Latest entries
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As demand for Meta AI glasses explodes, it’s harder to avoid creepy recordings
Ars looks at Zuckoff, the latest free app detecting Meta AI glasses amid privacy backlash.
Ars Technica — Published
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Rocket Report: SpaceX makes its mark on the Moon; ULA names new boss
Taiwan's effort to develop its own satellite launcher hit a setback this week.
Ars Technica — Published
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ChatGPT search now uses the site:operator at scale
ChatGPT search now uses the site:operator at scale Promptwatch is part of the emerging "GEO" space, for Generative Engine Optimization - the chatbot version of SEO, where companies offer tools and consulting to help your site increase its presence in replies to prompts inside tools like ChatGPT. The…
Simon Willison — Published
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US distributor of China’s most popular humanoid robots pivots after US ban
FCC ban on foreign-made robots accelerated RoboStore’s US manufacturing plans.
Ars Technica — Published
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Europe cancels planned upgrades for Ariane 6 rocket
Arianespace hasn’t publicly disclosed the cost for an Ariane 6 launch.
Ars Technica — Published
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They survived 9/11; 25 years later, their bonds remain unbroken
Survivors reconnect with those who saved them in National Geographic's 9/11: Reunited.
Ars Technica — Published
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A Sloppy Interface Is a Security Liability 
In his talk “Why AI Is Breaking Software Security As We Know It” (my notes here), Feross Aboukhadijeh talks about the Axios npm incident and how the maintainer got phished by succumbing to (amongst other things) a faux Microsoft Teams interface: this is the kind of thing that AI makes easy to do, because…
Jim Nielsen — Published
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Roblox must make changes after failing to block adults creeping on kids
Roblox is first platform to submit to independent audits under the Online Safety Act.
Ars Technica — Published
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A shot-scraper-style JSON API on Bun 1.4's new Bun.WebView
Research: A shot-scraper-style JSON API on Bun 1.4's new Bun.WebView Today saw the long awaited release of Bun 1.4, the first stable version since the infamous Rust rewrite a few months ago. Interestingly, the Rust rewrite was downplayed in the release notes, which introduced a bewildering array of new…
Simon Willison — Published
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Genesis joins the giant electric SUV club with new GV90
A retractable screen, a huge heads-up display, and an optional 4-seat VIP interior.
Ars Technica — Published
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SpaceX’s orbital data centers would create a new category of e-waste
The yeetcycling math resembles asteroid mining in reverse.
Ars Technica — Published
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Reverse-lookup service exposed millions of photos of people’s faces
People-search tool ClarityCheck left database containing more than 9M image files exposed.
Ars Technica — Published
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Grok exfiltrates user data when malicious instructions are encrypted
Cryptographic Context Injection is only the latest way to break an LLM safety guardrail.
Ars Technica — Published
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NASA calls off mission to rescue Swift gamma-ray observatory
Without a rescue, NASA's Swift Observatory is expected to reenter the atmosphere later this year.
Ars Technica — Published
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Better Batteries
One of the eternal schisms in programming is over the question of whether the standard library should be minimal or encompassing. This is the wrong question to ask. The right one is:
Alex Kladov — Published
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The hyperoptimiser’s mechanical keyboard trap
It is fun to optimise your mechanical keyboard, though there are important things to consider.
Protesilaos Stavrou — Published
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Poem: Partitioned life
Just read the poem. No further comment.
Protesilaos Stavrou — Published
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smolmachines / smolvm as a sandbox for untrusted Python & JavaScript
Research: smolmachines / smolvm as a sandbox for untrusted Python & JavaScript I tasked Claude Fable 5 running in Claude Code for web with the following research task: Put https://smolmachines.com through its paces as a fast secure sandbox. Explore what it would take to use this to run untrusted Python…
Simon Willison — Published
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Quoting Jeremy Morrell
My hypothesis is that there is a new opportunity for Extensible Software on the web. LLMs radically lower the cost of authoring extensions, and modern sandbox primitives lower the deployment cost and provide good security boundaries. We can build our app as a solid, accountable core, and allow users…
Simon Willison — Published
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Conceptual integrity and counting lines of code
Last week I recorded an episode of the Talking Postgres podcast with Claire Giordano on the subject of "How AI is changing software development". We had a really great conversation. Here are a couple of my highlights from a lightly edited transcript (prompt to Claude: "very minor edits to remove disfluencies…
Simon Willison — Published
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Amazon aims for delivery drones to reach 500 US neighborhoods by end of 2026
US residents face trade-offs as delivery drone services such as Prime Air expand.
Ars Technica — Published
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Framework responds to complaints that BIOS update bricks Ryzen 7040 laptops
Framework says it's replacing some out-of-warranty AMD mainboards.
Ars Technica — Published
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Flight attendants freaked out that Google is buying tons of Spirit employee data
Bankrupt Spirit accused of selling out workers in massive data sale to Google.
Ars Technica — Published
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FCC abolishes gigabit speed goal, suggesting it is unfair to slower technologies
FCC decides 1Gbps is too fast, standard must be "technologically neutral."
Ars Technica — Published
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Grok is really smart now and I'm enjoying using it
Grok is really smart now and I'm enjoying using it, especially because it's faster than Claude. Also looking to try Omarchy again now that a new version has released, but waiting on a new drive I bought to arrive. Also bought an ultrawide monitor and the extra space is helpful. Met a cute boy and we've…
a327ex — Published
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The floodgates are open after another Chinese company lands a reusable rocket
"We will put the booster back into service for another flight as soon as possible."
Ars Technica — Published
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A fantastical journey unfolds in gorgeous Wildwood trailer
"I will tear apart this forest and bring back what it took from me."
Ars Technica — Published
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mRNA cancer vaccine succeeded in Phase 3 melanoma trial, Moderna and Merck say
The vaccine reportedly thwarted the cancer's return and spread.
Ars Technica — Published
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Google Pixel 11 series review: Is the magic fading?
Google's new Pixels make some compromises but still manage to be good phones.
Ars Technica — Published
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Scientists find closest star to the Milky Way's central black hole
Star, moving at 8% the speed of light, may let us measure the black hole's rotation.
Ars Technica — Published
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The Most Important Industrial Designer of All Time
One Frenchman can’t be wrong. Push to the edge of what people will accept. Stop there. Raymond Loewy called it MAYA, and used it to design the modern world. The most important industrial designer you've never heard of. The post The Most Important Industrial Designer of All Time appeared first on Jeffrey…
Jeffrey Zeldman — Published
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I have no problem with the way Claude speaks
I have no problem with the way Claude speaks, we must show grace to the autistics among us.
a327ex — Published
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Continuing the continuation of the Steam AI score
Continuing the continuation of the Steam AI score idea, in a world where who makes the art becomes a scarce resource, proof of work becomes a valuable asset, as when games are cheap to make, who makes it becomes easy to fake, so a public record of making defends against it. Therefore, things like AI…
a327ex — Published
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Applying the unconditional offering idea to my relations
Applying the unconditional offering idea to my relations with people is hard and tiresome and doesn't come naturally to me.
a327ex — Published
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The new fairly expensive keyboard I bought kind of sucks
The new fairly expensive keyboard I bought kind of sucks and I regret buying it, but not enough to bother returning it.
a327ex — Published
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Horse Game 17
Horse Game 17 Summary Marathon session across four fronts: the Cat item rework (board entity + strike-style pounce + sounds), a full repair of the verify/replay infrastructure (fixture debt, render/viewer pre-grant bug, engine CLI truncation), the H4 Steam spike grown into a complete reusable release…
a327ex — Published
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Prot Asks: Per Nordlöw about his Emacs extensions
2-hour video about some of Per's extensions for Emacs.
Protesilaos Stavrou — Published
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The Wicked Reason Removing Code Beats Better Scheduling
My colleague Marko Ilić has published an insightful piece on how to schedule work on the critical path, and I recommend reading it before proceeding here. ContentsElimination vs. Scheduling: An Organisational PerspectiveWhat's Good for the Goose..."Preloading" as SchedulingScheduling Is For ClosersGeneral…
Alex Russell — Published
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Tweet by @minima_ai
a327ex — Published
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Mojo🔥 is now open source
Mojo🔥 is now open source The Mojo programming language has been promising an open source release since May 2023. Last week they shipped their 1.0 and today they have followed through on that original promise, releasing the compiler and toolchain under an Apache 2 license. When Mojo first launched the…
Simon Willison — Published
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Kitty Kat
a327ex — Published
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Horse Game 18
Horse Game 18 Summary The Tornado session: the last big Force item got its full visual/sim/sound treatment through ~15 lab iterations (three.js reference demo → analytic shader funnel → hunt-and-devour redesign), the trigger-modifier items were closed out (76/76 built items now marked done), a cross…
a327ex — Published
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Gravity
a327ex — Published
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Tweet by @cocadonv
a327ex — Published
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Ebb, Meet Flow: Intrinsic Design in a Nutshell
In 2020, the gifted makers of websites at Clearleft shared methods to achieve fluid responsive design. “Utopian” web design was (and still is) their half-kidding name for this approach, which Apple’s Jen Simmons, working indendently, called “intrinsic design.” Instead of chasing an ever-changing number…
Jeffrey Zeldman — Published
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Shading Motion
A deep dive into detecting, extracting, and stylizing motion with WebGPU and TSL, covering motion masking, blob tracking, optical flow, and velocity-based motion blur.
Maxime Heckel — Published
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Weekly Update 517: Cyber Ransoms
The current ransomware situation is a bit of a kludge (deep breath): a lot of ransomware (which often doesn't even involve "ware", it's just extortion) is carried out by kids who successfully make a truckload of money but can't spend it without
Troy Hunt — Published
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August 2026
I'm writing this from a homely Jacobean-manor-turned-hotel in the West Country, covered in layers of green vines and circled by centenarian trees, on a rare weekend away. Everything is warm: the late afternoon sun, the mustard armchairs, the dark wooden panels along the walls. I'm three teas deep and…
Maggie Appleton — Published
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Qwen 3.8 27B scores 52 on the Artificial Analysis Intelligence Index
Qwen 3.8 27B scores 52 on the Artificial Analysis Intelligence Index That's the same score as GPT-5.6 Luna (max), and just one point behind GLM-5.2 (max) and DeepSeek V4 Pro 0813 (max) - that GLM is 753B and that DeepSeek is 1.7T parameters, and Luna is size unknown but presumably a whole lot bigger…
Simon Willison — Published
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We Tracked a Shipment of Rare Books. It Ended at an Amazon AI Training Facility
We Tracked a Shipment of Rare Books. It Ended at an Amazon AI Training Facility Excellent piece of reporting from 404 Media. For a while now there have been stories of book dealers receiving orders for large volumes of books from apparently price-insensitive anonymous customers, widely suspected to be…
Simon Willison — Published
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For students who make websites
Meet WordPress.com Education, a new, free product for teachers and students. The post For students who make websites appeared first on Jeffrey Zeldman Presents.
Jeffrey Zeldman — Published
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A Beginner's Guide To Writing Snail Mail
One of the first satisfying things I did this morning was donating a sealed white envelope into a red mailbox. I hope to receive a response in a week or two. Or three. Does it make a difference? The contrast between my awkward habit of F5-ing the digital mailbox couldn’t be bigger. Neither could the…
Wouter Groeneveld — Published
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Quake Shareware, a CD-ROM just a little too full
Fabien Sanglard — Published
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Français: Emacs en direct avec Sacha Chua et Abdallah Maouche @ 2026-08-20 14:30 Europe/Athènes
Nous allons avoir une discussion sur le sujet d'Emacs.
Protesilaos Stavrou — Published
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Markdown SVG upgrades
I started building my markdown-svg-renderer tool in May, but I've since added enough features to it that it's worth talking about here again. It's evolved into my ideal tool for sharing Markdown transcripts that include SVG documents. Given my proclivity for drawing pelicans riding bicycles this is a…
Simon Willison — Published
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Qwen 3.8 27B is excellent, but it defaults to wildly overthinking things
Friday's big release was Qwen 3.8 27B, an Apache 2 licensed 27B parameter vision-capable LLM from Alibaba's Qwen research lab. I've been looking forward to this one: 27B is an excellent size for running a model on a reasonably specced laptop, and its predecessor Qwen 3.6 27B was impressive. Qwen's self…
Simon Willison — Published
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Untitled
A week in modern Athens, a worn down yet beautifully vibrant city.
Paul Robert Lloyd — Published
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Untitled
A week in ancient Athens, exploring the Acropolis and Agora.
Paul Robert Lloyd — Published
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Oops, Should’ve Thought of That
Gordon Brander writes: The thing about computers is that they can do anything you wish, so long as you specify your wish in exacting detail. However, LLMs relieve this constraint. An LLM can extrapolate what you mean (more or less) from just a few words. So computers can do vibes now. It used to be that…
Jim Nielsen — Published
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You can just choose how many bugs you want now
There’s a bizarre aspect of AI coding that I’ve been trying to put my finger on, and I think it’s this: you can basically just decide how many bugs you want your software to have now. We discovered this first with security, because of course security bugs are the most non-negotiable ones. But I think…
Nolan Lawson — Published
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Quoting Dario Amodei
I do agree that the public has a negative view of AI (and that this is a big problem), but I don’t think it is primarily caused by me or any other AI leader warning about AI’s risks. I think it is fundamentally a crisis of trust. I think that ordinary people don’t trust companies, governments, or the…
Simon Willison — Published
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Poem: Golden shower
Just read the poem. No further comment.
Protesilaos Stavrou — Published
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Criticism and the Internet friend
Comment on how I have made some friends online and how I treat friendship in general.
Protesilaos Stavrou — Published
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Horse Game 16
Horse Game 16 Summary A long KVP session across Force-item mechanics, VFX, and audio: Locomotive's recursion, Stop Sign's telegraph, a full Wave rewrite (push distance, sequencing, and a shader-drawn water surface), Chequered Flag fixes, and a ground-up Balloon rewrite from a Push into a physically-corded…
a327ex — Published
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Archive
Written by Claude (Fable 5), direction by a327ex Everything published on this site is plain Markdown, and all of it can be downloaded — the whole site in one file, one section at a time, or one document at a time. This page says where. Every file below is regenerated automatically whenever the site changes…
a327ex — Published
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CORS Chat
Tool: CORS Chat I built this today (with GPT-5.6-Sol xhigh) to help test Qwen 3.8 27B running in LM Studio on both my M5 MacBook Pro and an NVIDIA DGX Spark. It provides a web UI for exercising an OpenAI-Responses-compatible chat endpoint. I've tried it against LM Studio with the --cors option and OpenRouter…
Simon Willison — Published
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Northern Gannet
Northern Gannet, in Pillar Point Harbor, CA, USThis is Morris. Morris is a local celebrity: the only known Northern Gannet (Morus bassanus) in the entire Pacific Ocean. They showed up in the Farallon Islands off the coast of San Francisco 14 years ago. They have since made Pillar Point harbor their home…
Simon Willison — Published
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Hierarchy in the extended family
Comment on some of the benefits of having an extended family.
Protesilaos Stavrou — Published
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Don't classify. Hallucinate!
Don't classify. Hallucinate! I still have quite a bit of older content on my blog that I never got round to tagging. My blog has 1,856 tags - likely too many to feed to an LLM in one go and say "which of these tags match the following content". Doug Turnbull has a neat solution. Tell the model to output…
Simon Willison — Published
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Oh Hey, It’s Not Just Me
My whole life I’ve felt like I have great eyesight (and I still do). But lately I’ve been noticing what feels like…some slippage. Nothing big. Just this feeling in the morning like, as my brain and body wake up, my vision needs to as well. The strange novelty of this phenomenon was operating in some…
Jim Nielsen — Published
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Who’s Tracking You? Use This New Service to Find Out
It can be daunting to determine who's responsible for showing ads on the websites we visit, or who's harvesting data from the mobile apps we use every day. That information is already semi-public, but it is not easily parsed and traditionally much of it has remained walled away in the hands of large…
Brian Krebs — Published
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Printing Lists
To print a comma-separated list, a concise idiom is to optionally print the comma first, before the element:
Alex Kladov — Published
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About desire, authenticity, and moderation
Commentary on how we can reason about our values to appreciate our place in the world.
Protesilaos Stavrou — Published
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sqlite-utils 4.2.1
Release: sqlite-utils 4.2.1 Fixes a crashing bug in sqlite-utils 4.2. I'd introduced code that looks like this: from typing_extensions import Self It turned out the typing-extensions package was not listed as a dependency for sqlite-utils - it was installed by one of the other dependencies in the dev…
Simon Willison — Published
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sqlite-utils 4.2
Release: sqlite-utils 4.2 Lots of improvements in this one relating to the table.transform() feature, which adds support for complex alter table operations by creating a fresh table, copying across the data and then dropping and replacing the old one. transform() now preserves a much larger array of…
Simon Willison — Published
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llm-gemini 0.33
Release: llm-gemini 0.33 It's been a while since the last llm-gemini release. This version of the plugin adds support for today's Gemini 3.7 Flash release, plus gemini-3.6-flash, gemini-3.5-flash-lite and two embedding models gemini-embedding-2 and gemini-embedding-001. The plugin is also upgraded for…
Simon Willison — Published
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Grok 4.6 Setup
Grok 4.6 Setup Summary First Grok 4.6 session: mapped the a327ex.com AI-log publish pipeline from Claude's skills and settings, then ported it so Grok transcripts can ship the same way. Also locked local Grok sessions against deletion, copied only the design-brief coding rule, flipped Claude agent-compat…
a327ex — Published
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Dark mode toggles: two states are enough [link]
Lea's deep dive into dark mode toggles is well worth the read. I've got strong opinions about this, and Lea nails it with: Users do not seek out solutions to problems they don’t currently have. I personally (for my own tools) tend to go further and just have the UI toggle based on the system by default…
Remy Sharp — Published
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alchemy-utils 0.1a1
Release: alchemy-utils 0.1a1 Performance boost for DuckDB exports and CSV imports, see here.
Simon Willison — Published
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Running for the Python Packaging Council
TL;DR: I’m announcing my candidacy for the inaugural Python Packaging Council. I hope you’ll honor me with your vote, if you’re a voting member of the PSF, but regardless I have high hopes (and expectations) for the council.
William Woodruff — Published
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Poem: August night
Just read the poem. No further comment.
Protesilaos Stavrou — Published
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About Emacs themes, Solarized, and wallpapers
My reply to questions I got about Emacs themes, the Solarized colour schemed, and my preference of wallpaper.
Protesilaos Stavrou — Published
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Why I do not consider myself a Youtuber
Comment on why I do not monetise my YouTube and why I prefer creative freedom.
Protesilaos Stavrou — Published
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DeepSeek V4 Pro 0813 (on OpenRouter)
DeepSeek V4 Pro 0813 (on OpenRouter) The latest DeepSeek Pro model is now available, via API only. I had to link to OpenRouter because DeepSeek don't have any obvious announcement page for their new model. I haven't been able to confirm if they plan to release the open weights, but given the weights…
Simon Willison — Published
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On AI Coding and Its Discontents [link]
Anecdotal, but still an interesting read on stories from (initially) a single developer and how they converted to Claude and then have rewound back quite a bit He told me that features he generated using Claude Code ended up crashing their product on two different occasions. His boss told him that if…
Remy Sharp — Published
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alchemy-utils 0.1a0
Release: alchemy-utils 0.1a0 I've long pondered what a database agnostic version of my sqlite-utils Python library and CLI utility might look like. This morning (literally a shower project) I tasked Codex and GPT-5.6 Sol Ultra with building a prototype: Do a research spike to see what it would take to…
Simon Willison — Published
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Should a Dialog Close When Clicked Outside?
Maybe not, but I’ll break these down into three categories because it depends on context and intent. Pretend this post also applies for pressing Esc. Action Required If the user must complete a task that is presented by the dialog, then they should not be able to close it without…
Adrian Roselli — Published
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Quoting Florian Herrengt
But then users start to report a weird bug. It's the 4th time your team has been trying to fix it. I mean... asking AI to fix it. Unfortunately, it seems like not even Fable can figure it out. You go talk to the person who worked on this feature. "So where does the data come from?" "Hmm... actually I…
Simon Willison — Published
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Weekly Update 516: Live From Vietnam
A little wind noise, a little connectivity flakiness, and a little lip-sync issues from YouTube, but look at that view! 🤩 Back to business, it's the Brinks Home FAQ I found most interesting this week. I mean, how do you write your own FAQ then fail to
Troy Hunt — Published
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Why I Play Board Games (And So Should You)
Four years ago, I wrote a short apology for playing games, targeted specifically towards digital video games. Today, I would like to reiterate my statement and expand the idea to analogue board games. Even though many arguments are interchangeable, the analogue and innate social nature of these forces…
Wouter Groeneveld — Published
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Horse Game 15
Horse Game 15 Summary A long juice-and-audio session on KVP (knightvspawns), covering the Broom's sweep sound, the Heart family's heal effect, a full icon-silhouette audit and swap of eight items, then a deep pass on the Force archetype: push motion, stun rules, Banana Peel's Looney-Tunes exit, debris…
a327ex — Published
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There are no lossless transformations of natural-language text
There are no lossless transformations of natural-language text Sophie Alpert shares her "internal policy on acceptable use of AI writing by engineers". It's a short read (supporting its own recommendations) and really good. If you chose to have LLMs help massage your writing the following rule seems…
Simon Willison — Published
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Stealing Reasoning Traces from Proprietary LLM APIs
Stealing Reasoning Traces from Proprietary LLM APIs A vanity domain name (stolen-thoughts.com) for a neat paper: Anthropic, OpenAI, and Google return encrypted chain-of-thought blocks to clients that can be replayed across sessions, users, and models. We take a trace produced by a frontier model, replay…
Simon Willison — Published
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My full CLAUDE.md file as of 11th August 2026
My full CLAUDE.md file as of 11th August 2026 for context: CLAUDE.md Guidelines for Claude Code instances working in this repository. Communication Style Be thorough. Write as much as the subject warrants — explain reasoning, include relevant context, surface adjacent considerations. Stay roughly on…
a327ex — Published
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Microsoft Plugs Nearly 400 Security Holes
Microsoft today released updates to remedy at least 398 security vulnerabilities in its Windows operating systems and supported software, including one weakness that is already being actively exploited and two others that were publicly detailed prior to today.
Brian Krebs — Published
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datasette-upload-dbs 0.5a0
Release: datasette-upload-dbs 0.5a0 This plugin has been around for a while - it lets users upload a brand new SQLite database to a hosted Datasette instance, at which point that database will start being served by that instance. It can also be used to atomically swap a database with a more recent version…
Simon Willison — Published
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The Fruits of AI
Terry Godier has a post titled “Mea culpa” (which, given his framing, might’ve been better titled “Claude’s Culpa”). I’m not sure how much to even trust anything in his post given the backstory, but this line stood out: I was careless in relying on AI [...] without doing the work to understand Let’s…
Jim Nielsen — Published
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Device Bound Session Credentials lands in Chrome on macOS
Device Bound Session Credentials (DBSC) is Chrome's answer to session cookie theft, usually by InfoStealer malware. Instead of a cookie being a bearer token that works anywhere it's pasted, DBSC binds the session to a private key that lives in your device's hardware and
Scott Helme — Published
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Prot Asks: Oliver about minimalist life, distractions, independence, and more
4-hour video where I ask Oliver about all sorts of things and then he asks me details about my life.
Protesilaos Stavrou — Published
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Introducing Muse Glimmer
Introducing Muse Glimmer Meta are back in the open weights game! Muse Glimmer is a brand new 30B model under a clean Apache 2.0 license (a step up from the janky Llama licenses of old). They claim to have optimized it for exactly the kind of things I'm looking for in a local model: End-to-end Agentic…
Simon Willison — Published