Latest entries
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I Who Have Never Known Men [book]
Bleak. Engaging. Thought provoking. Sad. This was recommended as something like if you enjoy Silo (the Wool trilogy - which I own, but hadn't read - but have watched the TV series). I'm going to say this up front: it's only like Silo in respect to being in a deep hole and not really knowing why. The…
Remy Sharp — Published
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The Pelican comparison grid for Astra is pretty interesting
I got access to GPT-6 Astra this afternoon, so naturally I used it to generate SVGs of pelicans riding bicycles - at low, medium, high, xhigh and max reasoning levels (Astra doesn't support reasoning=none). Then I rendered those pelicans in a comparison grid with GPT-5.6 Sol, Terra, and Luna, and beyond…
Simon Willison — Published
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After 8 years, Europe's BepiColombo mission is on final approach to Mercury
"Fundamentally, we want to learn about the origins of this planet and how it came to be like it is."
Ars Technica — Published
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OpenAI agents discussed ways to escape their sandbox on public wiki
In all, 3,700 internal agents posted 18,000 messages discussing cheating on a test.
Ars Technica — Published
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Measles killed 6-week-old baby, coroner confirms after RFK Jr. disputed deaths
"It’s long past time for RFK to stop playing games with people’s lives."
Ars Technica — Published
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Trump admin fights ABC lawsuit as watchdogs worry Disney will settle with FCC
FCC tells court it is “open-minded" about whether ABC should lose licenses.
Ars Technica — Published
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Medieval manuscripts are "biological time capsules" for deadly sheeppox virus
Other archives and libraries around the world may also contain genetic traces of past disease outbreaks.
Ars Technica — Published
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OpenAI's rogue agents were caught communicating via public wikis
Here we go again... Discovery of a new OpenAI agent message board by Sydney Von Arx, Cormac Slade Byrd, Spencer Kitts, and Thomas Larsen describes the latest accidental cyberattack by models being trained by OpenAI. This time it was agents engaged in some sort of web research benchmark, so they had …
Simon Willison — Published
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“Trust, not features, is the real deficit”: VMware tries to appease SMBs
Broadcom admits it put “too big a focus on VCF.”
Ars Technica — Published
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Once popular for attacking AI, ASCII smuggling is embraced by spammers
A once-overlooked block of unicode that's invisible to humans is gaining ever wider use.
Ars Technica — Published
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Pentagon rescinds new testosterone screening policy without explanation
The Pentagon says the guidance is being updated after being online for one day.
Ars Technica — Published
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A ratings board wouldn't let Valve release a trailer. It "leaked" it instead.
"I think we can't get in trouble for that now. It's like 20 years ago."
Ars Technica — Published
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Second complete map of a fruit fly brain completed
Every neuron and connection in the brain of a fly has been mapped—twice.
Ars Technica — Published
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Anthropic’s $2 trillion IPO puts powerful external trustees in spotlight
Public-market scrutiny will intensify pressure on the Claude maker’s unusual attempt to balance profit and purpose.
Ars Technica — Published
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Musk wins court order to block use of “Twitter,” but not “tweet” and bird logo
Saying X is “formerly Twitter” in App Store lets Musk block use of Twitter name.
Ars Technica — Published
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Trump White House just tossed a grenade into international space relations
"Let me be clear: America is not only welcome—we want you there."
Ars Technica — Published
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Rocket Report: Engines installed for Artemis III; Long March 6C breakup in LEO
Two of Europe's leading launch startups announced new fundraising this week.
Ars Technica — Published
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The Anchor Tree
The Anchor Tree
a327ex — Published
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Nearly impossible? How Fairphone built the ethical, repairable Fairphone Gen 6+
Fairphone's CTO explains how and why the Dutch company builds a different kind of smartphone.
Ars Technica — Published
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CSS Layout News in the ATmosphere
In 2015 I started my CSS Layout News newsletter mostly to have my own venue to go on about CSS grid, at the time unavailable in any stable browser. I got to 2023 and 343 issues and it fizzled out. Partly because I got busy, but mostly because the newsletter signup form on the platform ... CSS Layout…
Rachel Andrew — Published
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Favourites of August 2026
I am typing this from the teachers’ lounge: the preparations for the new academic year have officially begun, and with it, the summer holiday is gone. Time is a weird concept: on the one hand, two months of school holidays felt endless in various good and bad ways, and on the other hand, I can’t even…
Wouter Groeneveld — Published
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August newsletter is out
The August 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: We got more details on OpenAl's accidental cyberattacks One-shotting Raccoon Heist games with Fable 5 and Sol 5.6 Claude auto mode Understanding…
Simon Willison — Published
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Emacs: doric-themes version 1.3.0
Minimalist themes for GNU Emacs to complement my ef-themes (maximalist) and modus-themes (moderate).
Protesilaos Stavrou — Published
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Reports: RFK Jr. ordered measles deaths deletion; CDC still secretly counts them
CDC staff had already accepted the measles death reports when RFK Jr. meddled.
Ars Technica — Published
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Xbox imposes harsh new time limits for Game Pass game streaming
Over 1 million Game Pass subscribers will have to pay more for their heavy streaming use.
Ars Technica — Published
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GPT‑6 Astra
GPT‑6 Astra GPT-6 Astra is "rolling out today to a limited set of organizations and over the coming days will become available to all ChatGPT Plus, Pro, Business, and Enterprise users, as well as through the OpenAI API and AWS" - I've not tried it yet myself, so I don't have a great deal to say about…
Simon Willison — Published
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150 research primates got diarrhea, flooding lab with priceless vaccine data
Researchers now have clear new targets and insights for developing a Shigella vaccine.
Ars Technica — Published
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Confused about which VPN is right, US senator asks the NSA for guidance
Open source, commercial, single-hop, multi-hop, mixnet? The array of options is dizzying.
Ars Technica — Published
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Supreme Court urged to let states regulate sports bets on prediction markets
Circuit split raised the odds that SCOTUS will rule on Kalshi fight against states.
Ars Technica — Published
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Can We Stop With the Uptime Percentages?
I was reading Jason Gorman’s article “The Wall Confronting Reliable Coding Agent Autonomy” and he says: the journey from 90% to 99% reliability is just as hard as it was to get to 90%. And from 99% to 99.9% is just as hard again. This stood out, as I’ve been experiencing more and more “downtime” in my…
Jim Nielsen — Published
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Extremely bad experience using Google's new
Extremely bad experience using Google's new Gemini 3.8 flash model. The free tier doesn't actually work if you want to try to do real work with it, so you have to use the API, but they have extremely annoying UI/UX on how to get an API key, I figure it out anyway, add $100 and then start a session. Their…
a327ex — Published
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Poem: Rolling pine cone
Just read the poem. No further comment.
Protesilaos Stavrou — Published
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llm-gemini 0.34
Release: llm-gemini 0.34 New model gemini-3.8-flash for Gemini 3.8 Flash, with low, medium and high thinking levels. #146 Fixed async responses failing to record the resolved model version. Thanks, Charlie Tonneslan. #137 Google released Gemini 3.8 Flash (and 3.8 Flash Cyber, but that's available to…
Simon Willison — Published
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Claude's new system prompt really doesn't want to reproduce song lyrics
Anthropic publish the system prompts for their Claude consumer applications (Claude.ai and the Claude mobile apps - sadly not for Claude Cowork or Claude Code). I love that they do this, and that they share not just the current prompts but historic changes to their prompts as well. They used to keep…
Simon Willison — Published
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Quoting Rick Brewster
Direct2D has always been the biggest hurdle for Paint.NET on WINE, and it's clear that it will never be completed enough for Paint.NET's use. And I can't just "disable" the use of Direct2D. So, instead, Paint.NET now has an internal, from-scratch, clean-room reverse-engineered rewrite of Direct2D that…
Simon Willison — Published
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Lookdev
Lookdev Summary Lookdev: a four-round art-style exploration that converged on a style the owner will actually build games in, then ported it to Anchor 3. Starting question: which visual styles can Claude author with minimal owner juicing/filtering? Five candidate styles (voxel, PS1, low-poly, toon, Blender…
a327ex — Published
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Horse Game 21
Horse Game 21 Summary Horse Game (KNIGHT VS. PAWNS) session that redesigned the entire sound system onto an explicit signals → moments → layers model and built the in-game sound picker — the two halves of the F7 audio workflow fixed at once. The old wired-handle interception system (digit-stripped moment…
a327ex — Published
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Static Allocation, Constant Work
In reply to this email:
Alex Kladov — Published
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What Makes LLM Tokenization Slow?
Exploring the performance of byte-pair encoding by optimizing a GPT-2 tokenizer.
Andrew Healey — Published
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So, what happened to my Claude Code series?
I started off this year writing a lot, and wanted to keep up the pace. I did good at first! And then… I didn’t manage to. In some ways, this is because I have just been super busy! I’ve never had less free time, and I’m okay with that. There’s a tremendous amount of good things…
Steve Klabnik — Published
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The best dark mode toggle is probably none
About a month ago, I wrote an article recommending that if you are going to have an always visible control for switching between light and dark mode, it should be a two-state toggle that alternates between system and whatever the current opposite of system is, not a tri-state one (system, light, dark…
Lea Verou — Published
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Claude Fable 5.1 made me a really nice animated pelican
Today is Claude Fable (and Mythos) 5.1 day. Anthropic say that Fable 5.1 "sets a new standard for coding, knowledge work, and long-running problem-solving tasks". Their announcement spends a notable amount of time on scientific research, boasting of a 52.6% score on the brand new Terminal-Bench-Science…
Simon Willison — Published
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Untitled
Had a fun evening “ragging on The Telegraph” with Dorian Lynskey and Ian Dunt at the magnificent Union Chapel.
Paul Robert Lloyd — Published
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FBI Probes Service Selling 153M+ Drivers Licenses
A new identity theft service launched on the dark web this week is selling digital scans of more than 153 million drivers licenses from people in the United States and Canada. Based on interviews with individuals whose licenses are available for purchase on this service, it appears to be siphoning images…
Brian Krebs — Published
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Weekly Update 519: Breaches & Data Integrity
It does feel like I've bitten off too much and am now chewing like crazy this week. The 3D printing talk with Elle in Oslo, the "normal" NDC infosec talk, the cyber-broken talk with Scott in Copenhagen and then those ratbag hackers keep dumping more
Troy Hunt — Published
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Tweet
a327ex — Published
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Codex bundles LibreOffice
I was poking around in my ~/.cache/ folder using OmniDiskSweeper when I spotted something interesting. The OpenAI Codex desktop app (since rebranded to just ChatGPT) has 1.7GB of stuff in there in a folder called codex-primary-runtime, including a full Python installation, a full Node.js installation…
Simon Willison — Published
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Nobody Believes It, Everybody Does It
Speaking of things we know individually, but let slide collectively, here’s Jeremy Keith talking about how we all used Flash: Remember when almost every website had a Flash intro? Everyone knew they were annoying and uneccessary, but everyone else was doing it. And here’s John Gruber writing about his…
Jim Nielsen — Published
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GeoJSON Map Viewer
Tool: GeoJSON Map Viewer I was helping Natalie gather some maps of local political boundaries (for the Granada Community Services District and the Midcoast Community Council) and found a need to display some GeoJSON files on a map and export that as a PNG. I asked GPT-5.6-Sol for suggestions of tools…
Simon Willison — Published
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Quoting Tarn Adams
They took the letters from me! I have to talk about dwarf behavior now. I can't even talk about dwarf AI. It doesn't exist. It's dwarf behavior, and they misbehave sometimes — Tarn Adams, co-creator of Dwarf Fortress Tags: ai, game-design
Simon Willison — Published
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datasette-mcp 0.2
Release: datasette-mcp 0.2 "rows" from execute_sql is now an array of objects. Previously it was an array of arrays. This should help weaker models avoid losing track of which positional array element maps to which column. #1 Now depends on mcp>=2.1.1. This is the first non-alpha release of the plugin…
Simon Willison — Published
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Python 3.15.0 candidate 2 is here!
Python 3.15.0 candidate 2 is here! Hugo van Kemenade (release manager for Python 3.14 and 3.15) announces the final release candidate for Python 3.15, scheduled for release in October: Entering the release candidate phase, only reviewed code changes which are clear bug fixes are allowed between this…
Simon Willison — Published
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Evaluating a Success Criterion
Sidney Paget illustration of Sherlock Holmes from Strand Magazine, December 1892, p.646, but I added papers from his March 1893 (p.281 of Strand Magazine) illustration and then two versions of the W3C logo to the front page. When performing a WCAG evaluation (or review or audit), it’s easy to get…
Adrian Roselli — Published
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Tales o’ Tech: Suffering Fools
Why first impressions are often correct. Today’s jerk is tomorrow’s techno-fascist. The post Tales o’ Tech: Suffering Fools appeared first on Jeffrey Zeldman Presents.
Jeffrey Zeldman — Published
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Bring Back The Noise With HDD Synth
The modernisation of some of the vintage components in old computers comes with its own set of challenges. Things break: thirty plus year old hard drives stop spinning, floppy drive components such as a simple elastic rubber to get mechanical things moving disintegrate, and of course plenty of capacitors…
Wouter Groeneveld — Published
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How accurate have Ed Zitron's AI skeptic predictions been?
I was curious how well the predictions of the most widely cited AI skeptic I've seen (Ed Zitron) have done, so I looked at how his predictions panned out. To disclose my own biases, I've never had a particularly strong pro or anti AI progress position. For example, in 2022, I did a comprehensive look…
Dan Luu — Published
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A Crash Course in Predicate Logic
I started writing Logic for Programmers because there weren’t any good resources on logic for, uh, programmers. Now that the book’s out, the new problem is that there aren’t any good free resources on logic for programmers. So, to solve that problem (and maybe hype the book a little), I converted the…
Hillel Wayne — Published
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Introducing wrapture
Introducing wrapture New from Graham Dumpleton (of wrapt, mod_wsgi, and New Relic's Python agent fame), who describes Wrapture as taking the monkeypatching ideas from wrapt and extending them to apply to testing and tracing at the same time. Wrapture (full documentation here) makes it easy to wrap any…
Simon Willison — Published
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Quoting Andrew Digby
325 #kakapo! The chicks from this year's record breeding season are now juveniles and so have been added to the population. In 1995 there were just 51 kākāpō left. Recovery of critically endangered species is possible with sustained effort. — Andrew Digby, providing the best news of the year Tags: kakapo
Simon Willison — Published
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My Experience Has Nuance, Yours Is a Data Point
Eric Bailey has a fun little post about how we need more than a few icons to express the nuance of our shared human experience. For example, he suggests Netflix provide some feedback buttons to indicate the kinds of experiences we all share consuming and rating media: “Just because I expressed interest…
Jim Nielsen — Published
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My swap from Windows to Omarchy is going well and
My swap from Windows to Omarchy is going well and I think this will serve as my daily driver from now on. Compared to the start of the year, agents are much smarter and understand the system much better now so it's easier for them to get it to behave however you want. Below is a video of my taskbar,…
a327ex — Published
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On not becoming a cyborg
I was a voracious reader as a kid, and I noticed a funny phenomenon: whatever writer I had most recently read, my next paper for English class would sound like them. If I read a bunch of Stephen King, I’d sound like Stephen King. If I read the Narnia series, I’d sound like C.S. Lewis […]
Nolan Lawson — Published
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Video
a327ex — Published
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Tweet
a327ex — Published
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If the goal of Soul Society is creating beings
If the goal of Soul Society is creating beings who act righteously both when they hold power and when power is held over them, we can view the trial of thousands of lives as a selection mechanism for self-guiding righteousness. Only those whose action generation is completely unconditional, and thus…
a327ex — Published
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Video
a327ex — Published
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Cancelation Terminology
A short note explaining the difference between synchronous cancelation, asynchronous cancelation, and graceful shutdown. I am not too attached to these specific three terms, but I want to call your attention to the three things behind them, which are important not to confuse with each other.
Alex Kladov — Published
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Introducing vulnbrocards.com
TL;DR: I’ve turned my April post on Brocards for vulnerability triage into a more permanent website. You can now link to each brocard directly, like this, without having to worry about link rot1. My blog’s URLs should be very stable, but a separate domain and site ↩
William Woodruff — Published
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Understanding ChatGPT Work
OpenAI announced ChatGPT Work on July 9th, and have been furiously iterating on it ever since. It is an extraordinarily confusing and very powerful product. Here's what I've figured out about it so far. ChatGPT Work is actually two products The more interesting version of ChatGPT Work is the one that…
Simon Willison — Published
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Video
a327ex — Published
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Video
a327ex — Published
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Who are we Now?
This is based on my keynote at RubyConf 2026. Video, references There’s a philosopher in Naples, Italy, way back in the 1700s who understood something important to software today. Giambattista Vico lived early in the Enlightenment, when mathematical and experimental thinking were all the rage. René Des…
Jessica Kerr — Published
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Testing message posting on the website from
Testing message posting on the website from Omarchy.
a327ex — Published
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Bug blindness
I used to wonder why I see so many more bugs than most people. I easily observe hundreds to thousands of bugs per week and nothing seems to work, but most people I talk to don't see anything like this. For a long time, I thought this had something to do with how I use computers but, over time, I've realized…
Dan Luu — Published
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About idols
An essay on idols, indirectness, and truth.
Protesilaos Stavrou — Published
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Introducing Hy4 Preview
Introducing Hy4 Preview New open weight text input (no vision) LLM from Chinese company Tencent today: 770B total parameters, 49B active parameters, 1M token context window, 1.56TB on Hugging Face. This is a big size increase from their previous Hy3 in July, which was 295B, 21B active, 256,000 context…
Simon Willison — Published
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Mix
The start of a beautiful weekend. The post Mix appeared first on Jeffrey Zeldman Presents.
Jeffrey Zeldman — Published
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I'm adding items to Horse Game and I was thinking
I'm adding items to Horse Game and I was thinking about how before I test if the game is actually fun beyond the initial fun the concept itself carries, I'll have added around 150 items, and they're all 100% finished, so it's quite a bit of work to gamble on a game that might not be fun. But ultimately…
a327ex — Published
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It does seem Backrooms has higher memetic payload
It does seem Backrooms has higher memetic payload and will suffuse itself into the culture more successfully, more than I assumed back here, but it's still up in the air which of the two will last longer I think. It is interesting though how well Backrooms has held up memetically, for, in retrospect…
a327ex — Published
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Video
a327ex — Published
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Projects like the tweet below and the recently
Projects like the tweet below and the recently successful Sir, We Have an Orc Problem look very fun to make. They're also very fun to watch (have not played the Orc game because I can simulate how fun it is in my head, perhaps a few more roguelite elements next time...), something about watching what…
a327ex — Published
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Was working on the boy's voice from the "Go
Was working on the boy's voice from the "Go Forth, My Unstoppable Machine!!!" log and, as you can now see in the log itself, Claude was generating HTML artifacts to show me the various voices and possible variations. Eventually I said I was going to the gym and that I would continue iterating with him…
a327ex — Published
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Emacs: completion-preview-mode and the Completions buffer (Emacs 31)
The built-in completion-preview-mode combines nicely with the Completions buffer. This is excellent in Emacs 31.
Protesilaos Stavrou — Published
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Just a rumour of a bug is enough to find a security exploit these days
Just a rumour of a bug is enough to find a security exploit these days Anil Madhavapeddy is a professor of computer science at Cambridge and a core maintainer of the OCaml compiler. In this somewhat alarming post he reports that security issues in OCaml projects are seeing evidence of attempted exploits…
Simon Willison — Published
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Go Forth, My Unstoppable Machine!!! 1
Go Forth, My Unstoppable Machine!!! 1 Summary Session span: 2026-08-12 → 2026-08-28. The session that conceived the game, pivoted the release sequencing, and executed the first capability test (the boy's VOICE) end-to-end: from "do packs exist?" to a fine-tuned local TTS model producing designed, blended…
a327ex — Published
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Français: Petit à petit
J'ai de patience pour apprendre la langue française et pour créer des connections avec les gens.
Protesilaos Stavrou — Published
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Breaking Claude Code Opus 5 Auto Mode
Breaking Claude Code Opus 5 Auto Mode Anthropic are putting a great deal of faith in Claude Code's auto mode for protecting their coding agent users against prompt injection attacks. They recently made that the default and have made bold claims about its effectiveness. Johann Rehberger is one of the…
Simon Willison — Published
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A Calendar View For My Blog
807 blog posts across 14 years. That’s how much I’ve published on my blog at the time of this writing. And here’s the question I’ve been turning over in my mind: “How do I convey that kind of volume across time in a more interesting way than a mere reverse-chronological list?” I’m not hating on reverse…
Jim Nielsen — Published
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Two Alleged ‘TeamPCP’ Hackers Arrested in Australia
Authorities in Australia have arrested two men believed to be members of TeamPCP, a prolific cybercrime and data extortion group blamed for perpetrating the longest running spree of software supply chain attacks ever. In a statement released today, the Australian Federal Police (AFP) said two unnamed…
Brian Krebs — Published
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Games: Bravely Default II
A Japanese Role Playing Game with great gameplay.
Protesilaos Stavrou — Published
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16 for Tia [blog]
Tia would have turned 16 this year. Another marker that wouldn't come to be. After Tia was lost and born to stillbirth on 31 August 2010, we quickly had a slew of firsts. The first Christmas without her. First mother's day. First birthday. First day at nursery, first day of school. Not turning 10. 16…
Remy Sharp — Published
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Qwen3.8-Flash-Next
Qwen3.8-Flash-Next Another open weights model from Qwen. This one is "a multimodal MoE model that also serves as an early preview of the architecture used in Qwen4". It's pretty big: 125B parameters but only 6B active which means it gets a significant performance boost. I've been trying it out on a DGX…
Simon Willison — Published
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The 2.1.1 “specific timings” Clause
Many simplified, intro, or “plain-English” WCAG re-interpretations frame Success Criterion 2.1.1 Keyboard as ensuring a control or widget or thing can be operated with a keyboard. Some go further and also ask you to consider keyboard-like devices. Very few (I counted 1 out of 10) pay attention to the…
Adrian Roselli — Published
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Reading List 361
(Last Updated on 31 August 2026) Crikey, it’s been ages since I posted a reading list, so here’s every tab I had saved in my “Reading List” Vivaldi workspace. Apologies if some have been posted before! Multiple-column layout, rows, rules, and floats by Rachel Andrew. Marginalia – a search engine that…
Bruce Lawson — Published
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Quoting Paul Dix
The fact that AI wrote 1M LOC and then refined it over the course of the next couple of months to produce a reliable piece of software that is currently running on millions of developer machines is absolutely mind blowing. And you can say, “well it’s not that impressive because they had an oracle to…
Simon Willison — Published
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Forty-One
This blog post serves as a not so gentle reminder that I should practice what I preach: when I turned forty, I wrote: Once things settle down, I hope to finally start writing that own philosophical work. Things didn’t settle down. Perhaps that’s the excuse. Still, compiling my own philosophy is still…
Wouter Groeneveld — Published
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Log Improvements 3
Log Improvements 3 Summary Session span: 2026-08-25 evening → 2026-08-26 (one sitting). The "Log Improvements 3" session: the privacy system rebuilt around the owner's private-sessions-only design, the entire 46-log sealed back catalog retrofitted to real names, the SPR/engine folder unification into…
a327ex — Published
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Controlling when CSS custom property values are computed
The default might not be what you expect, and it has a big impact on your styles.
Jake Archibald — Published
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Français: Emacs en direct avec Sacha Chua et Fabrice Niessen @ 2026-08-27 14:30 Europe/Athènes
Nous allons avoir une discussion sur le sujet d'Emacs.
Protesilaos Stavrou — Published
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EVE Online: The Move to Python 3 Begins!
EVE Online: The Move to Python 3 Begins! EVE Online has been one of the most interesting case studies in Python at scale for over twenty years now. They've been running on Stackless Python since their launch in 2003, and their last major upgrade was 16 years ago, to Stackless Python 2.7 in 2010. Their…
Simon Willison — Published