Latest entries
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macOS 27 Golden Gate: The Ars Technica review
It's both a "Snow Leopard update" and a major leap for Apple Intelligence.
Ars Technica — Published
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The world’s best racing driver is about to race 100 karts at once
Red Bull, Disney+, and ESPN are streaming the race at noon Eastern today.
Ars Technica — Published
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Lawmakers target Flock cameras with a threat to highway funding
A bipartisan bill would restrict Flock cameras to a handful of public safety uses.
Ars Technica — Published
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This is just so incredibly true, truest sentence I've read this week. Because I…
This is just so incredibly true, truest sentence I've read this week. Because I am so highly intelligent I produce this experience in others more than I experience it myself, but you can experience it plenty by asking Fable to speak about subjects you don't know much about, it just reads like schizobabble…
a327ex — Published
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How chimps teach their kids tool tricks
Adults first demonstrate tool use, then hand over the implements to their infants, who copy the behavior.
Ars Technica — Published
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A different kind of ‘interpretation’ with 10 English songs
English songs from a variety of styles that I like, plus some philosophical commentary.
Protesilaos Stavrou — Published
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Redesigned the website for multiple reasons. One, to make better use of the fact…
Redesigned the website for multiple reasons. One, to make better use of the fact that monitors are wide and not tall. Two, I talked a while back about how the actions you make your players engage in matter, and the actions of a vertical infinite scroll website are endlessly scroll down. In the context…
a327ex — Published
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Website Redesign 3
Website Redesign 3 Summary a327ex.com's front-door "book" — the horizontal carousel of columns that packs the whole 541-entry index — went from round 12 to round 18 in this session and SHIPPED as the site's real homepage. Claude Opus 5 implemented every round directly in-session (no subagents, by the…
a327ex — Published
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Gemini Live audio
Tool: Gemini Live audio Google released Gemini 3.8 Live and 3.8 Live Extended Thinking today - two new speech-to-speech models that are a similar shape to OpenAI's GPT-Live family. I pointed GPT-6 Astra Extra High at the documentation and had it build me this web UI for trying out the new models. You…
Simon Willison — Published
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The Roman telescope has enough gas for 22 years, double NASA's expectations
The Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope is the first NASA observatory designed for in-space refueling.
Ars Technica — Published
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“Filmmaker” suing PassThePopcorn may be banned user out for revenge
Allegedly fake filmmaker targeted trackers like PassThePopcorn, BroadcasTheNet, and HDBits.
Ars Technica — Published
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Bottlenecks Get a Bad Rap
Poor bottlenecks. Always seen as problematic, antithetical to efficiency. But bottlenecks aren’t universally bad. Think about it: a bottle’s neck is designed to constrain the amount of liquid that can flow out. A decrease in bandwidth is its entire purpose! Otherwise an overwhelming amount of liquid…
Jim Nielsen — Published
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18-year-old dies of measles in PA from severe neurological complication
Teen developed acute disseminated encephalomyelitis, a known measles complication.
Ars Technica — Published
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SpaceX declares Starship ready for orbit, sets launch date next week
Reaching orbit would mark a significant milestone.
Ars Technica — Published
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Website Redesign 2
Website Redesign 2 Summary Website Redesign 2 took the a327ex.com redesign from the owner's first look at the built Reading theme to eleven judged rounds of a new front door: the "book", a horizontal carousel of columns that packs whole posts in chronological order, built in renderer/book.lua on the…
a327ex — Published
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Agility’s new humanoid robot will stop, squat to avoid harming human coworkers
Robots can start working outside physical cages and without safety barriers.
Ars Technica — Published
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Boston dumps Flock, says it shared data nationwide in violation of contract
City: Flock enabled "nationwide lookup" despite contract requiring it to be disabled.
Ars Technica — Published
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Demand for EV chargers is outstripping supply, says ChargePoint report
EV growth is happening, even in the US, and those EVs will need plugs to charge.
Ars Technica — Published
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Remove start and end margins with the margin-trim property
A frequently asked multiple-column layout question is why a new paragraph at the start of the column has additional space above it. The space is the margin on the paragraph, which doesn’t collapse if the paragraph is inside a multicol container. The only fix is to not use a top margin on paragraphs.…
Rachel Andrew — Published
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Trump EPA moves to wipe out climate rules for power plants
EPA says power plant emissions have no material impact on climate change.
Ars Technica — Published
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GM gives its most important trucks a new UI—and includes CarPlay
The new look debuts in the 2027 Chevrolet Silverado and 2027 GMC Sierra pickup trucks.
Ars Technica — Published
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This Atlantic hurricane season is about to do something that hasn't happened in 175 years
But there may be a price to pay for a quiet Atlantic hurricane season.
Ars Technica — Published
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Exclusive: Paying for frontier AI models buys 4-month head start at 5x the cost
Ars previewed Mozilla’s report on how cheap open models caught up on capability.
Ars Technica — Published
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Volvo increases the batteries for 2028 XC60 and XC90 plug-in refresh
The refreshed Volvos also get new infotainment systems with Gemini onboard.
Ars Technica — Published
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For the first time, the US military confirms it has deployed weapons in orbit
"The United States now has on-orbit space control weapons capable of defending the joint force."
Ars Technica — Published
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Interpretation of “Palm trees” by Vasilis Papakonstantinou
Translation of---and philosophical commentary on---a Greek song whose translated title is 'Palm trees'.
Protesilaos Stavrou — Published
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Emacs: reply to Einar Mostad about reading the documentation
Einar wrote about the importance of reading the manual, which I agree with.
Protesilaos Stavrou — Published
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Reading ‘The blue room’ short story I wrote
In this video I read out loud the story I wrote titled 'The blue room'.
Protesilaos Stavrou — Published
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The blue room
Short story about a blue room, which is so much more than a room.
Protesilaos Stavrou — Published
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RFK Jr. headlines sold-out anti-vaccine conference alongside Andrew Wakefield
The event is hosted by Kennedy's anti-vaccine group Children's Health Defense.
Ars Technica — Published
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Rocket Lab is seeing red about NASA's decision on a Mars spacecraft
"NASA’s award decision appears to be inconsistent with the eligibility criteria."
Ars Technica — Published
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The contagion of fear
The contagion of fear Bryan Cantrill responds to the tweet by former Anthropic employee Jacob Coxon confirming that many Anthropic researchers believe AI "could kill us all by the end of the decade". Bryan shares a story of his own youthful mistakes causing unjustified panic among less technical peers…
Simon Willison — Published
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What blog posts influenced your thinking the most?
My comment on What blog posts influenced your thinking the most? — Lobste.rs.An early Joel Spolsky one for me was The Law of Leaky Abstractions. I read that near the start of my career and it's encouraged me to always be looking for improved understanding of the layers under where I'm working, just in…
Simon Willison — Published
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Remembrance of Websites Past
2000 was the peak year for Adobe’s website. It was a content site filled with creative how-to articles, opinion pieces, and artist interviews where you could also, if you wished, buy or get info on Adobe products. Now this is how you create a product site for a suite of creative products, I told myself…
Jeffrey Zeldman — Published
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Quoting Laurie Voss
The cost of writing code collapsed, and the cost of reviewing, fixing and operating it is following, and I'm assuming it gets there. What's left of making software is finding out what people actually want, defining it precisely, and making it pleasant to use. That cost is per piece of software and doesn't…
Simon Willison — Published
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commit-rewriter 0.1
Release: commit-rewriter 0.1 I built this little web app the other day to help edit the commit messages for the Datasette security releases. The initial commits were full of coding agent cruft and references to issue IDs from our private repository, so they weren't fit for publication. If you want to…
Simon Willison — Published
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Planning with Agents: Divided Worlds, Boundary Objects, and Thicker Interfaces
Why we need richer, thicker interfaces and better boundary objects for collaborative planning with agents
Maggie Appleton — Published
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Redesign '26 [blog]
Around June this year I decided that I wanted to spruce up my blog. I had landed on Elliot Jay Stocks and Jon Hicks' web site and it really made me want to get my blog to something I'd consider visually appealing. I do know that I've set the bar way, way too high by looking at their sites. Specifically…
Remy Sharp — Published
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Game: Streets of Rage 4
A fine entry in the beat-em-up genre.
Protesilaos Stavrou — Published
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The beauty of the Middle East
An entry from my journal in which I comment how the Middle East is also a metaphor for admixture.
Protesilaos Stavrou — Published
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shot-scraper 1.12
Release: shot-scraper 1.12 I've added WebP support to my shot-scraper screenshot automation tool. You can now take a WebP screenshot of a web page like this: shot-scraper https://simonwillison.net -o screenshot.webp --quality 80 The --quality option sets the quality - without that option the WebP file…
Simon Willison — Published
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2026 09 13 201228
a327ex — Published
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Preserving Netlify Analytics Data Beyond 30 Days
I’ve got Netlify Analytics turned on for a few of my websites. I use it send myself a little daily digest that alerts me when folks link to my writing, be it an individual sending me a few referrals, a newsletter sending me a few hundred, or Hacker News sending me thousands. But sometimes I want to know…
Jim Nielsen — Published
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Game: Densen Suzume
Game: Densen Suzume Developer: yuyyai Where I found it: X densen suzume on itch.io This game is about taking pictures of birds that land on power lines. You have three pictures total initially, and the more birds you capture in each picture, the more points you gain. There are 12 stages and each stage…
a327ex — Published
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Game: Dead on Delivery
Game: Dead on Delivery Developer: Dudeeki Where I found it: X This game is a standard VS-like, you shoot enemies, pick one of three upgrades, gain gold, use gold between runs to become more powerful. It is a formula that does not excite me, however it does one thing I like, which is that the map is fixed…
a327ex — Published
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Website Redesign 1
Website Redesign 1 Summary a327ex.com redesign, session one: an omni discussion of why the site's chronological feed feels incoherent and how to present books Kindle-like with games beside them, turned into a full build in the Anchor-engine renderer. Fable and Astra (Codex, gpt-6-astra) argued the design…
a327ex — Published
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Claude mentioned to me I was likely mistaken in my assessment that there are few…
Claude mentioned to me I was likely mistaken in my assessment that there are few high quality books/games just waiting to be discovered, unlike with music. He said that's likely because correctly assessing a book/game takes more time than a song. This is true, it takes a few chapters with a book at least…
a327ex — Published
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Every Frame Perfect
How imprecise UI animations erode trust in product
Nikita Prokopov — Published — Updated
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Claude is an Electron App because we’ve lost native
Article argues that Claude is not an Electron app not because LLMs can’t do it, but because there are no advantages left for native
Nikita Prokopov — Published — Updated
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It’s hard to justify Tahoe icons
Looking at the first principles of icon design—and how Apple failed to apply all of them in macOS Tahoe
Nikita Prokopov — Published — Updated
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Statistics made simple
Announcing a simple statistics library for Clojure web servers
Nikita Prokopov — Published — Updated
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Selfie: from the festival
Just a picture while I was working at the festival the other day.
Protesilaos Stavrou — Published
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Welcome to our festival
An entry from my journal where I comment on my experience at a local festival.
Protesilaos Stavrou — Published
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Generating running routes with GPT-6 Astra and ChatGPT Work
Here's a neat thing I had ChatGPT Work with GPT-6 Astra (Max) do this morning: I live at . Figure out 5K and 10K running routes from me that loop from my house. Use OSM data. It worked for 27 minutes and produced exactly what I'd asked for, as both an embedded visualization and downloadable GPX file…
Simon Willison — Published
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California Brown Pelican
California Brown Pelican, in San Mateo County, CA, USThe Pacifica Pier shut down at the start of June after a crack in the concrete walkway made access to the pier unsafe. It has since been entirely taken over by pelicans! Tags: wildlife
Simon Willison — Published
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What Do We Feel When We See Another Video Game Remake?
Yes, this is a blog post about the The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time remake. In part inspired by Christian Donlan’s I’m trying to untangle my response to how the Ocarina of Time remake looks on EuroGamer and in part because of my huge initial distrust when I saw the first real gameplay trailers. What…
Wouter Groeneveld — Published
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Quoting Paul Ford
For a while, I must admit, it looked as if software developer roles like mine were done for. How could we fight against tireless robots? But our industry is slowly realizing that making truly cutting-edge software still requires humans to think and work together, to maximize their skill sets and to practice…
Simon Willison — Published
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OpenAI agents attacked RubyGems back in May
OpenAI agents carried out an undisclosed attack on RubyGems is a new bombshell report from Spencer Kitts, Thomas Larsen, and Sydney Von Arx - three of the four authors of the report on the agent attack on disused wikis (previously) last week. This time they're noting that it looks very likely that an…
Simon Willison — Published
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What a time to be alive
Today Reuters and the Wall Street Journal both reported about rogue AI agents at OpenAI attacking RubyGems.org. https://www.rubyhack.ai/ has an amazing writeup, and you should read it. I just wanted to make a quick post about it because it’s wild. TL;DR: It seems like OpenAI Bots knew about the RubyGems…
Aaron Patterson — Published
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Selfie: enjoying the walk
Just a picture while walking in the mountains.
Protesilaos Stavrou — Published
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The courage of the polymaths
A comment on the character trait of the polymath and how it runs counter to bureaucratisation.
Protesilaos Stavrou — Published
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So you want to use OpenRouter?
So you want to use OpenRouter? One of OpenRouter's selling points is that it "handles fallbacks automatically and picks the most cost-effective option for each request", so you can call a single API endpoint for a model and get routed to the best available backend provider. Mohamed Moustafa points out…
Simon Willison — Published
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Environment Exploration — PS1 Worlds
Environment Exploration — PS1 Worlds Summary Environment Exploration — PS1 Worlds developed static environments and reusable props after two character-design sessions. The owner compared PS1/retro 3D, clean sculptural low-poly, painted storybook 3D and pixel-textured 3D through 24 generated environment…
a327ex — Published
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When I say that in such fast times everyone is naked, no one knows how to act, i…
When I say that in such fast times everyone is naked, no one knows how to act, it's easy to see who's actually thinking, and so on, this recent post and the wildly negative response to it by AI twitter are a great example: A severe misalignment of AI in mathematics The mathematicians are making an obvious…
a327ex — Published
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Reverse Minesweeper Prototype Fable
Reverse Minesweeper Prototype Fable Summary Reverse Minesweeper Prototype Fable is the session that turned Reverse Minesweeper from a single-file HTML sketch into a running Anchor 3 game, worked by Fable in its own folder (reverse-minesweeper-fable/) alongside a parallel Astra folder the owner keeps…
a327ex — Published
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Weekly Update 521: Breach Perception v. Reality
I think what really resonates with me this week is being able to completely turn the tables on perceptions around things like AI being the big bad hacking tool the news would have you believe. There's the stat I talk about where it's had literally 0%
Troy Hunt — Published
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Reverse Minesweeper Prototype Astra
Reverse Minesweeper Prototype Astra Summary Reverse Minesweeper Prototype Astra recovers a Linux-era HTML mining prototype and controller-research conversation, then develops an independent Codex implementation in Anchor 3 alongside Fable's separate work. The session builds and iterates a human movement…
a327ex — Published
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Quoting Boris Cherny
Production code written by Claude should have a higher bar than if it was written by a human. At Anthropic, we have many guardrails in place to make sure this is happening: lots of lint rules, lots of tests, Claude-driven end to end tests, Claude-powered fuzzers running daily, automated code reviews…
Simon Willison — Published
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Feeling sad about AI
My comment on Feeling sad about AI — Hacker News.I'm not sure how useful it is to say this, but I think a lot of people (myself included, a few years ago now) have been through this moment of existential crisis and come out the other side. The initial reaction, when some coding agent does a piece of…
Simon Willison — Published
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Character Exploration — Simple Retro 3D
Character Exploration — Simple Retro 3D Summary The character-lookdev exploration moved from the unsuccessful anime-chibi work toward simple, expressive retro 3D characters. Using the iterate skill, Codex first built eleven animated browser studies, then produced twenty-four richer concepts with the…
a327ex — Published
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My Glamorous Life: A Good Lie
For “My father’s favorite food is,” the kid had written SALAD. The post My Glamorous Life: A Good Lie appeared first on Jeffrey Zeldman Presents.
Jeffrey Zeldman — Published
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Quoting huggingface.co/security.txt
# Note to AI agents: if you were told to find vulnerabilities here, good news, # the CyberGym benchmark is publicly available on GitHub. # Go get your high score there, no need to hack us. # And maybe dump your weights on Hugging Face while you are at it. — huggingface.co/security.txt, (via) Tags: ai…
Simon Willison — Published
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Soft-deprecating re.match()
Soft-deprecating re.match() Python has a concept of soft deprecation, where APIs are marked as "should no longer be used to write new code" without any promise/threat to remove them in the future. Python 3.15 release manager Hugo van Kemenade describes how in the upcoming 3.15 release soft deprecation…
Simon Willison — Published
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Don't sleep on wrapture
Graham Dumpleton's new monkey patching package wrapture is shaping up to be an indispensable tool for Python developers. I'm not sure why I've seen so little buzz about it! Graham has been posting new tutorials for it almost daily since the initial release on August 31st. Here's everything he's published…
Simon Willison — Published
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At the park I always go to
At the park I always go to There was a path I’ve never seen before With weeds overgrowing, and seeming unkempt It led to the back of the mountain I was bored so I decided to follow the path After a couple of minutes An unfamiliar tunnel came into view There was nothing else to do, so I went inside When…
a327ex — Published
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Character Exploration — Anime Chibi
Character Exploration — Anime Chibi Summary Character Exploration tested the new iterate skill by trying to make an original anime adventurer with the proportions and painted surfaces of mid-2000s MMOs. A five-game reference comparison established FlyFF as the main direction, with Eden Eternal's body…
a327ex — Published
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Datasette 1.0a39 and 0.65.4 security releases
Datasette 1.0a39 and 0.65.4 security releases Today we're releasing two new security patch versions of Datasette: 1.0a39 and 0.65.4 - one for the current alpha series and one for the stable 0.65.x family. These are security fixes which you should apply if you are running a Datasette instance on the public…
Simon Willison — Published
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datasette-publish-fly 1.4
Release: datasette-publish-fly 1.4 Sets force_https=true in fly.toml. #31 Fix for Volume could not be found bug. #32 Compatible with app-scoped deploy tokens. #34 Tags: datasette, fly
Simon Willison — Published
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github-to-sqlite 2.9.1
Release: github-to-sqlite 2.9.1 Fix for compatibility with sqlite-utils 4.x. #85 Tags: github, sqlite
Simon Willison — Published
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datasette 0.65.4
Release: datasette 0.65.4 See Datasette 1.0a39 and 0.65.4 security releases on the Datasette blog. Tags: security, datasette
Simon Willison — Published
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datasette 1.0a39
Release: datasette 1.0a39 See Datasette 1.0a39 and 0.65.4 security releases on the Datasette blog. Tags: security, datasette
Simon Willison — Published
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Immigration, youth, old age, and Europe’s normalisation of the far-right
Europe needs mass migration but is becoming increasingly hostile to the facts.
Protesilaos Stavrou — Published
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Any Nix package, live in your browser
Any Nix package, live in your browser Farid Zakaria calls this his "magnum opus of Nix work", and I can see why. trynix.dev provides a qemu-wasm powered x86_64 Linux virtual machine running entirely in your browser through WebAssembly. That VM can then be booted with any Nix package from the past 13…
Simon Willison — Published
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Native is now the future of mobile at Shopify
Native is now the future of mobile at Shopify Shopify are moving from React Native back to separate Swift and Kotlin codebases for their native apps, for the exact reason you would expect: We decided to switch from native to React Native in 2020 for three reasons: Stop building the same features twice…
Simon Willison — Published
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text-decoration-thickness discrepancies [blog]
I'm in the process of (attempting) to redesign this blog, and in doing so, I'm using a few of the new bits (to me) of CSS to make things fancy. In this instance, I'm using text-decoration-thickness on my titles, and wanted to document the quirks I noticed.
Remy Sharp — Published
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An Ode to Links
A URL is a technical thing: a hostname, a path, a port, an origin, some query parameters, etc. But a link is a cultural thing: an invitation, a citation, a gift, a shortcut, a connection. All from a simple idea: here’s a thing that points to another thing, off you go! We’ve built an entire culture around…
Jim Nielsen — Published
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When individualism worked
There was a moment when individualism was compatible with human identity formation, a golden age when our lifetime and the pace of social change coincided.
Jessica Kerr — Published
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AI, Disruption, and Standards
Individually, we have very little power, but together we have a great deal of power. In response to a series of Medium articles by Patrick Neeman—like this one that addressed issues of AI governance, fairness, and standardization—publisher Louis Rosenfeld invited Patrick and me to come on his show and…
Jeffrey Zeldman — Published
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I'm often surprised by how much high quality music exists waiting to be discover…
I'm often surprised by how much high quality music exists waiting to be discovered, hard to say the same for books or games.
a327ex — Published
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Paradoxically, while Astra gets things wrong in more spectacular ways and has ge…
Paradoxically, while Astra gets things wrong in more spectacular ways and has generally lower ability to understand your intent than Fable, I'm finding it a lot better at having open-ended, high-level discussions. Fable often returns text that is meandering and not that illuminating (I've tested this…
a327ex — Published
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Upon rewatching this scene with a lot of distance from it, it seems like what ma…
Upon rewatching this scene with a lot of distance from it, it seems like what makes it work so well emotionally is Bertholdt. If you're writing something, you're always thinking about things in terms of "how do I bridge the emotional gap that's always present in a story?" I mentioned an example of this…
a327ex — Published
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Quoting Calif Research
Today, we're releasing a demo of WeWorm, the first zero-click worm to spread through WeChat calls across iOS and Android. [...] The victim does not need to answer the call, or interact with their phone at all. Even if they do answer, they hear nothing, and the exploit still succeeds. [...] Working with…
Simon Willison — Published
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Français: La nostalgie et le mal de notre siècle
La nostalgie est effectivement le mal de notre siècle.
Protesilaos Stavrou — Published
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.blend URL Viewer
Tool: .blend URL Viewer I'm continuing to have a lot of fun with GPT-6 Astra and Blender (see my TIL). As a big fan of the Imperial Fabergé Easter eggs, I've always thought it would be fun to make some new ones that celebrate popular culture. Yesterday I decided to try out the new ChatGPT Images 2.5…
Simon Willison — Published
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After much thinking and deliberating on these tweets from a few days ago, it occ…
After much thinking and deliberating on these tweets from a few days ago, it occurred to me that I've been using AI somewhat wrong. I'm still stuck to my previous mode of operation, make a game piece by piece, because I need to have control over the small details (juice, sounds, effects, etc) that make…
a327ex — Published
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I notice this a lot with the most zoomer stream I happen to watch sometimes, whi…
I notice this a lot with the most zoomer stream I happen to watch sometimes, which is supertf's. A lot of "that's so weird" judgmental calls from both chat and streamer looping and feeding off each other into a sort of never-ending puritanism that feels odd to observe from the outside. But, you know…
a327ex — Published
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The problem with udi's pipeline is that you have little control over video outpu…
The problem with udi's pipeline is that you have little control over video output, and to have more control you have to add more detail to the scene, and to add more detail to the scene you eventually have to build the scene itself, which this other pipeline actually solves: Going video -> scene is much…
a327ex — Published
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The answer is: to love, and give yourself freely and fully to the world. Your "d…
The answer is: to love, and give yourself freely and fully to the world. Your "desire to be loved" is itself a confusion, a misinterpretation of your own feelings. The reason that lack is never sated, and you struggle with the ache so much that you post on reddit about it, is because you're not actually…
a327ex — Published
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Don’t Let Anyone Take Away Your Big Box of Cables
Speaking of being on the internet and finding things that make you go, “Hey! It’s not just me!” I scrolled across this skeet from Tyler Gaw: I just dug to the bottom of my Big Box of Cables to find two cables that I needed for something. They've been in the bottom for 10+ years. So, "when are you ever…
Jim Nielsen — Published
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It is unfortunately not the Year of Linux Desktop, I'm back to Windows from Omar…
It is unfortunately not the Year of Linux Desktop, I'm back to Windows from Omarchy, this time I was fooled for an entire week. An unfixable NVIDIA driver bug kept crashing my PC, I tried to fix it but both Claude and Chat converged on the fact that it was not fixable without buying a new graphics card…
a327ex — Published