Latest entries
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2026 in LLMs (so far)
On Friday I gave the closing keynote at the WeAreDevelopers World Congress North America in San Jose. I tied together the key trends from the past year into a chronological exploration of everything that happened in 2026. The video is on YouTube; here are my annotated slides and notes to accompany the…
Simon Willison — Published
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S3 Is the Future, S3 Is the Past
My comment on S3 Is the Future, S3 Is the Past — Hacker News.One thing I find notable about S3 today is that, while it used to drop in price reasonably often, there hasn't been a price drop in a full decade: 2006-03-14 $0.150/GB-month 2010-11-01 $0.140/GB-month 2012-02-01 $0.125/GB-month 2012-12-01 …
Simon Willison — Published
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Bluesky reply bot checker
Tool: Bluesky reply bot checker Automated reply bots on Twitter are a scourge - as someone with a decent number of followers I attract a swarm of these, such that anything I post there attracts dozens of mindless automated replies. They've started manifesting on Bluesky as well. Unlike Twitter, Bluesky…
Simon Willison — Published
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How the Smithsonian became the latest front in Trump’s culture war
The Smithsonian has faced withering pressure from the Trump administration.
Ars Technica — Published
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Replacing the old battery on rechargeable bike lights
Hello! Recently I needed bike lights for my bike. And I remembered that I already had rechargeable bike lights that I bought ten years ago, that I hadn’t tried in a long time. I tried to recharge them, but after fully charging them, they only worked for maybe 5 minutes before they turned off again. I…
Julia Evans — Published
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Français: La vitalité
Une petite note sur le sujet de la vitalité.
Protesilaos Stavrou — Published
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Emacs live at the ‘Root Access’ stream on 2026-09-27 at 21:00 Europe/Athens
I will join @linkarzu and the folks over at the Root Access podcast series to do a live stream about Emacs.
Protesilaos Stavrou — Published
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I updated my ‘About me’ page with a ‘guest appearances’ section
Announcement about the new 'guest appearances' section in my 'about me' page.
Protesilaos Stavrou — Published
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Kākāpō Party
Tool: Kākāpō Party I presented a closing keynote for the WeAreDevelopers World Congress North America yesterday. As a STAR moment I decided to weave in references to the record breaking kākāpō breeding season we had in 2026. For my closing slide I wanted to celebrate, and I had seen some buzz around…
Simon Willison — Published
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Tesla’s big electric truck faces an even bigger infrastructure challenge
The 500-mile Semi arrives as charging gaps still limit electric trucking.
Ars Technica — Published
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Redesign: fonts, alignment and nav [blog]
As I continue occasionally tinker on the redesign I've started (and often think "what's the point, current design is fine"), I wanted to share some of the problems I've run in to. Problems mostly for me because I'm not a designer, and I don't have the wiring to know what works.
Remy Sharp — Published
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Emacs: I am experimenting with a Denote cache
Information about the experimental 'denote-data' feature I am working on.
Protesilaos Stavrou — Published
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Comments on Dao, pattern, and the simple life
An essay I wrote to a friend in 2022, which I am now sharing.
Protesilaos Stavrou — Published
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Can Trump ever be wrong? His pick to lead FDA refused to say.
Heidi Overton faced questions focused on vaccines, birth control, and vapes.
Ars Technica — Published
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U.S. Soldier Gets 70 Months in Prison for AT&T, Verizon Extortions
A U.S. Army soldier who pleaded guilty to hacking into multiple telecommunications companies and stealing mobile call and text metadata for more than 100 million AT&T customers in 2024 was sentenced to 70 months in federal prison today and ordered to pay nearly $300,000 in restitution to victims.
Brian Krebs — Published
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Court rules Pentagon can blacklist Anthropic for refusing to enable Claude features
"Overly constrained AI models" could cause military operations to fail, judges say.
Ars Technica — Published
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Tesla workers balk at training Optimus humanoid robots as replacements
Despite challenges, Tesla aims for 1,000 Optimus robots per week by end of 2026.
Ars Technica — Published
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Your uncle’s frozen Mac says it’s infected after viewing a Google ad. Now what?
Ads appearing all over the Internet are trying to scam people.
Ars Technica — Published
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Review: The iPhone 18 Pro is Apple's coolest smartphone (but only literally)
Better thermals and battery life make this iterative update nicer to use.
Ars Technica — Published
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AI was supposed to hit new grads hard. So far, unemployment data says otherwise.
"There is no evidence of any significant, widespread displacement or reduction in hiring.”
Ars Technica — Published
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Using an LLM to Automate the Process of Archiving New macOS App Icons
Whenever a new version of macOS drops, I find myself archiving the new app icons for my macOS icon gallery. In the past, the work to do this was a bit tedious. First, I’d find the app in the “Applications” folder (or elsewhere on the Mac), right click and choose “Get Info”: Right-click the app icon in…
Jim Nielsen — Published
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Paramount/WBD merger conditions give the public "virtually nothing," judge is told
US judge reviews deal with California, says it must not be result of collusion.
Ars Technica — Published
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Is solar's growth finally slowing in the US?
Renewables easily cover changes in US demand, which is rising by 2% in 2026.
Ars Technica — Published
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Microsoft stops insisting you need a "Copilot+ PC"
Microsoft's new Surface laptops forgo Copilot+ PC branding.
Ars Technica — Published
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Quoting John Gruber
Muse is getting a lot of attention — including mine — because it’s both groundbreaking technically (each user gets their own entire persistent Linux VM running in Meta’s cloud) and because it’s packaged in an easy-to-install easy-to-use way. It’s literally presented as a cute mascot. It’s the first consumer…
Simon Willison — Published
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After seven years, a spacecraft company is releasing its Otters into the wild
"There is always a tension that comes with seeing the first of anything fly."
Ars Technica — Published
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US being left behind in EV charging speeds as China goes sub-5 min to 70%
The new LFP battery charges from 10 to 70% in 4.5 minutes at just 65˚C.
Ars Technica — Published
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With PRIMA, NASA will try to build a billion-dollar space telescope in record time
NASA's PRIMA mission will use spare parts from Webb to do major science at a lower cost.
Ars Technica — Published
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Trump administration takes Musk’s side in fight over EU tech rules
Washington says Brussels overreached when it fined X €120 million under the DSA.
Ars Technica — Published
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Undersung Hero: M. Frog
I bought this LP because of its Milton Glaser-designed cover featuring the colored pencil musical notations of composer/synthesist and former monk Jean-Yves Labat, alias M. Frog. It was 1973; I was about to become a high school senior, and I had hitchhiked to New York City with my friend Al Crump. The…
Jeffrey Zeldman — Published
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Trump admin using AI to deny medical care for seniors in disastrous experiment
Vendors rolling out AI have an "incentive to deny as many claims as possible."
Ars Technica — Published
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Rocket Report: Era of cheap launch is over? Astra sets early 2027 target for return
"The customer got comfortable with a high reliability and a low price."
Ars Technica — Published
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Our Family No Longer Is A Vegetarian One
During the summer holiday of 2010, I read Jonathan Safran Foer’s Eating Animals. I remember it well: we were visiting the Neuschwanstein Castle in Bavaria, a region that is also known for its local meat produce. Of course we took advantage of that and stocked up on sausages in the cottage we rented.…
Wouter Groeneveld — Published
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Northern Gannet, Great Blue Heron, California Brown Pelican
Northern Gannet, Great Blue Heron, California Brown Pelican, in Monterey Bay National Marine Sanctuary, CA, US, CANew 200-800mm Canon EF lens got me my best photo of Morris yet. They really like hanging out under that sign in the harbor! Tags: photography, wildlife
Simon Willison — Published
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Emacs live with Sacha Chua and Pedro about Org LaTeX export on 2026-10-02 at 13:00 Europe/Athens
We will talk about Pedro's work on the Org LaTeX exporter.
Protesilaos Stavrou — Published
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Emacs: find a file in the ‘denote-directory’
Code samples that let you quickly find a file in the 'denote-directory'.
Protesilaos Stavrou — Published
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Note on 24th September 2026
The more time I spend working with coding agents, the more convinced I am that they make software engineering even harder. We can do amazing things with them, but unlocking their full potential requires extraordinary discipline and knowledge. Tags: coding-agents, ai, llms
Simon Willison — Published
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CDC opens state ordering for COVID-19 vaccines after unexplained delay
Health department previously blamed delay on "not yet finalized procurement decisions."
Ars Technica — Published
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Donald Duck's uncle was partly based on Wernher von Braun
Introducing the "world-famous authority on outer space..."
Ars Technica — Published
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commit-rewriter 0.2
Release: commit-rewriter 0.2 Support for branches other than the default branch. Use uvx commit-rewriter --branch other to run against another branch. #3 Tags: git
Simon Willison — Published
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F-Droid gets its biggest update in a decade with new UI and smoother app installs
F-Droid's Android app store has been rebuilt from the ground up.
Ars Technica — Published
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datasette 1.0a41
Release: datasette 1.0a41 Alec Garcia added support for OpenTelemetry to Datasette in this release. I've also refactored all of Datasette's modal dialogs to a single Web Component, which is now documented for other plugins to use. Tags: javascript, datasette, web-components, alex-garcia, opentelemetry
Simon Willison — Published
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Français: La superficialité
La superficialité caractérise les plusieurs affaires humaines. Mais nous voudrons ça qui n'a pas de prix.
Protesilaos Stavrou — Published
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Comment on tutelary figures
A comment on what are tutelary figures and how they function in society.
Protesilaos Stavrou — Published
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You Own the Outcome: Product Engineering in the Age of AI
Agents are great at producing code. The valuable work left for you is deciding what should exist, how it should behave, and what you're willing to trade for it.
Kent C. Dodds — Published
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We just shipped support for the ugliest part of HTTP: Vary
My comment on We just shipped support for the ugliest part of HTTP: Vary — Hacker News.I've been wanting this from Cloudflare for years. The classic problem here is if you do that thing where user agents that send "accept: text/html" get HTML, while user agents that don't get JSON or some other format…
Simon Willison — Published
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Make Money to Make More Websites
I was listening to the episode “Make Your Own Thing” from the Off Protocol podcast where Jim Ray interviews John Gruber. They cover a variety of topics, including Gruber’s thoughts on the dilution of personal brand by publishing through “chain” platforms like Substack (I quite enjoyed the metaphor of…
Jim Nielsen — Published
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Gemini 3.8 TTS Playground
Tool: Gemini 3.8 TTS Playground Google released two new Gemini text-to-speech models today - gemini-3.8-flash-tts and gemini-3.8-flash-lite-tts. They come with a library of over 2,000 voices, plus the ability to create a custom voice with "just a 30-second audio sample of your voice or a voice you have…
Simon Willison — Published
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Shadow roots, explained with live examples
Tool: Shadow roots, explained with live examples Prompt to Fable 5.1 Medium: Build an artifact to explain shadow roots in CSS with interactive examples Tags: css
Simon Willison — Published
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Weekly Update 522: Live From Oslo with Scott Helme
Heads up: the first 7 mins is a bit quiet until we worked out the external mic was misbehaving - sorry! But get through that and have a listen to Scott's experiences with how Report URI is identifying malware-infected machines within orgs, all due to CSP reporting. It&
Troy Hunt — Published
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SF October 14th: A Birds of a Feather Session on Agentic Engineering
SF October 14th: A Birds of a Feather Session on Agentic Engineering I'm hosting an evening event with Jesse Vincent in San Francisco on Wednesday 14th October for people who are building weird and interesting things with and on top of coding agents. Think of it as an agentic show-and-tell: Compare…
Simon Willison — Published
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Why is Hacker News like that?
Hacker News (aka HN) is a link aggregator where “hackers”1 gather to discuss technology, politics, and anything which “good hackers would find interesting”. HN is a means by which its host, prominent startup incubator Y Combinator, projects soft power, promotes startups it funds, and feeds people with…
Drew DeVault — Published
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Français: M’immerger dans la culture locale (inscrire les paroles d’une chanson de Joe Dassin)
J'explique pourquoi je cherche des oeuvres artistiques de la culture française.
Protesilaos Stavrou — Published
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Emacs: sxhkdrc-mode version 1.3.0
Information about the latest version of my Emacs major mode for editing the Simple X Hot Key Daemon files.
Protesilaos Stavrou — Published
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Claude Opus 5.5, GPT-6 Sol, GPT-6 Luna, and a new price war
Yesterday was Grok 4.7 (pelicans) and MiMo v2.6 Flash/Pro (more pelicans). Today Anthropic released Claude Opus 5.5, and around an hour later OpenAI released GPT-6 Sol and GPT-6 Luna. It's going to take a while to get a good read on all of these new models, but here are my impressions so far. GPT-6 Sol…
Simon Willison — Published
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llm 0.36
Release: llm 0.36 New OpenAI models: gpt-6-sol for GPT-6 Sol and gpt-6-luna for GPT-6 Luna. #1702 Model plugins can now declare supports_conversation = False for models that only accept single-turn prompts. LLM raises llm.ConversationNotSupported when these models receive assistant or tool history, and…
Simon Willison — Published
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Quoting @therealcornpop
Hey, you know it's like super obvious if you're using AI to write your scripts for TikTok and YouTube, right? [...] It's not just the general AI-isms of "it's not X, it's Y", or the rule of three, or the really weird broken staccato-like way of writing where you just say a lot of things with all these…
Simon Willison — Published
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llm-anthropic 0.29
Release: llm-anthropic 0.29 Adds support for Claude Opus 5.5: llm -m claude-opus-5.5 "prompt goes here" Tags: llm, anthropic
Simon Willison — Published
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llm-typesafe 0.1a0
Release: llm-typesafe 0.1a0 I built this new plugin for LLM to add support for TypeSafe AI's new Jev model. Install it like this: llm install llm-typesafe Then set an API key (get one here, the waitlist seems to move pretty fast): llm keys set typesafe # Paste key And now you can ask yes/no "noul" questions…
Simon Willison — Published
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About Europe teaching the values it does not have
Comment on the importance of collectivism and why European liberal democracy cannot support its beliefs.
Protesilaos Stavrou — Published
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Jev introduces a new shape of LLM - System One, aka Decision Models
Last week TypeSafe AI unveiled Jev, their first example of a new category of model that they are calling "System One models" (I'm with Maggie Appleton, I think "decision models" is a better name for these). Jev is an interesting variant on the usual LLM format: it still accepts text inputs, but instead…
Simon Willison — Published
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Cloudflare Python Workers are now generally available
Cloudflare Python Workers are now generally available After a two year preview, Cloudflare's support for running Python code in their server-side Workers platform is now stable: "Python is now a first-class, fully supported language on the Cloudflare Developer Platform". A neat thing about this is how…
Simon Willison — Published
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A Great Story Capturing the Essence of Being Online in 2026
I made a note of it, but Bryan Cantrill wrote a post about the ex-Anthropic employee who pegged the probability of AI killing humanity in the next decade at >10%. The article is a good one and you should read it, but what I want to capture here is a side story from Cantrill on the Oxide and Friends podcast…
Jim Nielsen — Published
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Arguing about arguments
Here’s some Rust code: // define a function fn foo (x : i32 , y : i32 ) -> i32 { // body elided } // call it let z = foo ( 5 , 6 ); In programming language jargon, we call x and y parameters and 5 and 6 arguments . Rust does not have many fancy features related to parameters and…
Steve Klabnik — Published
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Français: En cherchant de la réassurance
J'écris toujours pour moi, parce que l'écriture est une activité solitaire.
Protesilaos Stavrou — Published
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Interpretation of “Street flower” by Maria Spanou or Giorgos Rous
Translation of---and philosophical commentary on---a Greek song whose translated title is 'Street flower'.
Protesilaos Stavrou — Published
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Markdown in /src
TLDR Markdown is becoming source code, not documentation That Markdown should be checked in to /src, next to the code it produces Code and tests should be derived from that Markdown, rather than from ephemeral prompts (or at least prompt sessions should eventually turn into persisted Markdown) Intro…
Carson Gross — Published
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Quoting voxium
It has been half a month since I started a new role at a big company. Nobody knows anything here. The specs, code, tests, PRDs, tickets, resolution of those tickets, reports, etc., everything is made by Claude Code. Nobody on my team likes this. They are being forced to ship as much as they can. I have…
Simon Willison — Published
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MCP was always a bad idea?
My comment on MCP was always a bad idea? — Hacker News.This article entirely misses the value that MCP brings today. Sure, there's almost no reason to use MCPs if you are running a full-blown terminal agent (Claude Code, Codex, Meta Muse, OpenClaw etc) with unfettered internet access - just let it call…
Simon Willison — Published
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llm-keys-ui 0.1
Release: llm-keys-ui 0.1 This plugin solves a very specific problem. I've started using Codex Remote to run coding agents on various machines while controlling them from my phone. Sometimes I use those machines to hack on LLM projects, and occasionally that means I need to configure an API key. I don't…
Simon Willison — Published
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The iPhone Model Hall of Fame
John Gruber makes his picks for the iPhone Hall of Fame: iPhone (original) iPhone 4 iPhone 5S iPhone X iPhone 17 Pro Ok, my turn. Here’s my iPhone Hall of Fame: iPhone (original) iPhone 4 iPhone X iPhone 12 Mini iPod Touch Notes: How do you not put the OG iPhone at the top spot? It’s like doing a Mount…
Jim Nielsen — Published
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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-explain 0.2.2
Release: datasette-explain 0.2.2 Explain plans now work on read-only stored-query pages. I upgraded datasette.simonwillison.net to Datasette 1.0a40, which inspired me to ship a new version of this explain plugin. Tags: sqlite, datasette
Simon Willison — Published
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Radiating Intent
I had a new member of my team join recently and, when I met with them one-on-one for the first time, they complimented me on my standup updates. My team works remotely so standups are an important touchpoint. My colleague and I talked a bit more about...
Ash Furrow — Published
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About the coolest Seoul neighbourhood and erosion of public spaces
Comment on the degradation of local culture, city life, gentrification, mass tourism, and ethnicity.
Protesilaos Stavrou — Published
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Emacs: spacious-padding version 0.9.0
Information about the latest version of my 'spacious-padding' package for GNU Emacs.
Protesilaos Stavrou — Published
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From PrismJS to Better PrismJS to MicroLighter in Three Painless* Steps
An excellent feature of Eleventy1 is the official PrismJS-based syntax highlighting plugin, which adds painless build-time syntax highlighting. It keeps 11ty sites from worrying about client-side bloat from JS-based highlighters and the common failure mode of over-including language definitions.2 But…
Alex Russell — Published
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Dungeon Crawler Carl (Dungeon Crawler Carl, #1) [book]
Not something I'd normally pick, but enjoyable. I've never played dungeons and dragons, and in my head, I kept thinking of Minecraft as my rough frame of reference (which I've touched because of the kids but not really played to any real amount). The book follows Carl, who, as we guess from the title…
Remy Sharp — 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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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