will be littered with these little pink petals, and the very short blossom season will be behind us. Our cherry tree always had the tendency of…

    Wouter GroeneveldPublished

  59. Propellant.

    We cannot separate the everyday use of “AI” platforms from their use in death and war.

    Ethan MarcottePublished

  60. 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 ProkopovPublishedUpdated

  61. 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 ProkopovPublishedUpdated

  62. Statistics made simple

    Announcing a simple statistics library for Clojure web servers

    Nikita ProkopovPublishedUpdated

  63. How to get hired in 2025

    A collection of red flags in software engineers' test assignments

    Nikita ProkopovPublishedUpdated

  64. Needy programs

    We used to use software; now software started to use us

    Nikita ProkopovPublishedUpdated

  65. I am sorry, but everyone is getting syntax highlighting wrong

    Applying human ergonomics and design principles to syntax highlighting

    Nikita ProkopovPublishedUpdated

  66. Poem: Not for an eternity

    Just read the poem. No further comment.

    Protesilaos StavrouPublished

  67. Quoting Donald Knuth

    Shock! Shock! I learned yesterday that an open problem I'd been working on for several weeks had just been solved by Claude Opus 4.6 - Anthropic's hybrid reasoning model that had been released three weeks earlier! It seems that I'll have to revise my opinions about "generative AI" one of these days.…

    Simon WillisonPublished

  68. Gemini 3.1 Flash-Lite

    Gemini 3.1 Flash-Lite Google's latest model is an update to their inexpensive Flash-Lite family. At $0.25/million tokens of input and $1.5/million output this is 1/8th the price of Gemini 3.1 Pro. It supports four different thinking levels, so I had it output four different pelicans: minimal low medium…

    Simon WillisonPublished

  69. w0rdz aRe 1mpoRtAnt

    The other day I was looking at the team billing section of an AI product. They had a widget labeled “Usage leaderboard”. For whatever reason, that phrase at that moment made me pause and reflect — and led me here to this post. It’s an interesting label. You could argue the widget doesn’t even need a…

    Jim NielsenPublished

  70. What a year that was.

    Know your web design history. The post What a year that was. appeared first on Jeffrey Zeldman Presents.

    Jeffrey ZeldmanPublished

  71. Basic Letters with LaTeX

    Every so often I find myself cracking open LibreOffice to write a mildly-formal letter—perhaps a thank-you note to an author, or a letter to members of Congress—and going “Gosh, I wish I had LaTeX here”. I used to have a good template for this but lost it years ago; I’ve recently spent some time recreating…

    Kyle KingsburyPublished

  72. Finding enthusiasm in the face of boredom

    A journal entry where I describe how boredom works and why it helps to be honest with our feelings.

    Protesilaos StavrouPublished

  73. Real-Time UI

    “If a picture is worth a thousand words, then a prototype is worth a thousand meetings.”– Tom & David Kelley But what if the meeting is the prototype? That’s the spirit of an idea I’m calling “Real-time UI” (the name […]

    Brad FrostPublished

  74. GIF optimization tool using WebAssembly and Gifsicle

    Agentic Engineering Patterns > I like to include animated GIF demos in my online writing, often recorded using LICEcap. There's an example in the Interactive explanations chapter. These GIFs can be pretty big. I've tried a few tools for optimizing GIF file size and my favorite is Gifsicle by Eddie Kohler…

    Simon WillisonPublished

  75. Advice for job seekers

    Pitching isn’t bragging. The post Advice for job seekers appeared first on Jeffrey Zeldman Presents.

    Jeffrey ZeldmanPublished

  76. February sponsors-only newsletter

    I just sent the February edition of my sponsors-only monthly newsletter. If you are a sponsor (or if you start a sponsorship now) you can access it here. In this month's newsletter: More OpenClaw, and Claws in general I started a not-quite-a-book about Agentic Engineering StrongDM, Showboat and Rodney…

    Simon WillisonPublished

  77. An Album For Every Year Of My Life

    Inspired by Tom’s One Album for Every Year of Life compilation, Robert created his own list. It’s been a while since I last published a list related to music so here’s my own that should contain 40 items. This was a much more challenging exercise than I initially thought. It took me almost an entire…

    Wouter GroeneveldPublished

  78. January 2026 Baseline monthly digest

    Read about various happenings with Baseline during January 2026

    web.devPublished

  79. Weekly Update 493

    The Odido breach leaks were towards the beginning during this week's update. I recorded it the day after the second dump of data had hit, with a third dump coming a few hours later, and a final dump of everything the day after that. From what I hear,

    Troy HuntPublished

  80. Selfie: reviewing some manual labour I did earlier

    Selfie picture of me with part of the land I was working on earlier

    Protesilaos StavrouPublished

  81. Keeping calm in the face of war and uncertainty

    An entry from my journal in which I describe my immediate experience in light of the war that might affect Cyprus.

    Protesilaos StavrouPublished

  82. External import maps, today!

    A few weeks ago, I posted Web dependencies are broken. Can we fix them?. Today’s post is a little less gloomy: Turns out that the major limitation that would allow centralized set-it-and-forget-it import map management can be lifted today, with excellent browser support! The core idea is that you can…

    Lea VerouPublished

  83. Book Notes: “Blood In The Machine” by Brian Merchant

    For my future self, these are a few of my notes from this book. A take from one historian on the Luddite movement: If workmen disliked certain machines, it was because of the use that they were being put, not because they were machines or because they were new Can’t help but think of AI. I don’t worry…

    Jim NielsenPublished

  84. My current policy on AI writing for my blog

    Because I write about LLMs (and maybe because of my em dash text replacement code) a lot of people assume that the writing on my blog is partially or fully created by those LLMs. My current policy on this is that if text expresses opinions or has "I" pronouns attached to it then it's written by me. I…

    Simon WillisonPublished

  85. Quoting claude.com/import-memory

    I'm moving to another service and need to export my data. List every memory you have stored about me, as well as any context you've learned about me from past conversations. Output everything in a single code block so I can easily copy it. Format each entry as: [date saved, if available] - memory content…

    Simon WillisonPublished

  86. A Nintendo 64 Rumble Pak so Bad that it's Good

    I'm currently working on a game for the Nintendo 64. Naturally, I wanted to support the N64 Rumble Pak. You know, this controller accesorry that gave you “force feedback” in a time where game controllers didn't have a vibration motor built in. What looked like a straight forward endeavor lead me stumbling…

    Dominic SzablewskiPublished

  87. Untitled

    Starting March much as I did February by trying something new. This morning I completed my first Aquathon (Tuff Fitty’s Frost Bite event in Littlehampton, a 400m swim followed by a 5km run), finishing with a time of 50:35. I’ll take that!

    Paul Robert LloydPublished

  88. Vlog: preparatory work for an infrastructure project at the hut

    In this video I show some of the work I do to collect soil for an infrastructure project at the hut.

    Protesilaos StavrouPublished

  89. Interactive explanations

    Agentic Engineering Patterns > When we lose track of how code written by our agents works we take on cognitive debt. For a lot of things this doesn't matter: if the code fetches some data from a database and outputs it as JSON the implementation details are likely simple enough that we don't need to…

    Simon WillisonPublished

  90. Who is the Kimwolf Botmaster “Dort”?

    In early January 2026, KrebsOnSecurity revealed how a security researcher disclosed a vulnerability that was used to assemble Kimwolf, the world's largest and most disruptive botnet. Since then, the person in control of Kimwolf -- who goes by the handle "Dort" -- has coordinated a barrage of distributed…

    Brian KrebsPublished

  91. Anti-Book Book club

    The Anti-book book club started as an excuse to meet with friends every month or two. I wanted to document what the idea was and how it worked. Regular book clubs all chose a single book to talk about. There are a few disadvantages to this though: It doesn't cater to personal preferences on the book…

    Josh GhentPublished

  92. International relations and impunity

    Global justice is not attainable. What we can hope for is a viable balance of forces.

    Protesilaos StavrouPublished

  93. Please, please, please stop using passkeys for encrypting user data

    Please, please, please stop using passkeys for encrypting user data Because users lose their passkeys all the time, and may not understand that their data has been irreversibly encrypted using them and can no longer be recovered. Tim Cappalli: To the wider identity industry: please stop promoting and…

    Simon WillisonPublished

  94. An AI agent coding skeptic tries AI agent coding, in excessive detail

    An AI agent coding skeptic tries AI agent coding, in excessive detail Another in the genre of "OK, coding agents got good in November" posts, this one is by Max Woolf and is very much worth your time. He describes a sequence of coding agent projects, each more ambitious than the last - starting with…

    Simon WillisonPublished

  95. Computers and the Internet: A Two-Edged Sword

    Dave Rupert articulated something in “Priority of idle hands” that’s been growing in my subconscious for years: I had a small, intrusive realization the other day that computers and the internet are probably bad for me […] This is hard to accept because a lot of my work, hobbies, education, entertainment…

    Jim NielsenPublished

  96. Free Claude Max for (large project) open source maintainers

    Free Claude Max for (large project) open source maintainers Anthropic are now offering their $200/month Claude Max 20x plan for free to open source maintainers... for six months... and you have to meet the following criteria: Maintainers: You're a primary maintainer or core team member of a public repo…

    Simon WillisonPublished

  97. Unicode Explorer using binary search over fetch() HTTP range requests

    Unicode Explorer using binary search over fetch() HTTP range requests Here's a little prototype I built this morning from my phone as an experiment in HTTP range requests, and a general example of using LLMs to satisfy curiosity. I've been collecting HTTP range tricks for a while now, and I decided it…

    Simon WillisonPublished

  98. Supply Chain Irony

    There is a certain irony that large organisations carry out a myriad of checks, due diligence, impact assessments, contract reviews and more for any and all business they themselves do business with. But, their team of developers npm, pip, or cargo install any and all dependencies built by a single person…

    Josh GhentPublished

  99. Yes, and...

    I teach computer science at Montana State University. I am the father of three sons who all know I am a computer programmer and one of whom, at least, has expressed interest in the field. I love computer programming and try to communicate that love to my sons, the students in my classes and anyone else…

    Carson GrossPublished

  100. Untitled

    Just got bitten by a dog, which kinda sums up this Thursday.

    Paul Robert LloydPublished