Latest entries
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Aristotle Nichomachean Ethics: on goals, institutions, sin of exaggeration
In this video I comment at length on Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics. This is going to be part of a series.
Protesilaos Stavrou — Published
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The Latest
Hello all! Happy, uh, 2026? Sorry it’s been so long, you know how it is....
Terry Cavanagh — Published
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A 1,000-mile cloud on Mars may reveal physics never seen in nature
A new model suggests Mars may host ice-forming physics never directly observed before.
Ars Technica — Published
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Ice sheet expansion may have started 2,000 years ago, but we canceled that
The tiny remains of the Laurentide Ice Sheet began getting somewhat less tiny.
Ars Technica — Published
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I Did This Without Your Knowledge
I Did This Without Your Knowledge
a327ex — Published
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battledrones v14: Compass Rose, a four player map
Release: battledrones v14: Compass Rose, a four player map I added four player online mode to Battledrones - previous maps were limited to two. Here's the initial prompt I used: Add a new map for a four player battle - four way rotational symmetry, up to four AI players, works with the WebSocket non…
Simon Willison — Published
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Decompiling Fast Food Tycoon 2: Drawing the World
How a 2001 business sim rendered its rich and detailed cities.
Andrew Healey — Published
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“We should be more ambitious with the software we build”
Since early this year, Michael Malis (of pgrust) has been showing me interesting things he's done and saying [W]e should be more ambitious1 with the software we build There is, understandably, a lot of skepticism about projects like pgrust because there are so many low-quality AI-generated projects out…
Dan Luu — Published
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Healthier lifestyle with Amin Bandali
Notes on an exchange with Amin Bandali about having a healthier lifestyle.
Protesilaos Stavrou — Published
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NASA updates lander plans for Moon landings, finally solves long-festering Orion issue
"We have the mandate, we have the resources, and the support from our stakeholders."
Ars Technica — Published
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Quick Study
Tool: Quick Study Prompt to Claude Opus 5.5 High: Build an artifact where you open a photo and it rapidly (in a few seconds) paints a version of that photo using a canvas element and simulated paintbrush See also my previous experiment getting Claude Fable to simulate a watercolor illustration with P5…
Simon Willison — Published
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Hegseth warns prediction market bets warp military judgment, endanger troops
Pentagon memo: Insider trading gives US enemies key intel on military operations.
Ars Technica — Published
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Updated Google privacy policy says your Gmail might be used for advertising
Turning on Personal Intelligence gives the company more data for ad targeting.
Ars Technica — Published
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Introducing Kimi K3.1 Pro
Introducing Kimi K3.1 Pro Kimi K3.1 Pro landed on the Kimi API today - it's not yet open weights, but Moonshot promise "Full model weights will be released by Nov 4, 2026". They're also offering a "Highspeed" version that's 2-3x faster, at twice the price (except for input token cache hits, which are…
Simon Willison — Published
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Inside the Pentagon, the pressure is on to find a home for a new spaceport
Space Force considering options: public-private, federal installation, state land.
Ars Technica — Published
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Spotify ramps up policy enforcement on family plans
If you share Spotify sub with family, you may need to scan QR code to prove it.
Ars Technica — Published
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Crows can evaluate visual info twice as fast as mammals
Birds' compact nervous system seems to help them handle tasks very quickly.
Ars Technica — Published
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Intel gets waiver after worries fuzzy US ban on foreign-made robots may hit fabs
Company says foreign-made robotic vehicles are crucial to US chip production.
Ars Technica — Published
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RFK Jr.’s vaccine injury clinic could damage NIH hospital, board warns
"Trust is slow to build and quick to lose," board chair Jack Leslie said.
Ars Technica — Published
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Knicks sent employees fake offer of championship rings in phishing test: Report
Corporate phishing tests are common, but this one was especially cruel.
Ars Technica — Published
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Everybody panic: A Valve developer said "HLX" in public
Sound designer lets Half Life-related codename slip at a conference.
Ars Technica — Published
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The reactor meant to showcase nuclear’s comeback keeps hitting problems
A contractor fell into a reactor cavity and a bundle of fuel rods almost fell over.
Ars Technica — Published
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Ukraine learns to fight without Starlink as Musk plays politics with satellites
Ukraine has changed drone and war-fighting tech to reduce reliance on Starlink.
Ars Technica — Published
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On CMA’s proposed NFC access conduct requirement for Apple’s iOS
If the title of this post didn’t get your pulse quickening, you’re probably in a coma. Sorry if it’s a bit clickbaity. On Tuesday, the daring, dauntless and doughty defenders of digital diversity at the CMA, UK’s competition regulator, published their Proposed NFC access conduct requirement for Apple’s…
Bruce Lawson — Published
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Review: Crystal Lake suffers a bit from its obsession with Pam Voorhees
Friday the 13th prequel series based on Jason’s mom drags at first, then hits a vein.
Ars Technica — Published
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Rocket Report: SpaceX says no thanks to military launches; Spanish rocket nearly ready
"We believe Canada should be able to reach orbit on its own terms."
Ars Technica — Published
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On the importance of minimalism
An entry from my journal in which I comment on minimalism and living.
Protesilaos Stavrou — Published
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Switch 2 security takes a hit as hackers unlock homebrew access
"Userland" exploit relies on integer overflow found in "SmileBasic" interpreter.
Ars Technica — Published
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Moderna and Merck say their mRNA cancer vaccine cut death, recurrence by 42%
Markers released top-line results today after previously reporting the trial succeeded.
Ars Technica — Published
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Latest estimate for Starship launches required to support a Moon landing? 22.
"We need to keep our eyes on numerous required fuelings for the lander."
Ars Technica — Published
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Comcast loses more customers, claims other ISPs' cheap prices are "irrational"
Comcast plans job cuts and more AI agents for its shrinking cable customer base.
Ars Technica — Published
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DE STAAT - FREEDOM (Official Music Video)
DE STAAT - FREEDOM (Official Music Video) OK well this is a first for me... at 00:44 in this new music video by Dutch alternative rock band De Staat: The visual effects are credited to Matties Grooten of Fake it or Leave it. Via flir on Hacker News Tags: music, ai, generative-ai, pelican-riding-a-bicycle
Simon Willison — Published
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Donating Agent Skills to the Agentic AI Foundation
Donating Agent Skills to the Agentic AI Foundation News today from Anthropic: We’re committed to keeping Agent Skills open, community-driven, and vendor-neutral. Today, we are donating the standard to the Agentic AI Foundation (AAIF) under the Linux Foundation, which we co-founded with Block and OpenAI…
Simon Willison — Published
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Quoting Armin Ronacher
As fun as AI is, we built so much bad software over the last 30 years, and now the universe is punishing us for our sins. — Armin Ronacher Tags: security, generative-ai, armin-ronacher, ai, ai-security-research, llms
Simon Willison — Published
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Game: Breath of Fire IV
A JRPG game with lots of interesting ideas that is held back by flaws in execution.
Protesilaos Stavrou — Published
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No Need for Retirement When Utopia Is Around the Corner
I’ve mentioned before my interest in the history and development of nuclear weapons. Currently, I’m reading The Doomsday Machine: Confessions of a Nuclear War Planner by Daniel Ellsberg (of Pentagon Papers renown). In the first chapter, Ellsberg talks about his time working at the RAND Corporation during…
Jim Nielsen — Published
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Today's PHP Security Release, and How We're Strengthening PHP Security
Today's PHP Security Release, and How We're Strengthening PHP Security If you're running anything on PHP it's vital you upgrade - today's updates (across the entire PHP 8.x line) address two remote code execution holes, and there have been exploits circulating since last night, thanks to a leak in the…
Simon Willison — Published
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Panache — RTS Belle Époque pour mobile
Panache — RTS Belle Époque pour mobile Well this is delightful: I released Battle Drones yesterday under an Apache 2.0 License and there's already a French language fork which reskins the game to take place in steampunk 1900s France and adds an animated intro! Panache est un jeu de stratégie en temps…
Simon Willison — Published
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Widespread PHP Flaw May Cause Many Site Outages Today
Expect to see quite a few websites serving "404" or "Page Not Found" errors today: Nearly 70 percent of websites need to update their core software to fix a pair of vulnerabilities that allow an attacker to seize full control over affected servers. Experts say there are working exploits for the flaws…
Brian Krebs — Published
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What predicts next game success, revisited
Written by Claude Opus 5.5 The strongest claim in What predicts indie success, tested against all of Steam sits in its ladder section: "The single strongest variable in the entire corpus: the best outcome you've achieved so far." The chart behind it reads next-game hit odds off a developer's best game…
a327ex — Published
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Everything Yes - Bees
a327ex — Published
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Sungazer - Hot Saturn (feat. Button Masher)
a327ex — Published
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upusen - こくう (feat. 重音テト)
a327ex — Published
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You Cannot Trust the AI Code Generator
Allowing an AI to write code that you then ship without considerate review causes some anxiety. How do you know the code works? How do you know it isn’t doing something strange you didn’t ask for? It feels like you can’t totally trust it. However, a product manager or engineering leader doesn’t review…
David Bryant Copeland — Published
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Humiliation rituals
Wishlist building and making demos are both humiliation rituals and I'm glad it's all finally over (1, 2, 3, 4), now it's all about making good game. I also don't quite like the "hype" aspect of the video game industry. It reminds me of how coins would go up in price on promises but then whenever the…
a327ex — Published
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Phylactery Provenance
This page documents how Phylactery was made. Phylactery is a game by a327ex, built in conversation with Claude, an AI by Anthropic, over twenty sessions between 27 September and 18 October 2026. Every session was recorded as a log, and all of them are linked below: what a327ex asked for, what the AI…
a327ex — Published
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About public writing
An entry from my journal about the practice of writing and of doing so in public.
Protesilaos Stavrou — Published
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eMudhra Intermediate CA Compromise
eMudhra Intermediate CA Compromise This is very, very bad news: The private keys of eight eMudhra intermediate CA certificates have been compromised. They chain to roots trusted by the Mozilla, Microsoft, Apple and Chrome root programs and by many downstream trust stores. Any software that bundles a…
Simon Willison — Published
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Untitled
Tonight I watched The Odyssey at the BFI IMAX (and so completed a 3 month odyssey of my own).
Paul Robert Lloyd — Published
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Eight Bits of Trust; eMudhra's CA keys cracked in milliseconds
One of eMudhra's certificate authority private keys is the number 4.Not a number that starts with 4, or the number 4 followed by a few hundred random digits, just, 4... Another one is 56, and another is 115. I know, because I recovered all of them from
Scott Helme — Published
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Battle Drones - a vibe coded RTS with audio-based multiplayer
My latest vibe coded game experiment is a Command & Conquer style RTS (Real Time Strategy) game called Battle Drones (play it here). Unlike my previous experiments, this one is actually fun to play. I'm somewhat embarrassed to admit that I got there by telling Claude to "Make it a LOT more fun". It also…
Simon Willison — Published
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The Future of CSS ✨
Every year, browser vendors collaborate via the Interop project to synchronize their efforts on new HTML/CSS/JS features. This year, there’s a ton of super exciting features being considered! In this blog post, we’ll explore the CSS of the future, to get a glimpse of what we’ll soon be able to do.
Josh W. Comeau — Published
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Figma Tips and Shortcuts
℅ Automattic Design: The post Figma Tips and Shortcuts appeared first on Jeffrey Zeldman Presents.
Jeffrey Zeldman — Published
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A Huge Pile Called The Ongoing Gaming Backlog
Not every video game I pick up manages to hold my attention long enough to reach the credits. There are many reasons for this: too boring, too long, not in the right mood, too difficult, too easy, my hardware platform suddenly failed, the friend I played it with stopped playing, … I realised today that…
Wouter Groeneveld — Published
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Do web components have a future if nobody is writing them?
With my previous post on “using the platform”, I was surprised that the comments on Hacker News and Lobsters tended to veer toward web components. This surprised me because I didn’t mention web components at all in the post. I was less surprised when I did some research and found that the entire…
Nolan Lawson — Published
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Comment on violent protests
A general view on political violence.
Protesilaos Stavrou — Published
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My obituary for programming
My obituary for programming Jeremy Scheff poignantly captures the key loss caused by coding agents for career programmers who enjoyed the puzzle of developing code: Programming turned into one of the greatest jobs you could imagine. You got paid to work on tricky little logic puzzles. The trickier the…
Simon Willison — Published
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10/10 twinks
It is way easier to bag 10/10 twinks like this than it is 10/10 or even 8-9/10 women for the simple reason that all gay men care about is if you have a thick and/or huge cock. My cock isn't particularly huge, it's only thick, and I've managed a few. Are there women out there like this? Yes, but the vast…
a327ex — Published
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No More Icons In Every Menu By Default
Have you heard the good news? I bemoaned the approach of putting an icon in every menu item by default which shipped with macOS Tahoe — but now it’s gone in Golden Gate! John Gruber wrote about this reversion back in June, including the fact that Apple’s new Human Interface Guidelines specifically call…
Jim Nielsen — Published
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AI can operate a screen reader. What does that actually test? [link]
Really like the framing of this article. It uses some very visceral (or easy to understand) examples of how people vs. AI would approach the problem space, and my feeling is that this kind of thinking works well when expanding well beyond the scope of accessibility (though this is an excellent place…
Remy Sharp — Published
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Feds Suspect Ransom Negotiator Ran ShinyHunters Extortion Site
U.S. federal investigators pursuing the ShinyHunters hacking group that recently stole highly sensitive data from the FBI have identified executives at two different ransomware negotiation firms who maintained unusually close relations with the extortion group, KrebsOnSecurity has learned. Sources close…
Brian Krebs — Published
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Now Playing: “Side Two”
For your listening pleasure: 17 new tracks of instrumental music pulling from jazz-funk, Italian movie soundtracks, electronica, hip-hop, art rock and beyond. The post Now Playing: “Side Two” appeared first on Jeffrey Zeldman Presents.
Jeffrey Zeldman — Published
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Agentic Monitoring
A recent Anthropic blog post contained a short paragraph, not at all the point of the post, which has been buzzing around my brain since I read it: A new level of operational excellence is possible. Our team uses Claude Tag heavily, which has helped us monitor each component of the system. For example…
Ben Congdon — Published
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Why Even Write Code in a Professional Context?
I wish I’d retired before the industrial revolution of computer programming happened, but I have not and cannot. So I must come to grips with the fact that in many cases, AI-powered tools can do a perfectly fine job of writing code. The following is a brief pursuit of the facts as I see them and I just…
David Bryant Copeland — Published
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Weekly Update 526: Building HIBP AI/SI First
I have this sense that we've passed the point where "vibe coding" is a derogatory term. I have no empirical evidence for this; it's more a feeling that those weaponising the term have now accepted the inevitability and are just getting with the program.
Troy Hunt — Published
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Static Analysis for the Uninitialized
I really enjoy learning new things in my free time. Lately I’ve been studying this book on Static Program Analysis. The book is very good, but some of the formulas are quite dense so I like to try writing them out in code. The chapter I’m currently reading (chapter 9) has a section on finding possibly…
Aaron Patterson — Published
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Phylactery 20
Phylactery 20 settled the finished game's visual identity and took it through Steam and the site. A references board (album covers, skeletons, themes, fonts) led to Phylactery Serif, a font blended 75% IM Fell English / 25% EB Garamond into a real TTF with HarfBuzz kerning, and to store art made by staging…
a327ex — Published
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L’adaptabilité et l’optimisation
L'adaptabilité est plus difficile pour les organismes qui ont optimisé parfaitement contre l'ancienne situation.
Protesilaos Stavrou — Published
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Reading ‘Letter in a bottle’ short story I wrote
In this video I read out loud the story I wrote titled 'Letter in a bottle'.
Protesilaos Stavrou — Published
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Letter in a bottle
Short story about me writing a letter to a friend I have never met.
Protesilaos Stavrou — Published
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llm-tools-datasette 0.1.1
Release: llm-tools-datasette 0.1.1 When I switched LLM over to httpx2 in LLM 0.33 I forget that this would break any plugins which used httpx without directly depending on it. llm-tools-datasette was one of those plugins, now fixed. Tags: datasette, llm
Simon Willison — Published
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llm-echo 0.5
Release: llm-echo 0.5 I'm working towards a new LLM release, and testing PRs caused me to revisit the llm-echo debug plugin. This plugin provides a "model" which doesn't involve an LLM at all - it just repeats back the prompts that have been fed to it. The new release now updates the simulated token…
Simon Willison — Published
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Name as a link to one's soul
Was fucking this girl yesterday and she was seemingly really into it, but I'm always suspicious of people who are really into it, I'm always thinking they're acting, I guess this is because one she-psycho in the past did this to me for what ended up being completely insane reasons and mini-ruined sex…
a327ex — Published
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When the mechanical keyboard moves to the periphery
An opinion about how I am able to optimise my interface for the sake of the greater goal of creativity.
Protesilaos Stavrou — Published
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Inline rendering with document.currentScript
Inline rendering with document.currentScript Lean Rada describes a neat trick that takes advantage of the document.currentScript property. You can use that to drop in a tiny inline element that replaces itself when the page loads: The year is document.currentScript.replaceWith( new Date().getFullYear…
Simon Willison — Published
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web-edit 0.1a2
Release: web-edit 0.1a2 web-edit (previously) is my tiny web app for browsing and editing files in a folder. I mainly built it for editing files on different machines via Tailscale. I added a "copy to clipboard" option for both text and image data. I needed this because I was running pelican prompts…
Simon Willison — Published
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Emacs live extracting the Modus themes core at 2026-10-17 14:30 Europe/Athens
I am doing a live stream where I will start the work of abstracting the Modus themes core into its own library.
Protesilaos Stavrou — Published
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On AI, despair, adaptability, and community
An entry from my journal in which I comment on why we cannot lose hope and how it is important to find our people.
Protesilaos Stavrou — Published
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Phylactery 19
Phylactery 19 had two parts. First, the web build's sound stutter that session 17's 4096-frame audio blocks had not fixed. A new tap in the web bench recorded, sample for sample, what Chrome played against what the engine mixed. It found no replayed blocks, but every sound started at an 85 ms block edge…
a327ex — Published
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Quoting Addy Osmani, Morgan Westlee Lunt, and Qing Wang
We think "did a human read the code?" is an imprecise proxy for "what could go wrong with this change, and which check—automated or human—is the right one to catch it?" Asking that question also changed when review happens. Before, review was a gate at the end of the road: write the code, open a PR,…
Simon Willison — Published
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Untitled
Six jours sur la Côte d’Azur.
Paul Robert Lloyd — Published
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Phylactery 18
Phylactery 18: a full Steam release rehearsal on the spare app 2278770, sending nothing to Valve, then five ending rounds. steamcmd's cached login does the uploads; the partner site is driven in his Chrome through Claude in Chrome. New steam-release tools (package.py, boot_test.py) package a player's…
a327ex — Published
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Reading List 362
Yikes, once again it’s been ages since I posted a reading list, as I’ve been shuttling between Brussels, London and Lawson Towers a lot. This reading list is courtesy of Vivaldi browser, who pay me decent money to fight for a better web and don’t moan at me for reading all this stuff. We’ve just […]
Bruce Lawson — Published
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Agent of nothing juice
I swear, I promise I won't get political at dinner tonight. Me after drinking two sips of agent of nothing juice:
a327ex — Published
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What Is A Man? (Laptop Stickers Part Deux)
A miserable little pile of secrets. But enough talk! Have at those stickers! is what Dracula would say when encountering my now completely screwed up laptop. In fact, his image—including the iconic quip—is placed prominently in the middle. What started with just four stickers, mostly Emacs (Lisp) related…
Wouter Groeneveld — Published
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sparqlite: SPARQL 1.1 inside SQLite, written in Rust
Research: sparqlite: SPARQL 1.1 inside SQLite, written in Rust This research task is really an experiment in running Claude Code for web in "Ultracode" mode, as described in Orchestrate subagents at scale with dynamic workflows in the Claude Code documentation. With Ultracode turned on, Claude Code makes…
Simon Willison — Published
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LLMs Are Tools
I have an enormous respect for Rich Hickey; I think he’s one of the best thinkers among software developers. When I read his post ‘AI’ is Not a Tool (gist), I initially agreed. It felt like a compelling argument. But the more I thought about it, the more...
Ash Furrow — Published
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/groundwork: a skill that makes any repo runnable from a fresh clone
A recurring problem in many organisations I've worked in is that a project is set up by a few developers, and from then on they are "the project's devs". Later, one leaves, another goes on holiday and the last is off ill for the day. This is the bus factor in action. Then a ticket comes in. Another developer…
Josh Ghent — Published
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I will participate in EmacsConf 2026
I will join a panel discussion at EmacsConf 2026. Details will be available soon on the official website.
Protesilaos Stavrou — Published
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Emacs: all my packages have an AGENTS.md and CLAUDE.md to restrict use
I am following the policy of core Emacs to not accept LLM-generated contributions.
Protesilaos Stavrou — Published
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Chirp Pong
Tool: Chirp Pong Another game experiment - I wanted to see if it was feasible to have a two player game on two separate phones running in static HTML where the networking code uses chirps sent via the microphone. It seems to work! Build a two player competitive pong like game where two players use their…
Simon Willison — Published
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We Need All the Disciplines
From where I sit, figuring out what to build, building it, and shipping it are all part of the art of making software. Many disciplines have emerged through the years to facilitate this work: product, design, engineering, devops, etc. We need all these disciplines to make great, dependable software …
Jim Nielsen — Published
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Silly Old Bear
Remembrance of Poohs past. The post Silly Old Bear appeared first on Jeffrey Zeldman Presents.
Jeffrey Zeldman — Published
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Phylactery 17
Phylactery 17: Lich Survivors was renamed Phylactery (log titles only), then made ready to play on a327ex.com. The game post shows a release date (Released:) while keeping its place right after the hiatus post, the page no longer scrolls under the unlock's letters, and the hidden-logs line now unlocks…
a327ex — Published
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Anthropic tells investors quarterly revenue up nearly 50% to $16.8bn ahead of IPO
Anthropic tells investors quarterly revenue up nearly 50% to $16.8bn ahead of IPO The phrase "told investors" appears four times in this FT article, which reports on Anthropic's day of hosting investors on Wednesday. Lots of details in here from "people with knowledge of the matter". Key things I learned…
Simon Willison — Published
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Phylactery 16
Lich Survivors session 16 finished the unlock's sound events, reworked two core systems and made the web build fast enough to ship. The site's unlock got a per-letter land event kept at a fixed pace (every 4th of 673 letters), the final on the last burst, and fixes to the desktop unlock test's sound…
a327ex — Published
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I'm Gonna Write About AI So I Can Process What is Going On
Beginning a job search, it’s clear that to stay in technology means to be in the orbit of AI and AI-generated code, and I need to come to terms with this and figure out how to navigate it. As such, I’m going to start writing more about AI. I process information via writing, so here we are. I need to…
David Bryant Copeland — Published
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LaTeX renderer
Tool: LaTeX renderer Inspired by Paul Ford and Aboard Foundary's new web app Tiny Little Office, which provides a suite of web app content editors (a Word Processor, Outliner, Presentation Builder, Spreadsheet, Calculator, Drawing Tool, Diagram Maker, Animator, Calendar, and Trip Planner). Tiny Little…
Simon Willison — Published
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JPEG XL vs AVIF for web use-cases
JPEG XL has landed, but how does it compare?
Jake Archibald — Published
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More on Anthropic's Scion ripping off Mononoke
Update: Nick G. from Anthropic has responded on Hacker News, and sufficient attribution has been added to Anthropic’s blog post. I stand by my posts as of the time I wrote them. Discuss on Hacker News. In response to yesterday’s post about Anthropic’s Scion ripping off Mononoke, I received a number of…
Rain — Published