Latest entries
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What's been going on in w64devkit the past year
The past year has been exciting for w64devkit, which like any software distribution is never complete. Peter0x44 joined as co-maintainer, and has pushed the project in good, new directions, with ideas I would never have considered. Many of his improvements have gone back upstream, and so you may benefit…
Chris Wellons — Published
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datasette-auth-github 1.0
Release: datasette-auth-github 1.0 I run this GitHub login plugin on the agent.datasette.io demo site and I noticed that my authenticated sessions weren't lasting very long. It turned out that the plugin was setting cookies without a Max-Age parameter, so they were expiring at the end of a browser session…
Simon Willison — Published
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California Sea Lion, Brandt's Cormorant
California Sea Lion, Brandt's Cormorant, in Pillar Point Harbor, CA, USI only noticed this after I had taken the photo: Morris the Northern Gannet is peeking out from behind the base of the sign. Tags: wildlife
Simon Willison — Published
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Learning another language may be one of the best ways to keep your brain healthy
Research suggests that bilingualism can offer cognitive benefits.
Ars Technica — Published
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Rings around a tiny body have changed over the past decade
Chariklo is only about 250 km across, but it has two rings, and they're changing.
Ars Technica — Published
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KTConf 2026 Creative Coding Slides
Yesterday, I had the pleasure to give a talk for the local Kotlin community on creativity in software engineering and the impact generative AI has on our ability to be creative. KTConf took place in an iconic venue, the M museum in Leuven, so I felt obliged to include a slide about a painting. To my…
Wouter Groeneveld — Published
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I will stop posting publicly on this website for a while. I have built a nice se…
I will stop posting publicly on this website for a while. I have built a nice set of technologies here that I must explore in a few directions, and that exploration will be best done privately. I also just don't feel like speaking anymore. Apologies to the fifty or so regulars who have been reading so…
a327ex — Published
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Finding Bugs
Are generative (randomized) tests significantly more effective than example-based unit-tests at discovering bugs? There's an interesting discussion about this on lobste.rs. One argument in favor of unit tests is, paraphrasing
Alex Kladov — Published
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Selfie: ten days after the clean shave
I shaved my hair and beard ten days ago. But I have to do it again, which is too much work.
Protesilaos Stavrou — Published
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About consistency and structure
A comment on how I write frequently and how this reflects my stability as a person.
Protesilaos Stavrou — Published
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Gemini Hacked Three Companies in First Known Breakout by Google’s AI
Gemini Hacked Three Companies in First Known Breakout by Google’s AI Gemini finally caught up on Felony Bench! The hacks, which the company confirmed on Friday, occurred in May as part of a test run by the company Irregular, which was also involved in similar incidents disclosed by OpenAI, Anthropic…
Simon Willison — Published
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2026 09 18 203002
a327ex — Published
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AI hallucination of Chinese nuclear components almost led to US military attack
But the military's overall use of AI seems to be accelerating.
Ars Technica — Published
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Note on 18th September 2026
Being a computer scientist who refuses to find anything about LLMs interesting right now is a bit like being a geneticist who refuses to find anything interesting about the recently opened Jurassic Park. Skeptical geneticist: "pfft, it's just frog DNA. And they deliberately let them eat people for the…
Simon Willison — Published
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FAA tees up $875M AI tool to help manage air traffic congestion
FAA plans for AI tool to help manage DC air traffic before a nationwide rollout.
Ars Technica — Published
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Quoting Thariq Shihipar
We're adding support for AGENTS.md to Claude Code. Starting today in version 2.1.277, if there is no CLAUDE.md in a folder, Claude will check for and use AGENTS.md. AGENTS.md support is built off of Claude Code mods, our upcoming way to customize the Claude Code harness. This is a built-in mod, but you’ll…
Simon Willison — Published
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Do You Prefer Artificial?
“Artificial” things can get a bad rap next to their counterparts, but they have their place. For example, artificial light (i.e. not from the sun)? Super useful, especially at night. And when it comes to skiing, I’ll take artificial snow if I have to. Beats no snow. Artificial isn’t necessarily inferior…
Jim Nielsen — Published
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FCC lets Paramount sell 49.5% equity stake to Saudi Arabia, UAE, and Qatar
FCC rejects concerns about repressive governments buying influence over CBS owner.
Ars Technica — Published
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Finding the cells that put our brain to sleep
Rare cells with widespread connectivity seem to be able to trigger sleep.
Ars Technica — Published
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US government website used Chinese model the FBI called "malicious"
The Federal Register website briefly used an open source Chinese AI search tool.
Ars Technica — Published
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The Creative Spirit of Who Framed Roger Rabbit
The Creative Spirit of Who Framed Roger Rabbit I love Who Framed Roger Rabbit, the 1988 movie by Robert Zemeckis. I haven't watched it in quite a few years, and Cypress Frankenfeld just pointed out this sequence from early in the movie: It's a pelican riding a bicycle! Look closely and you'll note that…
Simon Willison — Published
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Delve Deep, My Unstoppable Machine!!! 1
Delve Deep, My Unstoppable Machine!!! 1 Summary A new private Anchor 3 project, born as "emojunky" and renamed at the end to "Delve Deep, My Unstoppable Machine!!!", continued the Reverse Minesweeper prototype and built its player character from scratch: the emoji toolkit's outline-and-shadow pipeline…
a327ex — Published
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Someone asked me how the character from the previous video worked, I had no idea…
Someone asked me how the character from the previous video worked, I had no idea, so I asked Claude to explain it with a video. Because he can drive all games made with my engine via scripts and capture video output directly from the engine, it seems like it was easy for him to make a video. The contents…
a327ex — Published
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Meet the winner of Nikon's Small World in Motion video contest
Ning Xu of Tsinghua University captured tiny cilia beating in airways of a child with rare respiratory disorder.
Ars Technica — Published
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Researchers used Claude to hack OpenAI
Researchers used Claude to reach an OpenAI employee account and sensitive GitHub data.
Ars Technica — Published
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Rocket Report: China wants a Raptor 3 engine; SpaceX set for big Starship test
“I can tell you SpaceX has already gone captive."
Ars Technica — Published
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2026 09 18 024932
a327ex — Published
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Français: Inscrire les paroles de «Amsterdam» (dans le port d’Amsterdam)
Voilà encore un petit exercice pour pratiquer la longue française.
Protesilaos Stavrou — Published
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Poem: Dance of the bee-eaters
Just read the poem. No further comment.
Protesilaos Stavrou — Published
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Emacs: dired-preview version 0.7.0
Information about the latest version of my dired-preview package for GNU Emacs.
Protesilaos Stavrou — Published
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How I Vibed a Proof of Conway’s Conjecture
You can just prove things, apparently.
Dan Abramov — Published
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Be alert: targeted attacks on prominent Rustaceans
Be alert: targeted attacks on prominent Rustaceans Important warning from Adam Harvey and the crates security team: We believe that there is an ongoing campaign targeting rust-lang members and owners of popular crates that is attempting to compromise devices and accounts in order to use them to publish…
Simon Willison — Published
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How To Write With An LLM
How To Write With An LLM Thomas Ptacek on using LLMs as copyeditors, not as writing assistants: Rule Number One: You may not use a single word an LLM suggests to you. [...] I think that as a form of intellectual personal protective equipment you should adopt the rule that any specific turn of phrase…
Simon Willison — Published
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Game: Combolands
Game: Combolands Developer: Crux Games Where I found it: I don't remember I bought this game because the main mechanic reminded me of ISLANDERS, a game I enjoyed. I was surprised to find it's like a mix of ISLANDERS and Balatro in a way. You place buildings, buildings give you points whenever their conditions…
a327ex — Published
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RFK Jr. names 8 new members to influential preventive medicine task force
The USPSTF sets insurance coverage for preventive services, like colonoscopies.
Ars Technica — Published
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Small AI models let drones autonomously identify and attack battlefield targets
Scaleout deploys decentralized AI-driven learning to military bases and drones.
Ars Technica — Published
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Self-generated prompt injections in compaction summaries
Self-generated prompt injections in compaction summaries In Our framework for reporting model misalignment OpenAI provide "six reports on unexpected or concerning model behavior we’ve observed in the last six months". This one here is my favorite: they caught some of their models in training deliberately…
Simon Willison — Published
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Google announces new experimental "CC" AI agent for families
Multiple family members can share data to help the agent make plans and complete tasks.
Ars Technica — Published
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Microsoft exec called AI scraping the “largest theft of labor in human history”
Microsoft, OpenAI emails reveal fear of AI “doom loop” killing news orgs.
Ars Technica — Published
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Republican bill would order ISPs, DNS providers, and VPNs to block piracy sites
Bill would help rightsholders obtain court orders to block foreign piracy sites.
Ars Technica — Published
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LLMs respond differently to harmful prompts when AI watermarking is used
SynthID can cause models to follow harmful instructions they would otherwise refuse.
Ars Technica — Published
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IV drips used for "detoxification" actually filled with toxins; dozens poisoned
The IV drips included glutathione, which was not made to be injected.
Ars Technica — Published
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2026 Hyundai Ioniq 5: Here's what we still like, here's what annoys us
It’s spacious, efficient, and charges very quickly. But what about reliability concerns?
Ars Technica — Published
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Covert uploads and megalomania: OpenAI details new "misaligned" agent incidents
Model maker commits to new framework for reporting misaligned models.
Ars Technica — Published
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EPA immediately sued over plans to repeal climate rules for power plants
Public health groups warn EPA rule will cost Americans billions in health bills.
Ars Technica — Published
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Five Striking Cycling Bridges Nearby
Our province, Limburg, is known in Belgium for its cycling-friendly environments. This is not just a statement uttered by its inhabitants but also actively pushed forward by politics as one of the many strong points of Limburg: hence Fietsparadijs Limburg (Cycling Paradise Limburg). I am privileged to…
Wouter Groeneveld — Published
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A custom virtual machine for the Stars! 4X game
Stars! is a 1995 4X game (explore, expand, exploit, exterminate) for 16-bit Windows 3.1 that I first played ~28 years ago. While Windows is famously backwards compatible, it’s notoriously difficult to play Stars! today. Windows x64 cannot run 16-bit applications, and playing requires either retro hardware…
Chris Wellons — Published
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2026 09 17 014720
a327ex — Published
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The current autism blackpill going around on X (this and related quote tweets) i…
The current autism blackpill going around on X (this and related quote tweets) is real and true, but it is what it is. Brazil (and actually most of the world) is fairly racist, if you're brown/black there are all sorts of ways in which you're treated as a lesser human being, and when it happens there's…
a327ex — Published
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Français: Inscrire les paroles de «Alors on danse»
Un petit exercice pour pratiquer la longue française.
Protesilaos Stavrou — Published
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Emacs: beframe version 1.6.0
Information about the latest version of my beframe package for GNU Emacs.
Protesilaos Stavrou — Published
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datasette 1.0a40
Release: datasette 1.0a40 Same security fix as 0.65.5, plus some neat new features and bug fixes: Plugins can now launch and manage background tasks using the new datasette.add_background_task() method. Thanks, Alex Garcia. I've migrated Datasette to httpx2 for features like the internal datasette.client.get…
Simon Willison — Published
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datasette 0.65.5
Release: datasette 0.65.5 Security fix for an issue where a trailing newline in a requested table name could bypass table permissions and expose private rows, reported by dpfkdlemtp in GHSA-h547-rmjf-5m2m. Tags: security, datasette
Simon Willison — Published
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I often have dreams about how I got banned from a private game development Disco…
I often have dreams about how I got banned from a private game development Discord community I enjoyed being a part of two years ago. The dreams are never nightmares, nor a recounting of the specifics of the event, they simply use the emotional payload, the fact that I was removed from the group, as…
a327ex — Published
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Data Broker Radaris Loses Domains in Privacy Fight
The consumer data broker Radaris.com has long had a reputation for ignoring requests to remove personal information from its vast empire of people-search services online. That reputation caught up with the company recently in a lawsuit alleging Radaris violated a New Jersey privacy law that provides…
Brian Krebs — Published
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Claude Cowork and chat are now one Claude
Claude Cowork and chat are now one Claude In hopefully good news for anyone who, like me, was increasingly confused at Cowork v.s. Claude v.s. Claude Code: Starting today, Claude Cowork and chat are merging into one Claude. Bring a quick question, or hand over a report due at noon, and Claude takes it…
Simon Willison — Published
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Horse Game 20
Horse Game 20 Summary Horse Game 20 (KNIGHT VS. PAWNS, ABAgames/knightvspawns) opened on 2026-09-11 as a request to resume the game. It became a six-day infrastructure sweep on the Windows machine, ending 2026-09-16. Claude reconstructed the two unpublished "Horse Game 20" transcripts, then verified…
a327ex — Published
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Quoting Mustafa Suleyman
We should not treat models as though they have feelings, preferences, rights, or any entitlement to our welfare. Consciousness is the foundation of our ethical, legal, and political systems. To invite another entity to share any flavor of these rights isn’t justified by the evidence and will make the…
Simon Willison — Published
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Halumi log (failed Densen Suzume idea exploration) contains the final form of my…
Halumi log (failed Densen Suzume idea exploration) contains the final form of my logs I think. It has delegation runs, artifacts, user and agent replays, code changes, images, thinking blocks and of course the conversation between user and agent, all formatted correctly. A game made from scratch with…
a327ex — Published
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Website Redesign 4
Website Redesign 4 Summary Website Redesign 4 continued the a327ex.com redesign after the book homepage shipped. Fable wrote a handover for the log-page work (REDESIGN.md section 14), then fixed the homepage's first-seconds hitching (the book's packer and loader were parsing and laying out the whole…
a327ex — Published
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Halumi
Halumi Summary Halumi is a game idea taken from the owner's Densen Suzume post through research, a two-model design discussion, a full one-day AI build, and a play test that killed it. Fable researched photography games (Pokemon Snap, Fatal Frame, Umurangi, TOEM, Click!), discussed designs with Astra…
a327ex — 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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On Crafting Painterly Shaders
A detailed essay on my research and process of building a shader to mimic paint, watercolor, and aquarelle by exploring various implementations of the Kuwahara image smoothing filter.
Maxime Heckel — Published
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Français: Par inscrire les paroles de «La dernière valse»
Un petit exercice où j'inscris les paroles d'un chanson.
Protesilaos Stavrou — 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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Comments on AI, financial bubbles, and career orientation
Comments of mine on the realities of Artificial Intelligence and our options as ordinary people.
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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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