Latest entries
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Quoting Linus Torvalds
And this was a debug session from hell, enormously helped by an AI doing much of the grunt-work. I'd like to call it my tireless helper, but the AI several times stated flat out that this was impossible and unsolvable and that we should just write a report about it. I suspect those things have been trained…
Simon Willison — Published
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llm 0.33
Release: llm 0.33 My highlights from this release: Upgraded to the OpenAI Python library 3.x and switched the HTTP client dependency from httpx to httpx2. #1608, #1631 I shipped a quick 0.32.1 fix for this yesterday, but this is the more comprehensive fix. llm embed and llm embed-multi now accept --key…
Simon Willison — Published
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More than just code review
The key skill required to make productive use of coding agents is being able to confidently instruct them on how to make changes and then confidently verify that those changes have been applied in the correct way. Sometimes this involves reviewing every line of code they have written, but there are other…
Simon Willison — Published
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Putting mice into hibernation causes a major loss of synapses
Hibernation cuts down on synapses, but mice seem to retain memories anyway.
Ars Technica — Published
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Dismantling the Roadless Rule threatens to disrupt wildlife and water in US
Lands free of roads are under threat from the Trump administration’s proposed rollback.
Ars Technica — Published
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The realization the logs are more useful than I
The realization the logs are more useful than I intuited them to be gave me several ideas on how to improve them. The most important improvement is being able to see what I actually did in the game between each turn with the AI, so a full generic replay system. Playing the replays then is trivial as…
a327ex — Published
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Trump's space transportation policy calls for new spaceport on federal land
"We probably need another site that's capable of heavy and super heavy launch capability."
Ars Technica — Published
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Thunder + fiber-optic cabling used for seismic imaging
Thunderstorms make seismic waves that can be used to find sub-surface features.
Ars Technica — Published
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Hidden Zillow listings created fake supply shock, raising NYC rents, lawsuit says
Renters say hidden Zillow listings make it harder to afford living in New York City.
Ars Technica — Published
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Motorola's GrapheneOS phones will launch in 2027 priced higher than Pixels
The private Android-based OS will expand beyond Pixels next year.
Ars Technica — Published
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Lawsuit demands Logitech hand tariff refunds over to customers
Logitech increased prices by up to 25 percent last year.
Ars Technica — Published
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Chinese regulators tell Tesla to fix nearly 3 million cars
Chinese safety regulators have cracked down on doors that don't open in a crash.
Ars Technica — Published
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Deconstructing A 17th Century Letter
Continuing the letter writing fever, I’ve been exploring the academic work called Letters As Loot by Gijsbert Rutten and Marijke J. van der Wal. It’s a treasure trove of information on how letters were written in the 17th and 18th century, based on a corpus of 50k letters that were captured by raiding…
Wouter Groeneveld — Published
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llm 0.32.1
Release: llm 0.32.1 Fresh installs of LLM stopped working the other day because the OpenAI Python library dropped its usage of httpx, and it turned out LLM depended on that library but only installed it via a transitive openai dependency. This dot-release fixes that for the moment by pinning to openai…
Simon Willison — Published
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llm-openrouter 0.7
Release: llm-openrouter 0.7 Now that this plugin is compatible with LLM 0.32 it can display the reasoning traces for LLMs available through OpenRouter. Updated for compatibility with LLM 0.32. Models now use OpenRouter's implementation of the Responses API. Three new server-side tools: Shell, WebFetch…
Simon Willison — Published
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Fighter jets help destroy Russian drone boat near European offshore gas platform
Romania blew up drone boat to protect lives of several hundred rig workers.
Ars Technica — Published
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Personalized pricing is “abhorrent,” but FTC limits may increase costs, critics say
Some Americans fear the FTC may be thinking about personalized pricing all wrong.
Ars Technica — Published
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Stop Making TUIs
Stop Making TUIs Thomas Ptacek advocates for building real native user interfaces for even the smallest of personal tools, because coding agents have reduced the cost of getting a usable-enough GUI up and running to almost nothing. I wrote about my vibe-coded bandwidth and GPU monitoring macOS task bar…
Simon Willison — Published
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Quoting Matt Webb
After I released version 1.0, I figured I would have to do the rotations myself. So I sat down with ChatGPT and I didn’t get it to write the code, but I got it to educate me. With a patient, interactive tutor, I was able to finally do what I hadn’t by reading books and asking mathematician friends –…
Simon Willison — Published
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Introducing dbsc.dev: Does Your Browser Support DBSC?
Every other web platform feature I've ever written about, I've been able to test in some easy way. Open DevTools, type the name of the thing, see if it's there. Device Bound Session Credentials doesn't work like that: there is no way
Scott Helme — Published
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Horse Game 19
Horse Game 19 Summary Three full item batches built for KNIGHT VS. PAWNS (76 to 106 of 169 items, past the 100-item draft threshold), a unification of the game's economy onto gold, and an offline synthesizer written from scratch to voice the Note item's chords. Item catalog review and execution-order…
a327ex — Published
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Waymo doubles spending on lobbying in robotaxi battle with Uber
Alphabet-owned company is seeking to persuade US regulators to clear a path for fully autonomous taxi services.
Ars Technica — Published
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ABA Games Variations — qweiop
ABA Games Variations — qweiop Summary First Grok game-dev session in this workspace: independently re-analyzed the 248-game ABAgames catalog against Claude's original list-01 picks, then prototyped a new seed that drifted from I SLASH / One Finger Death Punch into a typing-fed color-war sim at E:/a327ex…
a327ex — Published
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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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Rust Glancer
Rust Glancer, a functional LSP server for Rust which uses two orders of magnitude less RAM, is incredibly cool. Go check it out! This post started as a comment on lobste.rs, but I figured it out that it's better to publish it somewhat more prominently. Don't expect polished writing though!
Alex Kladov — Published
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There's no reason for software to be slow anymore
The other day, I saw a viral tweet saying that people talking about how LLMs are causing slow, bloated, code are going to eat crow once they re-write everything in super-optimized assembly. We're not quite at the point where we want to write everything in assembly, but some variant of what Nolan Lawson…
Dan Luu — Published
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My agent.md to improve LLM-assisted code quality
Fabien Sanglard — Published
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About rootlessness and broken relationships
Commentary on the distrust that is at the root of the modern Western world and how that undermines communities.
Protesilaos Stavrou — 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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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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The Talented Mr Ripley (Ripley, #1) [book]
Really enjoyed it, weirdly relatable and kept coming back for more. I'd seen the movie of the same name at the cinema back in 1999, and I remember Matt Damon as Ripley, but I didn't remember the details, except to say that the air of the character was this slightly creepy, little weird but quite clever…
Remy Sharp — 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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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 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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The benchmarkpocalypse
There's been a lot of talk about the vulnpocalypse, to which I don't have much to add because I'm not a security person, but I haven't seen much discussion on the closely related (and to be fair, less serious, issue), the benchmarkpocalypse. While it's become easier than ever to make serious performance…
Dan Luu — 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