Latest entries
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Anthropic's public benefit mission
Someone asked if there was an Anthropic equivalent to OpenAI's IRS mission statements over time. Anthropic are a "public benefit corporation" but not a non-profit, so they don't have the same requirements to file public documents with the IRS every year. But when I asked Claude it ran a search and dug…
Simon Willison — Published
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The evolution of OpenAI's mission statement
As a USA 501(c)(3) the OpenAI non-profit has to file a tax return each year with the IRS. One of the required fields on that tax return is to "Briefly describe the organization’s mission or most significant activities" - this has actual legal weight to it as the IRS can use it to evaluate if the organization…
Simon Willison — Published
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WHO slams US-funded newborn vaccine trial as "unethical"
CDC awarded $1.6 million for study birth dose of hepatitis B vaccine in Guinea-Bissau.
Ars Technica — Published
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Aided by AI, California beach town broadens hunt for bike lane blockers
Hayden AI's cameras will scan for violations from 7 city vehicles.
Ars Technica — Published
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Verizon imposes new roadblock on users trying to unlock paid-off phones
Verizon unlocks have 35-day waiting period after paying off device plan online.
Ars Technica — Published
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Ring cancels Flock deal after dystopian Super Bowl ad prompts mass outrage
“This is definitely not about dogs,” senator says, urging a pause on Ring face scans.
Ars Technica — Published
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The first Android 17 beta is now available on Pixel devices
Don't expect big changes yet.
Ars Technica — Published
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$1.8 million MST3K Kickstarter brings in (almost) everyone from the old show
MST3K's 2010s revival looked forward; this one is emphatically looking backward.
Ars Technica — Published
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Tiny, 45 base long RNA can make copies of itself
Self-copying RNAs may have been a key stop along the pathway to life.
Ars Technica — Published
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What if riders don't close a robotaxi door after a ride? Try DoorDash.
Robotaxis can't escape the gig economy as Waymo tries to solve a human problem.
Ars Technica — Published
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Why is Bezos trolling Musk on X with turtle pics? Because he has a new Moon plan.
"It’s time to go back to the Moon—this time to stay."
Ars Technica — Published
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Reading List 354
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 released Vivaldi 7.8 for mobile, with even more personalistion and zero “A.I.”, because it’s cream of the crop, not a stream of the Slop. [……
Bruce Lawson — Published
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I spent two days gigging at RentAHuman and didn't make a single cent
These bots supposedly need a human body to accomplish great things in meatspace.
Ars Technica — Published
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Rocket Report: Say cheerio to Orbex; China is getting good at booster landings
"You absolutely have to have a plan to compete with SpaceX on price."
Ars Technica — Published
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Platforms bend over backward to help DHS censor ICE critics, advocates say
Pam Bondi and Kristi Noem sued for coercing platforms into censoring ICE posts.
Ars Technica — Published
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Why Parenting Is Similar To JavaScript Development
Here’s a crazy thought: to me, parenting feels very similar to programming in JavaScript. The more I think about it, the more convinced I am. If you’re an old fart that’s been coding stuff in JavaScript since its inception, you’ll undoubtedly be familiar with Douglas Crockford’s bibles, or to be more…
Wouter Groeneveld — Published
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When Amazon badly needed a ride, Europe's Ariane 6 rocket delivered
This was the first launch of the Ariane 64, the most powerful rocket in European space history.
Ars Technica — Published
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Emacs: my GNOME accent color theme switcher package
Video demo of my new Emacs package that synchronises the theme with that of the GNOME desktop environment.
Protesilaos Stavrou — Published
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OpenAI sidesteps Nvidia with unusually fast coding model on plate-sized chips
OpenAI's new GPT‑5.3‑Codex‑Spark is 15 times faster at coding than its predecessor.
Ars Technica — Published
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Trump official overruled FDA scientists to reject Moderna's flu shot
FDA's top vaccine regulator, Vinay Prasad, is known for overruling scientists.
Ars Technica — Published
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Spider-Noir teaser comes in colorized "True Hue" and black and white
Nicolas Cage described his character as "70 percent Humphrey Bogart and 30 percent Bugs Bunny."
Ars Technica — Published
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ULA's Vulcan rocket suffers another booster problem on the way to orbit
Vulcan's Blue Origin-made BE-4 engines appear to have saved the rocket from failure.
Ars Technica — Published
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Introducing GPT‑5.3‑Codex‑Spark
Introducing GPT‑5.3‑Codex‑Spark OpenAI announced a partnership with Cerebras on January 14th. Four weeks later they're already launching the first integration, "an ultra-fast model for real-time coding in Codex". Despite being named GPT-5.3-Codex-Spark it's not purely an accelerated alternative to GPT…
Simon Willison — Published
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EPA kills foundation of greenhouse gas regulations
The agency is betting the the Supreme Court will reverse a prior ruling.
Ars Technica — Published
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Trump FTC wants Apple News to promote more Fox News and Breitbart stories
FTC claims Apple News suppresses conservatives, cites study by pro-Trump group.
Ars Technica — Published
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Quoting Anthropic
Claude Code was made available to the general public in May 2025. Today, Claude Code’s run-rate revenue has grown to over $2.5 billion; this figure has more than doubled since the beginning of 2026. The number of weekly active Claude Code users has also doubled since January 1 [six weeks ago]. — Anthropic…
Simon Willison — Published
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DIY PC maker Framework has needed monthly price hikes to navigate the RAM shortage
And Framework expects things to get worse before they get better.
Ars Technica — Published
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Covering electricity price increases from our data centers
Covering electricity price increases from our data centers One of the sub-threads of the AI energy usage discourse has been the impact new data centers have on the cost of electricity to nearby residents. Here's detailed analysis from Bloomberg in September reporting "Wholesale electricity costs as much…
Simon Willison — Published
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Gemini 3 Deep Think
Gemini 3 Deep Think New from Google. They say it's "built to push the frontier of intelligence and solve modern challenges across science, research, and engineering". It drew me a really good SVG of a pelican riding a bicycle! I think this is the best one I've seen so far - here's my previous collection…
Simon Willison — Published
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An AI Agent Published a Hit Piece on Me
An AI Agent Published a Hit Piece on Me Scott Shambaugh helps maintain the excellent and venerable matplotlib Python charting library, including taking on the thankless task of triaging and reviewing incoming pull requests. A GitHub account called @crabby-rathbun opened PR 31132 the other day in response…
Simon Willison — Published
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Supervisor, not overseer
In my post about my Showboat project I used the term "overseer" to refer to the person who manages a coding agent. It turns out that's a term tied to slavery and plantation management. So that's gross! I've edited that post to use "supervisor" instead, and I'll be using that going forward. Tags: language
Simon Willison — Published
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Untitled
Fuck me, the conclusion to season 2 of The Night Manager was quite unexpected. Wow.
Paul Robert Lloyd — Published
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git recent: what branch did I work on? [blog]
Mega short blog post, mostly for me to remember, but also might be useful to you. In a project I'll often work on and move around different branches throughout the day, and as the years wear on it's rather dulled my memory - that's to say, I quickly forget what branch I was working on!
Remy Sharp — Published
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Emacs: Lin version 2.0.0
Information about the latest version of my lin package for GNU Emacs.
Protesilaos Stavrou — Published
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Vlog: mountain climb in the rain with my four dogs
In this video I go on one of my usual long walks with my dogs, while it is raining.
Protesilaos Stavrou — Published
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Quoting Andrew Deck for Niemen Lab
An AI-generated report, delivered directly to the email inboxes of journalists, was an essential tool in the Times’ coverage. It was also one of the first signals that conservative media was turning against the administration [...] Built in-house and known internally as the “Manosphere Report,” the tool…
Simon Willison — Published
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Skills in OpenAI API
Skills in OpenAI API OpenAI's adoption of Skills continues to gain ground. You can now use Skills directly in the OpenAI API with their shell tool. You can zip skills up and upload them first, but I think an even neater interface is the ability to send skills with the JSON request as inline base64-encoded…
Simon Willison — Published
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Unresponsive Buttons on My Fastest Hardware Ever
This is one of those small things that drives me nuts. Why? I don’t know. I think it has something to do with the fact that I have a computer that is faster than any computer I’ve ever used in my entire life — and yet, clicking on buttons results in slight but perceptible delays. Let me explain. Imagine…
Jim Nielsen — Published
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GLM-5: From Vibe Coding to Agentic Engineering
GLM-5: From Vibe Coding to Agentic Engineering This is a huge new MIT-licensed model: 754B parameters and 1.51TB on Hugging Face twice the size of GLM-4.7 which was 368B and 717GB (4.5 and 4.6 were around that size too). It's interesting to see Z.ai take a position on what we should call professional…
Simon Willison — Published
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cysqlite - a new sqlite driver
cysqlite - a new sqlite driver Charles Leifer has been maintaining pysqlite3 - a fork of the Python standard library's sqlite3 module that makes it much easier to run upgraded SQLite versions - since 2018. He's been working on a ground-up Cython rewrite called cysqlite for almost as long, but it's finally…
Simon Willison — Published
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Kimwolf Botnet Swamps Anonymity Network I2P
For the past week, the massive "Internet of Things" (IoT) botnet known as Kimwolf has been disrupting the The Invisible Internet Project (I2P), a decentralized, encrypted communications network designed to anonymize and secure online communications. I2P users started reporting disruptions in the network…
Brian Krebs — Published
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App certainty and interoperability: Apple’s pinky promises to CMA
TL;DR: If Apple decides to kick you in the face, it must give you 5 minutes notice. And if you think it was too hard a kick, you can complain to Apple, which will investigate Apple. If the CMA believes Apple routinely gives you less than 5 minutes notice, or routinely kicks you too hard, […]
Bruce Lawson — Published
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Programming Aphorisms
A meta programming post --- looking at my thought process when coding and trying to pin down what isprogramming knowledge. Turns out, a significant fraction of that is just reducing new problems toa vocabulary of known tricks. This is a personal, descriptive post, not a prescriptive post for you.
Alex Kladov — Published
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Emacs: institution-calendar package (University of Oxford/Cambridge, etc.)
The institution-calendar package for GNU Emacs augments the calendar buffer with indicators about term weeks (e.g. for university semesters).
Protesilaos Stavrou — Published
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Patch Tuesday, February 2026 Edition
Microsoft today released updates to fix more than 50 security holes in its Windows operating systems and other software, including patches for a whopping six "zero-day" vulnerabilities that attackers are already exploiting in the wild.
Brian Krebs — Published
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Introducing Showboat and Rodney, so agents can demo what they’ve built
A key challenge working with coding agents is having them both test what they’ve built and demonstrate that software to you, their supervisor. This goes beyond automated tests - we need artifacts that show their progress and help us see exactly what the agent-produced software is able to do. I’ve just…
Simon Willison — Published
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A Note on File History in Emacs
Once you start digging beyond the surface, you discover that an ancient piece of text editing software called Emacs was light years ahead of its time. It already contained a clipboard history (kill-ring) and automatic saves/backups decades before contemporary editors took a half-baked stab at mimicking…
Wouter Groeneveld — Published
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Works in Progress
New tunes from an old maker. The post Works in Progress appeared first on Jeffrey Zeldman Presents.
Jeffrey Zeldman — Published
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Shades of Halftone
An interactive deep dive into building halftone shaders in GLSL, covering everything from classic dot patterns and CMYK color separation to Moiré interference, gooey effects, and animated displacement.
Maxime Heckel — Published
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The guerrilla fighters
In this journal entry I comment on how I do not try to control people's impression of me.
Protesilaos Stavrou — Published
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Structured Context Engineering for File-Native Agentic Systems
Structured Context Engineering for File-Native Agentic Systems New paper by Damon McMillan exploring challenging LLM context tasks involving large SQL schemas (up to 10,000 tables) across different models and file formats: Using SQL generation as a proxy for programmatic agent operations, we present…
Simon Willison — Published
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A Brief History of App Icons From Apple’s Creator Studio
I recently updated my collection of macOS icons to include Apple’s new “Creator Studio” family of icons. Doing this — in tandem with seeing funny things like this post on Mastodon — got me thinking about the history of these icons. I built a feature on my icon gallery sites that’s useful for comparing…
Jim Nielsen — Published
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DNS-PERSIST-01; Handling Domain Control Validation in a short-lived certificate World
This year, we have a new method for Domain Control Validation arriving called DNS-PERSIST-01. It is quite a fundamental change from how we do DCV now, so let's take a look at the benefits and the drawbacks.First, a quick recapWhen you approach a Certificate Authority, like
Scott Helme — Published
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AI Doesn’t Reduce Work—It Intensifies It
AI Doesn’t Reduce Work—It Intensifies It Aruna Ranganathan and Xingqi Maggie Ye from Berkeley Haas School of Business report initial findings in the HBR from their April to December 2025 study of 200 employees at a "U.S.-based technology company". This captures an effect I've been observing in my own…
Simon Willison — Published
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Untitled
I bloody love Lyon.
Paul Robert Lloyd — Published
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Claude Code for Designers
FIRST, the disclaimers: Some of my favorite writers—folks who are as anti-fascist and pro-democracy as they come—publish on Substack, but I read and recommend their work less and less frequently, because Substack has a Nazi problem. To wit: Awkward: Substack’s Nazi Problem Substack call themselves a…
Jeffrey Zeldman — Published
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Weekly Update 490
A big "thank you" to everyone who helped me troubleshoot the problem with my "Print Screen" button on the new PC. Try as we all might, none of us could figure out why it refused to bind to SnagIt and instead insisted on dumping the entire
Troy Hunt — Published
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Emacs: doric-themes version 1.0.0
Minimalist themes for GNU Emacs to complement my ef-themes (maximalist) and modus-themes (moderate).
Protesilaos Stavrou — Published
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Kākāpō mug by Karen James
Friend and neighbour Karen James made me a Kākāpō mug. It has a charismatic Kākāpō, four Kākāpō chicks (in celebration of the 2026 breeding season) and even has some rimu fruit! I love it so much. Tags: kakapo, art
Simon Willison — Published
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Untitled
Don’t cry because it’s over, smile because it happened.
Paul Robert Lloyd — Published
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Quoting Thomas Ptacek
People on the orange site are laughing at this, assuming it's just an ad and that there's nothing to it. Vulnerability researchers I talk to do not think this is a joke. As an erstwhile vuln researcher myself: do not bet against LLMs on this. Axios: Anthropic's Claude Opus 4.6 uncovers 500 zero-day flaws…
Simon Willison — Published
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Prot Asks: Eric about free software, art, religion, and cosmic consistency
I talk with .
Protesilaos Stavrou — Published
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Vouch
Vouch Mitchell Hashimoto's new system to help address the deluge of worthless AI-generated PRs faced by open source projects now that the friction involved in contributing has dropped so low. He says: The idea is simple: Unvouched users can't contribute to your projects. Very bad users can be explicitly…
Simon Willison — Published
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Claude: Speed up responses with fast mode
Claude: Speed up responses with fast mode New "research preview" from Anthropic today: you can now access a faster version of their frontier model Claude Opus 4.6 by typing /fast in Claude Code... but at a cost that's 6x the normal price. Opus is usually $5/million input and $25/million output. The new…
Simon Willison — Published
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Quoting David Crawshaw
I am having more fun programming than I ever have, because so many more of the programs I wish I could find the time to write actually exist. I wish I could share this joy with the people who are fearful about the changes agents are bringing. The fear itself I understand, I have fear more broadly about…
Simon Willison — Published
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We mourn our craft
I didn’t ask for this and neither did you. I didn’t ask for a robot to consume every blog post and piece of code I ever wrote and parrot it back so that some hack could make money off of it. I didn’t ask for the role of a programmer to be reduced to that […]
Nolan Lawson — Published
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How StrongDM's AI team build serious software without even looking at the code
Last week I hinted at a demo I had seen from a team implementing what Dan Shapiro called the Dark Factory level of AI adoption, where no human even looks at the code the coding agents are producing. That team was part of StrongDM, and they've just shared the first public description of how they are working…
Simon Willison — Published
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Creating Buttons To Remember Things
My wife recently bought a device to scratch her creative crafting itch: a button press. At first, I dismissed it as yet another thing requiring space in her increasingly messy atelier. I don’t know how we manage to do it but we seem to be experts in gathering things that gather things themselves: dust…
Wouter Groeneveld — Published
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Quoting Tom Dale
I don't know why this week became the tipping point, but nearly every software engineer I've talked to is experiencing some degree of mental health crisis. [...] Many people assuming I meant job loss anxiety but that's just one presentation. I'm seeing near-manic episodes triggered by watching software…
Simon Willison — Published
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Running Pydantic's Monty Rust sandboxed Python subset in WebAssembly
There's a jargon-filled headline for you! Everyone's building sandboxes for running untrusted code right now, and Pydantic's latest attempt, Monty, provides a custom Python-like language (a subset of Python) in Rust and makes it available as both a Rust library and a Python package. I got it working…
Simon Willison — Published
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Honoring Mobile OS Text Size
If your users scale the text size in Android or iDeviceOS, that doesn’t always affect the size of text on a web page. It’s a function of browser and authored code, as opposed to a standardized approach. That may be changing. Support The current state of affairs in the three…
Adrian Roselli — Published
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Study Finds Obvious Truth Everybody Knows
Researchers at Anthropic published their findings around how AI assistance impacts the formation of coding skills: We found that using AI assistance led to a statistically significant decrease in mastery […] Using AI sped up the task slightly, but this didn’t reach the threshold of statistical significance…
Jim Nielsen — Published
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An Update on Heroku
An Update on Heroku An ominous headline to see on the official Heroku blog and yes, it's bad news. Today, Heroku is transitioning to a sustaining engineering model focused on stability, security, reliability, and support. Heroku remains an actively supported, production-ready platform, with an emphasis…
Simon Willison — Published
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Quoting Karel D'Oosterlinck
When I want to quickly implement a one-off experiment in a part of the codebase I am unfamiliar with, I get codex to do extensive due diligence. Codex explores relevant slack channels, reads related discussions, fetches experimental branches from those discussions, and cherry picks useful changes for…
Simon Willison — Published
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CI In a Box
I wrote box, a thin wrapper around sshfor running commands on remote machines. I want a box-shaped interface for CI:
Alex Kladov — Published
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Re: Self haircut tips
Excerpt from a private exchange where I comment on how I cut my hair.
Protesilaos Stavrou — Published
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Mitchell Hashimoto: My AI Adoption Journey
Mitchell Hashimoto: My AI Adoption Journey Some really good and unconventional tips in here for getting to a place with coding agents where they demonstrably improve your workflow and productivity. I particularly liked: Reproduce your own work - when learning to use coding agents Mitchell went through…
Simon Willison — Published
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Opus 4.6 and Codex 5.3
Two major new model releases today, within about 15 minutes of each other. Anthropic released Opus 4.6. Here's its pelican: OpenAI release GPT-5.3-Codex, albeit only via their Codex app, not yet in their API. Here's its pelican: I've had a bit of preview access to both of these models and to be honest…
Simon Willison — Published
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You Know What? Just Don’t Split Words into Letters
This is an unplanned part two for Barriers from Links with ARIA. The title reflects my exasperation because this isn’t new, I’ve simply failed to be explicit about it over the last decade or so. In 2012 I vented about TypeButter using for each letter. In 2020…
Adrian Roselli — Published
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Spotlighting The World Factbook as We Bid a Fond Farewell
Spotlighting The World Factbook as We Bid a Fond Farewell Somewhat devastating news today from CIA: One of CIA’s oldest and most recognizable intelligence publications, The World Factbook, has sunset. There's not even a hint as to why they decided to stop maintaining this publication, which has been…
Simon Willison — Published
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The Imperial Units Strike Back
I lived in the United States for six years, during which time I refused to learn Fahrenheit. I was forced to give in to using inches because, unlike every tape measure I owned in Canada that had both inches and centimetres, every measuring tape I could...
Ash Furrow — Published
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Let's compile Quake like it's 1997!
Fabien Sanglard — Published
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Selfie: WEBP means selfies are back on the menu
Selfie picture of me topless with some wild land in the background.
Protesilaos Stavrou — Published
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Emacs: new Doric themes ‘doric-jade’ and ‘doric-copper’
I am developing two new themes for my minimalistic 'doric-themes' package for Emacs.
Protesilaos Stavrou — Published
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Voxtral transcribes at the speed of sound
Voxtral transcribes at the speed of sound Mistral just released Voxtral Transcribe 2 - a family of two new models, one open weights, for transcribing audio to text. This is the latest in their Whisper-like model family, and a sequel to the original Voxtral which they released in July 2025. Voxtral Realtime…
Simon Willison — Published
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“A streamlined newspaper for a streamlined era”
Posted today for no particular reason. The post “A streamlined newspaper for a streamlined era” appeared first on Jeffrey Zeldman Presents.
Jeffrey Zeldman — Published
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Trudging Through Nonsense
Last week Anthropic released a report on disempowerment patterns in real-world AI usage which finds that roughly one in 1,000 to one in 10,000 conversations with their LLM, Claude, fundamentally compromises the user’s beliefs, values, or actions. They note that the prevalence of moderate to severe “disempowerment…
Kyle Kingsbury — Published
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Distributing Go binaries like sqlite-scanner through PyPI using go-to-wheel
I've been exploring Go for building small, fast and self-contained binary applications recently. I'm enjoying how there's generally one obvious way to do things and the resulting code is boring and readable - and something that LLMs are very competent at writing. The one catch is distribution, but it…
Simon Willison — Published
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Favourites of January 2026
The end of the start of another year has ended. So now all there is left to do is to look forward to the end of the next month, starting effective immediately, and of course ending after the end of the end we are going to look forward to. Quite the end-eavour. I guess I’ll end these ramblings by ending…
Wouter Groeneveld — Published
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Weekly Update 489
This week I'm in Hong Kong, and the day after recording, I gave the talk shown in the image above at INTERPOL's Cybercrime Expert Group. I posted a little about this on Facebook and LinkedIn, but thought I'd expand on what really stuck with
Troy Hunt — Published
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Interpretation of “God himself” by Blé (Giorgia Kefalá)
Translation of---and philosophical commentary on---a Greek song whose translated title is 'God Himself'.
Protesilaos Stavrou — Published
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Emacs: beframe version 1.5.0
Information about the latest version of my beframe package for GNU Emacs.
Protesilaos Stavrou — Published
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Saying “No” In an Age of Abundance
You’ve probably heard this famous quote from Steve Jobs about saying ‘no’: People think focus means saying yes to the thing you’ve got to focus on. But that’s not what it means at all. It means saying no to the hundred other good ideas that there are. You have to pick carefully. I’m actually as proud…
Jim Nielsen — Published
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Untitled
This has been one of the most intense weeks of my life, both physically challenging and mentally exhausting. And it’s only Tuesday.
Paul Robert Lloyd — Published
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Try text scaling support [link]
I've had a larger phone because I got fed up with squinting at my screen, but because of that I also have the OS level font bumped to 115% (and I know Jule, my wife, has it bumped to 125%). This meta tag will use the system font size to adjust the font. Importantly, Josh also points out that the default…
Remy Sharp — Published
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Please Don’t Feed the Scattered Lapsus ShinyHunters
A prolific data ransom gang that calls itself Scattered Lapsus ShinyHunters (SLSH) has a distinctive playbook when it seeks to extort payment from victim firms: Harassing, threatening and even swatting executives and their families, all while notifying journalists and regulators… Read More »
Brian Krebs — Published
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The European Space Agency got hacked, and now we own the domain used!
It's not often that two of my interests align so well, but we're talking about space rockets and cyber security! Whilst Magecart and Magecart-style attacks might not be the most common attack vector at the moment, they are still happening with worrying frequency, and they are
Scott Helme — Published
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Untitled
Gone skiing.
Paul Robert Lloyd — Published
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Bear Head (Dogs of War, #2) [book]
Really enjoyed this follow up to Dogs of War. I accidentally read Dogs of War in 2018 - I never went looking for it and loved it. Equally, I can't remember when I found out about Bear Head but I knew I wanted to read it if it existed in the same universe. So finally I get around to it. Overall well written…
Remy Sharp — Published
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JS Bin down in 2026 [blog]
January 27th I got an email notification saying that JS Bin had become unavailable. Then next day real life human beings were asking what's going on. By 11pm on the 30th the last of the issues were resolved. Earlier today Jake asked me: what went wrong? Fucking, everything.
Remy Sharp — Published