Latest entries
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NYT demands Brave shut down its paywall blocker and end deals with AI firms
Lawsuit calls Brave "supplier, dealer, and distributor" of stolen news content.
Ars Technica — Published
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Buttons are back and storage is king when it comes to car interiors
We talk with Nissan designer Hiren Patel about how vehicle interior designs are changing.
Ars Technica — Published
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Google will let schools skip AI tools, but they have to give up search, too
Google will offer schools AI tools that purportedly don't give away the answers.
Ars Technica — Published
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Another child dies of measles as CDC reportedly holds up health alert
NY gov. pointed to Kennedy's long-standing anti-vaccine work as spurring outbreaks.
Ars Technica — Published
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Google dismantles botnet secretly running on 1.3 million Android TV boxes
Google has cut ties with the company behind the botnet campaign.
Ars Technica — Published
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This space company is betting its future on a propellant available everywhere
Is that water in your spacecraft, or are you just happy to see the delta-V?
Ars Technica — Published
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Qwen 3.8 27B on my laptop can interpret model weights, too
Yesterday's hot paper was Sparks of Weight-Space Programming: LLMs can natively read & write neural network weights by Rikiya Takehi, Jayden Teoh, Alex Zhang, and Omar Khattab. The paper found that frontier models, in particular GPT-6 Astra, can both interpret and modify the raw weights of a machine…
Simon Willison — Published
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UEFI bootkit infected fully patched Windows machines. Is Microsoft to blame?
UEFI bootkit BlackX exploits Microsoft's lack of clarity around Secure Boot protections.
Ars Technica — Published
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Trump wanted to give No Kings no air. Then, Meta suspended its Instagram.
Meta faces pressure to protect No Kings Instagram on election day.
Ars Technica — Published
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EPA throws in the towel on policing air pollution from factory farms
Critics say EPA is effectively abandoning Clean Air Act enforcement at factory farms.
Ars Technica — Published
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Why this Obscure Audio Codec is a Perfect Fit for the N64
Sorry for the clickbait title. I promise this post delivers: 44100 Hz stereo with near-Opus bitrates using about 4% of the N64’s CPU time. But first, some history: The options for playing and storing audio data on the N64 were dire. The PlayStation could just stream uncompressed redbook audio straight…
Dominic Szablewski — Published
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Beyond screens: Mercedes-Benz's new holographic heads-up display
After pioneering the passenger screen, Mercedes has designs on the windshield.
Ars Technica — Published
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Why Review AI-Generated Code?
AI can generate a lot of code quickly. There’s a thought that we can catch its mistakes or other issues by reviewing that code. In theory, this may be true; code review can catch bugs. In practice, it only works if the reviewer knows what to look for, has some context and, well, gives a shit. There's…
David Bryant Copeland — Published
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I discovered a sound that leaks your exact location (and it's everywhere) - YouTube
I discovered a sound that leaks your exact location (and it's everywhere) - YouTube Genius piece of OSINT by Colsto, who demonstrates how you can take almost imperceptible background noise of planes from a video soundtrack, figure out their Doppler curves, then cross reference them against ADS-B data…
Simon Willison — Published
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October sponsors-only newsletter
I sent out the October edition of my sponsors-only monthly newsletter. If you are a sponsor (or start a sponsorship now) you can access it here. This month: The October inflection point for vibe game development The vulnerability apocalypse gets hot LLM releases API credits for $100+/month subscriptions…
Simon Willison — Published
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Interpolative Software
Much of the excitement around AI coding is downstream of the fact that a lot of software is interpolative. This has become especially true as of late, with the release of Opus 5.5, which is, I’d argue, superhumanly good at generating mass amounts of high-quality interpolative software.1 This post is…
Ben Congdon — Published
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Tech Firms Dismantle Botnet That Turned 1.3M TV Boxes Into Proxies
Google said today it worked with industry partners to dismantle a botnet made up of more than 1.3 million Android TV set-top boxes that ship with malicious software which secretly rents the user's Internet connection out to strangers and conducts advertising fraud. Experts involved in the takedown say…
Brian Krebs — Published
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Welfare versus warfare considerations in Europe
Essay on the trade-offs that are involved in policy orientations between welfare and warfare.
Protesilaos Stavrou — Published
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llm 0.37
Release: llm 0.37 There's a lot of stuff in this new release of my LLM CLI tool and Python library, representing around two months of accumulated features and fixes. I added gpt-6.1-sol and gpt-6.1-terra, plus a new llm openai endpoint add command to make it easier to configure additional models that…
Simon Willison — Published
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"At Home in Space" opens, caps Air and Space Museum renovation
The Smithsonian's National Air and Space Museum has all of its "space" back open.
Ars Technica — Published
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Why large dogs age faster than small ones, and other October research highlights
Plus invisible tattoos, medieval skeleton gets an ID, trapping a single antimatter particle, and more.
Ars Technica — Published
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Third person dies of bird flu since virus started jumping to livestock
The threat is still considered to be low, but the virus continues to spread.
Ars Technica — Published
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Googling "Zelda" today offers a glimpse of how search worked in 1998
"The flow of time is always cruel."
Ars Technica — Published
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Most of our measures of a key cognitive process don't agree
A big study with very little beyond negative results still gets published.
Ars Technica — Published
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Coming in 2027: Apple’s $1,000 home robot for FaceTime and switching on lights
Apple robot backed by CEO John Ternus may have hefty price tag and limited uses.
Ars Technica — Published
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Claude’s new rules against game cloning won’t stop the AI copying boom
The tsunami of imitators is way bigger than any one model maker can stem.
Ars Technica — Published
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China publicly discloses plan for a lunar landing within three years
The plan does not include a mission similar to Apollo 8 or Artemis II.
Ars Technica — Published
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Making features generic in CSS
CSS has two new positional alignment keywords as part of CSS Box Alignment Level 3: flow-start and flow-end. These are defined as aliases for the existing flex-start and flex-end keywords. Therefore, in a supporting browser, the following two lines should align flex items to the end of the flex container…
Rachel Andrew — Published
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F1 in Mexico City: Yet another Ferrari fiasco, but that’s not all
There was plenty of drama on and off the track for Formula 1 this weekend.
Ars Technica — Published
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The world has a new plan to save nature, but it still needs the money
A new action plan aims to rescue 2030 nature targets as financing remains inadequate.
Ars Technica — Published
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The U.S. Census Bureau and “Super Intelligence”
I was reminded today of AI Adoption Rate Trending Down for Large Companies, a chart produced by Apollo Global Management in September 2025, which appeared to show a slowdown in U.S. corporate AI adoption based on numbers collected by the U.S. Census Bureau. At the time I used that chart to demonstrate…
Simon Willison — Published
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If in doubt, delete the uv.lock file
I've been getting the occasional confusing Python dependency error since switching over to Python 3.15 and the rule I'm having to remember is: If in doubt, delete the uv.lock file Most of my projects are libraries which don't include a uv.lock file, since it's rude for a library dependency to lock versions…
Simon Willison — Published
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Book Number Nineteen
When I said my farewells to Book Number Eighteen that for me just didn’t have the right proportions, I didn’t expect to fill Number Nineteen so quickly. That’s 245 unlined Leuchtturm pages from April to October 2026 which must have been a new record! I’m happy to have picked up the pace again after months…
Wouter Groeneveld — Published
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Quoting Kyle Kingsbury
More broadly, the use of LLMs erodes trust in documentation, in software, and in the organizations which produce them. Perhaps engineers will begin to treat any new software project with suspicion—the signals we used to rely on as markers of a mature system are now easier to counterfeit. [...] In the…
Simon Willison — Published
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The smartphoneless NEET shut-in
So true, I resisted getting a smartphone for as long as I reasonably could, especially because after college I was pretty much a NEET shut-in for a good while, but eventually, if you want to interact with society at all, you need it, and I gave in because my life was becoming more inconvenient without…
a327ex — Published
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Computer Use is Useful Now
The ability for models to steer browsers is now past the threshold of being clearly useful. LLM providers have been advertising computer use capabilities for a couple of years1, but in the times I’d tried, the results were more of a clunky curiosity than something I’d actually use on a daily basis. The…
Ben Congdon — Published
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Untitled
There’s possibly nothing more painful than wanting something you already have.
Paul Robert Lloyd — Published
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Weekly Update 528: Reading AI-generated Code & the Economics of Solar
By pure timing coincidence, the Proton CEO's AI @ Proton, Engineering Manifesto made headlines around the same time as this week's video. The guy's management style and choice of language have really rubbed a lot of people up the wrong way, and deservedly so, IMHO.
Troy Hunt — Published
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Could a modern chess engine on a Pentium have defeated Kasparov in 1996?
A fun experiment where I back-port all the improvements we've made to chess engines over the last 30 years and run it on a 1996 Pentium Pro to see what we could have done if only we knew more at the time.
Nicholas Carlini — Published
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My Slow Return to a Swift Career
I recently gave this talk at the SwiftRockies conference in Calgary. This blog post expands on a few points that I didn’t have time for in the presentation, as well as some updates since then. The talk is here. Because I’ll be discussing my work with...
Ash Furrow — Published
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Aristotle Nicomachean Ethics: society of spirit and “Prot’s glasses’s”
In this 1-hour video I talk at length about ethics, wellness, goals, rationality, and interpersonal affairs.
Protesilaos Stavrou — Published
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The Memory Police [book]
A weird story. Not quite sure what to make of it! Definitely surreal, and unlike any story I’ve read before. I did find I was trying to make sense of it, wondering if the protagonist was stuck in purgatory, but as the book finished, I don't think that was that was the point. It’s a good story, and engagingly…
Remy Sharp — Published
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How We Took Over ChatGPT Accounts
How We Took Over ChatGPT Accounts Parameter Labs describe an exploit they found against ChatGPT's implementation of the artifacts pattern (OpenAI used to call this "Canvas" but it looks like the latest revision is called HTML previews), where interactive custom HTML apps are displayed in a sandboxed…
Simon Willison — Published
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datasette-llm 0.1a9
Release: datasette-llm 0.1a9 I have some big upgrades to Datasette Agent in the pipeline, but in the meantime here's a tiny user experience improvement to the underlying datasette-llm plugin. It now picks up the default model used by LLM, which means you can start using Datasette Agent without needing…
Simon Willison — Published
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Prospero: a new coding harness for a more civilized age
I’ve been fascinated with local LLMs for a couple of years now. The better open weight models, including some that inference on regular, higher-end consumer hardware at tolerable speeds, are now reliable enough to handle simpler programming tasks. This requires a coding harness, but so far this year…
Chris Wellons — Published
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Emacs live new Halloween theme for ‘ef-themes’ at 2026-10-31 14:00 Europe/Athens
I will develop at least one new theme for my 'ef-themes' package which will be in the spirit of Halloween.
Protesilaos Stavrou — Published
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Emacs: ef-halloween-dark is in ef-themes.git
I added a new dark theme to my 'ef-themes' package for Emacs.
Protesilaos Stavrou — Published
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dbreunig/nesformer
dbreunig/nesformer Inspired by qwenputer by Divyansh Agrawal, Drew Breunig baked a working emulator for a Nintendo Entertainment System 6502 CPU into the weights of Qwen3.5-4B. You can now play NES ROMs such as Super Mario Bros (very slowly) running inside Qwen! In a comment on Hacker News Drew reveals…
Simon Willison — Published
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Emacs live refinements for Denote at 2026-10-30 14:45 Europe/Athens
I am doing a live stream where I will make some refinements to Denote.
Protesilaos Stavrou — Published
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API credits benefit for eligible ChatGPT subscriptions
API credits benefit for eligible ChatGPT subscriptions Earlier this month Anthropic announced a generous new benefit for their Max and Team subscriptions: $100, $200, and $500 per month subscribers would get the equivalent quantity of (expiring) credits to use with the Anthropic API. OpenAI have now…
Simon Willison — Published
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Celebrating SIM Cards
It’s time to celebrate a little win. The other day, my mom contacted me saying her 10-year-old iPhone wouldn’t turn on. After getting a hold of the device and doing some family IT support, I concluded the battery was dead. So I bought her a new (old) one on Walmart (SE 3rd gen., if you must know). Her…
Jim Nielsen — Published
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Building a multiplayer game world with autonomous Fable-class models
How I Built the Most AI-Pilled Company in the World Don't be put off by the clickbait headline, this piece by Jacob Sansbury describing how they are building Spawn is a fascinating exploration of the bleeding edge of what's possible with agentic engineering against frontier models. Spawn is a massively…
Simon Willison — Published
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The Day the Focus Died
If we failed to do this, I feared, we would stop leading the industry and turn into “merely the CSS trick of the week.” The post The Day the Focus Died appeared first on Jeffrey Zeldman Presents.
Jeffrey Zeldman — Published
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Twenty Years of Retronauts (And Me)
Episode 800 of the Retronauts podcast recently released , celebrating twenty years of floating around in the podcast-o-sphere. Twenty years of making podcasts and eight hundred episodes, not counting the ones Jeremy and co. did for 1UP! That’s a remarkable achievement considering most other podcasts…
Wouter Groeneveld — Published
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Quoting Ben Hylak
every product i use should just be a headless mcp, that feeds into an agent, where i never have to think about anything underneath. except for our product, of course. in our product, customers love the ui and love us very much. we're special that way. — Ben Hylak Tags: model-context-protocol, ai
Simon Willison — Published
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The ship is anchor’d safe and sound.
A favorite actor just passed away.
Ethan Marcotte — Published
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Avoid Public Functions Calling Other Public Functions
A small-scale rule of thumb. This article will land much better with a concrete example, but I am drawing a blank here, so you gotta just blindly trust my say so!
Alex Kladov — Published
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Emacs live refining ‘ef-themes’ Diff/Magit colours at 2026-10-29 18:00 Europe/Athens
I am doing a live stream where I will revise colours that are used for diff interfaces.
Protesilaos Stavrou — Published
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My 2027 Web Platform Feature Ranking [blog]
Like my peers, I've decided to publish my personal ranking preference for the 2027 interop project. I'm doing this from a phone, so I can't link to the others that have published theirs, but I think it's interesting to see and compare what we feel is important.
Remy Sharp — Published
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Quoting Ted Sanders
In general, LLM performance is incredibly multidimensional. There's no guarantee of a fixed ordering where the model that is best at math is also the model that's best at jokes. Despite that complexity, much of the variation in performance is explained by just a single variable: model size. In general…
Simon Willison — Published
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Compass-deadening big automated runs
Currently I'm working on SNKRX's update, this is the only project I work on almost every day and have been managing to keep it going for about a month, and then I explore other projects as I see fit, like Phylactery which I ended up finishing. So as I explore potential ideas and as Opus 5.5 is more capable…
a327ex — Published
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GitHub Octoverse 2026
GitHub Octoverse 2026 I'm at GitHub Universe today (GitHub gave me a free ticket through their "GitHub Stars" program). EVP Jay Parikh just announced this year's Octoverse report, and highlighted these numbers in particular: This is a pretty stark representation of the impact of agentic engineering on…
Simon Willison — Published
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The AI cost of JavaScript frameworks
One of my pet peeves with the web development community is that so many of the decisions we make are vibes-based. Frameworks are “blazing fast,” tools will “supercharge” your development, the right abstraction will benefit both you and your users (DX and UX all in one!). All of this breathless…
Nolan Lawson — Published
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The October inflection point for vibe game development
I've written before about how November 2025 was an inflection point for coding agents - the point where Opus 4.5 and GPT-5.1 crossed a tipping point that meant their respective coding agents became reliable daily drivers for software engineers. I think we've reached a new inflection point in October…
Simon Willison — Published
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Quoting Terk Terkowitz
If your work does not benefit from current AI tooling, that is a finding, not a failing. Document why, share it with your community of peers, bring it to your manager, and work to find solutions. An engineer who can explain where AI does not yet help their work is demonstrating the judgement we are asking…
Simon Willison — Published
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About the first criticisms
An entry from my journal in which I comment on some important instances of criticism that made me a better person.
Protesilaos Stavrou — Published
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Last week was terrible. It didn't have to be
Last week saw the arrival of two CVEs for PHP, CVE-2026-109618 and CVE-2026-109619, each rated a staggering CVSS 9.2. For comparison, Heartbleed was rated 5.0 under CVSS version 2 and 7.5 under version 3.1. Soon after the news landed, the cyber security team and others at work were setting up war room…
Josh Ghent — Published
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Enterprise sales teams, please, I beg you, stop
At $dayJob we reached the seat limit on a SaaS product. I reached out to their sales team for a quote on a few more seats. We already pay for this software. I'm not a new customer. What I expected was an email saying: "Great, glad you want to use this more. It will cost £X." I needed that price because…
Josh Ghent — Published
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Game Boy Color on My Conference Badge
Game Boy Color on My Conference Badge I'm at GitHub Universe this week and, similar to last year, the conference badge is a full-blown color screen computer. I've been hacking around with it again, and then I ran into with Steve Francia... who worked with Gemini to get a full NES emulator working on…
Simon Willison — Published
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The game theory of dating as a race to the bottom
a327ex — Published
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Weekly Update 527: Cybergeddon News v. Reality
As the news from last week has settled down, it would seem this headline was pretty spot on. The foretold apocalypse didn't eventuate, and there were no internet-destroying outages. In fact, it took days before I could find a single story of PHP2Shell being reliably attributed back
Troy Hunt — Published
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Poem: As robins do
Just read the poem. No further comment.
Protesilaos Stavrou — Published
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As You Wake, Break the Shell [book]
Love, grief, connection and plants. This was a really endearing story of love unfolding. Sure, it's a bit twee, but it's a nice change from doom. Solarpunk I think. It makes me smile when I read the touching moments between Cora and Signey. There's a nice technical feature of this book that I've not…
Remy Sharp — Published
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GPT-6.1 Terra
GPT-6.1 Terra It's always interesting to note which aspects of a new model are emphasized in the release announcement. In the case of GPT-6.1 Terra, OpenAI went with visual reasoning and computer use: We’re introducing GPT-6.1 Terra, a fast, efficient model that combines detailed visual reasoning and…
Simon Willison — Published
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Quoting Jason Koebler
Because big tech platforms essentially do not have customer support and make it impossible for their users to contact a human, many people experiencing run-of-the-mill tech problems have turned to ChatGPT. And, increasingly, ChatGPT is telling people that have normal tech support problems that they have…
Simon Willison — Published
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400-parameter eyes
This is a good example of what I meant in #629 regarding small games still being the favorable thing to do. You can now go really hard on specific things in a way that wasn't as possible before for an individual. Imagine applying the same level of detail like this not only to eyes but to an entire face…
a327ex — Published
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webframe: evaluated as a scraper and a sandbox
Research: webframe: evaluated as a scraper and a sandbox webframe is a neat little project from Jeff Lindsay which lets you "run a web page like a program" - you point it at a URL or file and it executes it in a hidden headless web view and outputs console.log() to standard output and any exceptions…
Simon Willison — Published
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Hello? Where Is Everybody?
The shopping centre we find ourselves in also has an IKEA nearby. My daughter & I pop in to walk through the isles that house the teddy bears. She picks out a giraffe that now lives by the name Giraffa or just Raffa. For once, we don’t really need anything else in this lovely Swedish store so we head…
Wouter Groeneveld — Published
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Aristotle Nicomachean Ethics: criticism, happiness, good-spirit-ness
In this video I comment at length on Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics. This is the second episode in the series.
Protesilaos Stavrou — Published
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Of trance, exploration, and rationality
An entry from my journal in which I comment on trance music and then more abstract matters.
Protesilaos Stavrou — Published
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Watch trap
My decision earlier this year to wear a watch again is reflective of my growing preoccupation with time.
Paul Robert Lloyd — Published
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Why My Dad Didn’t Have a Cell Phone
Here’s Dave Rupert writing about all those emails, texts, phone calls, etc. we’re getting these days: Once upon a time it had utility, now it’s all noise and grifter slop demanding our attention and giving us to-dos That last part really hit: “giving us to-dos”. I feel this. So many of the messenger…
Jim Nielsen — Published
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Seam Cutter
Tool: Seam Cutter I built this weird and very specific cropping tool - it lets you create a horizontal or vertical cut across an image, then slide the two sides relative to each other. Effectively it lets you crop out a section in the middle of an image. I wanted this because I often use Tailor on my…
Simon Willison — Published
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Emacs: doric-themes version 1.4.0
Minimalist themes for GNU Emacs to complement my ef-themes (maximalist) and modus-themes (moderate).
Protesilaos Stavrou — Published
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Aristotle Nicomachean 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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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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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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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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On CMA’s proposed NFC access conduct requirement for Apple’s iOS
(Last Updated on 26 October 2026) 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…
Bruce Lawson — 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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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