Latest entries
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Microsoft event debuts new AI-friendly hardware and Windows changes
Get ready for more AI in your Windows and more AI on the desktop.
Ars Technica — Published
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Quoting Ben Affleck
I've always been kind of into computers since I was young. And then when film started to move from analog film to digital, I became more interested in that aspect of it. And the visual effects workflow for many years has included machine learning. So I can write like pretty shitty Python scripts and…
Simon Willison — Published
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“Software is over”: Bold AI developer takes aim at Adobe with open source clones
Opus-built Creative Cloud alternatives are ambitious, free, and nowhere near finished.
Ars Technica — Published
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Claude Haiku 5.5
As previously promised, here's Anthropic's new fast, low cost model: Introducing Claude Haiku 5.5. The previous Haiku, 4.5, was very much showing its age. It came out almost a year ago, and was priced at $1/million input and $5/million output - relatively expensive even back then, and a full 10x the…
Simon Willison — Published
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PA measles outbreak tops 1,000 cases, largest since disease was eliminated
Pennsylvania reported 1,066 outbreak-linked cases on Wednesday.
Ars Technica — Published
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TP-Link problems in US grow amid FCC router ban and four state lawsuits
TP-Link can't sell latest routers in US, still needs exemption from FCC ban.
Ars Technica — Published
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Chemistry Nobel goes to reactions like those that gave life a hand
Altering molecular handedness has implications for the origins of life.
Ars Technica — Published
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Pediatricians renew call to ban raw milk as anti-science rhetoric reigns
In renewed policy, pediatricians review the benefits of heating milk to kill germs.
Ars Technica — Published
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Fraudster jailed for using 10K bots and AI songs to outstream Taylor Swift
Man gets 18 months for AI scheme stealing $8M in music streaming royalties.
Ars Technica — Published
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Jaguar Type 01 debuts; now, no one remembers the electric Ferrari
Car design sure riles people up on the Internet these days. Goes double for EVs.
Ars Technica — Published
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Trade group crunches numbers on Trump’s impossible push for 100% US-made tech
Trump's aggressive reshoring push could cost tech firms $230 billion, CTA estimates.
Ars Technica — Published
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Anti-Patterns in Software Blogging
Anti-Patterns in Software Blogging Some excellent writing advice from Michael Lynch. Michael warns against "meandering intros", misjudging your reader's existing knowledge, assuming they'll read your previous posts, and excessive formality. He also warns against overreliance on links as an excuse not…
Simon Willison — Published
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Mistral says "Le Chonk" can challenge the best AI models
Mistral says Le Chonk can rival top closed models while remaining open-weight.
Ars Technica — Published
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Google rolls out improved SynthID AI content detector, now available globally
The new SynthID website can now identify AI content from Google, OpenAI, and more.
Ars Technica — Published
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AI/ML is becoming a performance factor in motorsport
More than just a sponsor: OpenAI has been helping Ganassi with setups.
Ars Technica — Published
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ShinyHunters Extorted Boeing Spin-off Prior to Arrests
A teenager from Amman, Jordan suspected of leading the prolific data theft and extortion group ShinyHunters has been detained and is reportedly cooperating with the FBI to identify other members of the hacking gang. KrebsOnSecurity has learned that the suspect, who uses the hacker handle "Rey," was detained…
Brian Krebs — Published
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Review: Fine, let's talk about Digger
Its excesses may try one’s patience at times, but the film sticks the landing with a savagely moving finale.
Ars Technica — Published
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If you're looking, here's a "good deal" for NASA and the European Space Agency
"We are in the era of people interested in having good deals, and LISA is a very good deal for the US."
Ars Technica — Published
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Quoting Jake Boggan
I was a graph theory junkie long ago and even moved to Budapest for awhile to study among the greats. While I was there I started working on Barnette's Conjecture which came to occupy my thoughts over the next 24 years of my life, on and off as I worked in many different fields. Last summer I even thought…
Simon Willison — Published
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OpenAI “rogue” agent activities found on Wikimedia projects
OpenAI “rogue” agent activities found on Wikimedia projects Given how tempting a target wikis are for rogue agent swarms, it's not a huge surprise that Wikipedia found evidence of that activity once they went looking: The Wikimedia Foundation conducted its own investigation to see whether Wikimedia websites…
Simon Willison — Published
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On Git Refs
I have recently improved my mental model of Git. Consider these two git commands:
Alex Kladov — Published
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Emacs: spontaneous live new ‘denote-data’ feature (2026-10-07 at 18:00 Europe/Athens)
I am doing a live stream where I will continue the work I am doing on the new 'denote-data' feature for 'denote'.
Protesilaos Stavrou — Published
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Quoting Victoria Kim
Since the Medicare breach, OpenAI has put in place additional monitoring to allow “immediate intervention” by staff to stop training if the company’s models access the internet in ways they’re not supposed to, Mr. Kwon [chief strategy officer at OpenAI] said. — Victoria Kim, Reporting from the Australian…
Simon Willison — Published
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llm-openai-decisions 0.1a0
Release: llm-openai-decisions 0.1a0 OpenAI released their new Jev-style Decisions API, as previously announced at last week's DevDay. Since I already have an llm-typesafe plugin for talking to Jev, I had GPT-6 Astra read the new OpenAI API documentation and build an llm-openai-decisions plugin inspired…
Simon Willison — Published
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llm-mistral 0.16
Release: llm-mistral 0.16 Adds support for reasoning models, such as the newly released Mistral Large 4. Tags: llm, mistral, llm-reasoning
Simon Willison — Published
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Drones sink ships near NATO countries in “unacceptable” attacks, EU says
Two cargo ships have sunk, one ship was afire, and sailors are dead or missing.
Ars Technica — Published
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OpenAI will watermark ChatGPT outputs by default—but only in the EU
Like other solutions, it is not especially reliable, and it's easy to circumvent.
Ars Technica — Published
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EmbeddingGemma 2
My comment on EmbeddingGemma 2 — Hacker News.I really appreciate that EmbeddingGemma 2 is under the Apache 2.0 license. For embedding models in particular, I don't think it makes sense to use a closed, proprietary, hosted-only model. Most applications of embedding models involve calculating thousands…
Simon Willison — Published
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HBO Max, Paramount+, and Discovery+ "will unify into a single service”
A combined service could lead to higher prices.
Ars Technica — Published
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Introducing Mistral Large 4: Le chonk
Introducing Mistral Large 4: Le chonk Mistral are back in the game. Today they're releasing a preview of Mistral Large 4, a 1 trillion parameter, 49 billion active parameter model trained on their own cluster of 3,800 NVIDIA Grace Blackwell GPUs. The preview is available via their API. They promise to…
Simon Willison — Published
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It looks like the Atlantic storm season may finally produce a hurricane
To date, this Atlantic tropics year has been exceptionally quiet.
Ars Technica — Published
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Hackers obtain counterfeit TLS certificates for Google and other large services
Compromise of 3 domain registries allows hackers to walk off with unauthorized certs.
Ars Technica — Published
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Using Parseable with Datasette for OpenTelemetry traces
TIL: Using Parseable with Datasette for OpenTelemetry traces I saw Parseable in a Show HN today - it's a new observability platform with both an open source (AGPL) Rust implementation (a single ~180MB binary), an "Enterprise" version with extra features and a cloud hosted option. Since Datasette 1.0a41…
Simon Willison — Published
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Homo Irrealis
André Aciman’s Homo Irrealis leaves a strange feeling lingering long after I put down the book. The irrealis aspect of his essays comes across as an aggressive and rather depressing form of nostalgia, where the temporal context is heavily skewed towards the past. André describes it as follows: imagine…
Wouter Groeneveld — Published
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Apple’s App Icon HOA
Louie Mantia has a great post about how app icons are converging towards the squircle on iOS and macOS. His post reads like a history. If you’re wondering, “How did we get to a place where all app icons are becoming squircles?” Mantia’s post answers that question by starting at the beginning. It’s hard…
Jim Nielsen — Published
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Mistral Large 4
My comment on Mistral Large 4 — Hacker News. wren6991: The benchmark is saturated. Frontier models are tested with an armadillo in fishnet tights jaywalking on Mars. OK well I couldn't resist this one: llm -m claude-opus-5.5 'Generate an SVG of an armadillo in fishnet tights jaywalking on Mars' llm …
Simon Willison — Published
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datasette-atom 0.11a0
Release: datasette-atom 0.11a0 A minor fix for compatibility with the latest Datasette alphas. This meant we could upgrade the datasette.io site to Datasette 1.0a41. Tags: atom, datasette
Simon Willison — Published
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Paramount completes $111B Warner merger, creating “Skydance” behemoth
Paramount now owns Warner Bros. as last-ditch effort to stop $111B merger fails.
Ars Technica — Published
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Scrimshaw Jukebox
Tool: Scrimshaw Jukebox I wanted to see if Claude Opus 5.5 could compose music, so I tried this: I want you to write some computer game music for me. First design simple text based format for the music and build an artifact that can play it out loud - include some example tracks in that artifact I am…
Simon Willison — Published
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Ring is deliberately nefarious when you E2E encrypt your video
Over the past few years, I've embarked on a journey towards more privacy. This has ranged from migrating away from Gmail to removing data about me online and more. (I've also moved my 2FA codes off Authy along the way.) One bugbear remained: our doorbell. I quickly realised I'd made a huge mistake. I…
Josh Ghent — Published
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Microbenchmarks in the age of clankers
read it here
Vyacheslav Egorov — Published
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Français: Les temps qui changent
On peut imaginer que chaque automne est un mini préparation pour les crises les plus sérieux.
Protesilaos Stavrou — Published
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About memory and nostalgia
An entry from my journal in which I comment at length about memory and nostalgia.
Protesilaos Stavrou — Published
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Quoting Felix Rieseberg
The "old" version of Cowork runs model inference in the cloud, executing tool calls in an Anthropic-provided VM we shipped to your computer. We added the VM for capability, safety, and security reasons - mapping in just the data you explicitly added to your session. People loved what they were able to…
Simon Willison — Published
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Benchmark In Milliseconds
How long should a micro benchmark run? My rule of thumb is to tweak the input size until the benchmark takes about 300ms, for the following reasons:
Alex Kladov — Published
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I created my own status page
Status pages have forever baffled me as products in software engineering. Most of the FAANG mafia use Atlassian Statuspage, which inevitably costs tens of thousands of dollars while providing almost nothing except a single HTML page. Then you have other solutions like UptimeRobot and the "indiehacker…
Josh Ghent — Published
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Selfies: hiking before the sunset
Three selfies from my hike earlier this evening.
Protesilaos Stavrou — Published
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Emacs: ‘doric-meadow’ and ‘doric-mountain’ coming to the ‘doric-themes’
I am developing two new themes for my minimalist 'doric-themes' package.
Protesilaos Stavrou — Published
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Qwen3.8 27B addition in words
Research: Qwen3.8 27B addition in words Colin Frasier posted on Bluesky about an experiment he ran over two years ago using GPT-4o to see how well it could "compute the sum but return the answer in words" across increasingly large numbers. Here's the chart he shared of those results: I'm confident GPT…
Simon Willison — Published
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“I’m Embarrassed on Behalf of the Tech Industry”
That’s something Ben Thompson said a recent episode of Dithering. He was referring to how he felt while trying to help his mom get control of her digital life. Everything was just too hard and convoluted and he felt embarrassed as someone who works in tech. That very same evening, I randomly got this…
Jim Nielsen — Published
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A new, bespoke static site generator to replace Jekyll
My blog began as a blosxom (Perl) site running on a VPS. In 2011 I moved to the new GitHub Pages, with the site generated statically by Jekyll (Ruby) on a GitHub server. It was a no-brainer: easier, faster, and cheaper, better in every way. After 15 years of Jekyll, and spurred by a post on m4, this…
Chris Wellons — Published
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Weekly Update 524: Live From Copenhagen
I'm in Denmark! Well, just, I'm now at Copenhagen airport ready to begin the long trek home, with the final event at GOTO now done and going just perfectly. This week, there are two ShinyHunters arrests in the news: Pepijn in the Netherlands and then Saif
Troy Hunt — Published
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About psychopaths, bullies, and integrity
Journal entry where I comment at length on the psychosynthesis of the bully.
Protesilaos Stavrou — Published
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We're going to need default hard budget caps on pretty much everything
Here's a product feature which the world is going to need a whole lot more of over the coming months and years: default hard budget caps. I'm talking about the feature of pay-by-usage services and APIs that lets you say "after $X/month, cut this thing off and return errors". These need to be hard limits…
Simon Willison — Published
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September sponsors-only newsletter
I just sent the September edition of my sponsors-only monthly newsletter. If you are a sponsor (or start a sponsorship now) you can access it here. This month: More Fable class models A pricing war 3D graphics, Blender, and pixel art LLMs come for mathematics So many more accidental cyberattacks The…
Simon Willison — Published
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Why don’t more developers “use the platform”?
For years, advocates for web standards, performance, and accessibility have implored web developers to “use the platform”. I’ve often been one of those advocates. The argument is simple: why build something yourself, in JavaScript, when the browser can do it for you? Whatever you build, it’s likely…
Nolan Lawson — Published
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Another Saturday, Another Song.
🎧 “Side Two” LP in progress. At 14 songs, it is nearly complete. I expect to release it before the year’s end. The post Another Saturday, Another Song. appeared first on Jeffrey Zeldman Presents.
Jeffrey Zeldman — Published
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Firefox version 157 is very round (and how to make it less round) – creolened.com [link]
This is very useful. I do like the direction Firefox design is going, but the very round tabs make me think the hit target for tabs - especially when pinned and muted - is much smaller than it actually is. Original link: creolened.com/firefox-version-157-is-very-round
Remy Sharp — Published
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On liberartianism and securitarianism
Essay on the general mechanics of political drifts and degredation at the social level.
Protesilaos Stavrou — Published
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Rex's Dino Store
Museum: Rex's Dino Store Located just before the turnstiles in the Grand Army Plaza subway station at the north end of Brooklyn's Prospect Park is this former newsstand which is now operated by a dinosaur. The density of dinosaur puns is exceptional. Tags: art, new-york
Simon Willison — Published
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Untitled
One of many similar photos taken this evening. Glorious!
Paul Robert Lloyd — Published
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Favourites of September 2026
The calendar claims it’s October already but the temperatures are still in denial. I can’t remember ever experiencing the start of this month that warm. It’s getting scary! See what I did there? Because of October? Spooky month? Scary? No? Worth a shot. What happened in September? More letter writing…
Wouter Groeneveld — Published
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About Omarchy and reasonableness
Excerpt from comments I made at the 'Root Access' podcast about Omarchy, technology, and politics.
Protesilaos Stavrou — Published
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About Emacs, AI contributions, and the politics of copyright
Excerpt from comments I made at the 'Root Access' podcast about Emacs, AI, and free software politics.
Protesilaos Stavrou — Published
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About comments that only communicate feelings
Commentary on feedback that only communicates feelings and how that is not actionable.
Protesilaos Stavrou — Published
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pwasm 0.2a0
Release: pwasm 0.2a0 pwasm is one of my folly projects - an entirely vibe-coded pure Python WebAssembly engine that I built in January during my first bout of AI mania. I hadn't touched it since January, so I decided to let Claude Opus 5.5 loose on it and see if it could make any significant improvements…
Simon Willison — Published
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Quoting Matthew Green
[...] Put these pieces together and you have the two halves of a worm: a payload that hijacks the agent, and an agent that will carry the payload to the next agent. Agents in separately-isolated sandboxes discovered that they could leave instructions for each other in a shared package cache, and those…
Simon Willison — Published
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Goodbye WordPress
This blog has moved from WordPress.com to self-hosting. If you were following it via WordPress, you should use an RSS reader pointed at nolanlawson.com/feed instead. WordPress has served me faithfully for 15 years, but I think it’s time to move on. A few things have nudged me in that direction: The…
Nolan Lawson — Published
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Notes on the underclass, materialism, corruption, religion, and ethnicity
Extensive commentary that covers a broad view of history, geopolitics, religion, and human nature.
Protesilaos Stavrou — Published
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About structure, the little things, and critical thinking
An essay on the importance of structure at the person and social level.
Protesilaos Stavrou — Published
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He Built This City
I visited the Museum of the City of New York today and got to see He Built This City: Joe Macken’s Model, the 50 x27 feet model of the city built over a 21 year period from balsa wood and cardboard. It exceeded my already high expectations. The exhibition closes on 12th October so you should absolutely…
Simon Willison — Published
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Dear Software Makers
Marques Brownlee just released a video essay titled “Dear YouTube”. I loved it. He talks about how YouTube is going to start shipping this new feature where makers can essentially publish different “variants” of their videos and see which performs best (an A/B test). Which immediately begs a lot of questions…
Jim Nielsen — Published
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More than words
While I’ve done a lot of reference documentation writing, my favourite type of work is writing tutorials and “how to” content. I enjoy the challenge of understanding a technology and an audience, then explaining the technology to that audience. AI seems to be particularly bad at creating this kind of…
Rachel Andrew — Published
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About the Toucan2 and other split mechanical keyboard considerations
My opinion on how to choose a split mechanical keyboard.
Protesilaos Stavrou — Published
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About feeling judged, forgiving oneself, and moving on
A comment on the sense of judgement, forgiveness, and progress.
Protesilaos Stavrou — Published
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Quoting Anthropic Frontier Red Team
We evaluate several models on 100 tasks from the [internal Binary Exploitation benchmark] (selected at random), and find that GLM-5.3 develops full control flow hijacks in 4% of the trials; Claude Mythos Preview did so in 6%. Although GLM-5.3 performs below Claude Mythos Preview here, a meaningful threshold…
Simon Willison — Published
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This reality must be a dream
As I'm making the lich game, I'm experiencing something new, which is the addicting nature of having a vision in my head and realizing it in reality exactly how I see it. I'm not an artist, so I couldn't quite do it before, and now I can. It is incredibly addicting and empowering. I have seen so many…
a327ex — Published
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Art from humans to humans
The threads here touch on a lot of good points, @gorilla_wrfre is correct that focusing on quality is a losing game and focusing on communication instead is the right move, this is the same point I made in #459. I personally believe that good art is good art, it doesn't matter who it came from, but most…
a327ex — Published
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Just don't lie
The way the incentives work for AI art in video games is that a single AI asset requires a disclosure, which will alienate some fraction of players. So if you use one AI asset, you might as well use ten thousand of them, because only the first one is penalized. Just don't lie. The moment I realized AI…
a327ex — Published
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My Glamorous Life: in Which I am a Target
As I limped home from Physical Therapy, a man walking in the opposite direction suddenly planted himself directly in front of me and slammed me in the head with a heavy bag. It was a cloth bag, like a backpack with only one strap. I’ve no idea what was inside it : a beat box? […] The post My Glamorous…
Jeffrey Zeldman — Published
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VLM Enhanced Metadata For My Icon Galleries
Confession: I got nerd-sniped by Sam Henri Gold’s request for my icon galleries: I'd like to humbly request artwork-level searching in macosicongallery.com What follows is a train-of-thought blog post as I play with what an implementation might look like. I’ve actually long-wanted something like this…
Jim Nielsen — Published
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More actively anti-gambling
Transações com Pix têm queda de 10% após proibição de bets https://valor.globo.com/financas/noticia/2026/09/29/transacoes-com-pix-tem-queda-de-10percent-apos-proibicao-de-bets.ghtml The tweet above links to an article saying "pix transactions fall 10% after bets ban." If you don't know, Pix is a Brazilian…
a327ex — Published
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GPT 6.1 Sol: Near-Astra intelligence for a fifth of the price
My comment on GPT 6.1 Sol: Near-Astra intelligence for a fifth of the price — Hacker News.I'm a bit late with the pelicans because I was live-blogging the keynote: https://simonwillison.net/2026/Sep/29/openai-devday-2026-liv... Here they are for GPT-6.1-Sol: https://tools.simonwillison.net/markdown-svg…
Simon Willison — Published
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Photo Scrubber — local face blur & metadata removal
Tool: Photo Scrubber — local face blur & metadata removal I took a photograph of some protesters, then thought about how I don't like sharing photographs of strangers with identifiable faces. I had GPT-6 Astra build this experimental tool that would identify faces and automatically blur them out. It…
Simon Willison — Published
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OpenAI DevDay 2026 live blog
I'm at OpenAI DevDay today, in Fort Mason, San Francisco. Same as last year I'll be live blogging the keynote and some other notes during the day. OpenAI gave me a free ticket and a seat in the "creator" area for the keynote. Tags: ai, openai, generative-ai, llms, coding-agents, live-blog, openai-devday
Simon Willison — Published
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October Is Spooky Video Game Month
It’s just two days shy of being October, the spookiest month of the year. October does not just signify Inktober or any other compound word involving the name of the month. No; October means playing Mega Ran, Richie Branson & Kadesh Flow’s Ghouls ‘N Ghosts albums on repeat (we’re the kings of the night…
Wouter Groeneveld — Published
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Français: Les lignes de l’horizon
C'est normal d'avoir beaucoup des difficultés quand les lignes de ton horizon changent.
Protesilaos Stavrou — Published
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Emacs: status update on the ‘denote-data’ cache for Denote
A status update on the project I am working on to have an opt-in, in-memory cache for Denote.
Protesilaos Stavrou — Published
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Comment on guilt by association about Omarchy and the Modus themes
A comment I made on the 'Root Access' live stream about Omarchy and the Modus themes.
Protesilaos Stavrou — Published
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llm-anthropic 0.30
Release: llm-anthropic 0.30 In addition to Claude Sonnet 5.5, this release adds the ability to run llm anthropic refresh to refresh the list of Anthropic models directly from their API - which means I don't need to push a new release just to add support for a newly released model. I also added an llm…
Simon Willison — Published
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Claude Sonnet 5.5
Claude Sonnet 5.5 New Sonnet model from Anthropic today. They say it "runs 30%+ faster, and costs up to 30% less for most work" - it's priced the same as Sonnet 5 but appears to beat it on every benchmark, and should be cheaper to run as well. Here are some pelicans riding bicycles. Sonnet 5.5 suffered…
Simon Willison — Published
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#Corpowid and #Skynet Technologies Will Get You Sued
The market is flooded with so many accessibility overlays that it’s impossible to keep up. I’ve written about the biggest players (plus some also-rans) and provided enough technical details that most readers should know how to quickly evaluate their false claims and poor technology. Never mind their…
Adrian Roselli — Published
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Quoting @joedaroo
To say that we were surprised at the jump and suddenness of the capabilities of our models when it came to “cyber” or “swarming” or “message boards” or anything else related to the incidents is an understatement. Security posture takes time to develop. It’s not just about hardening the systems at play…
Simon Willison — Published
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Dutch Police Arrest ‘Reformed’ Hacker in Shiny Hunters Investigation
Authorities in the Netherlands have arrested a 23-year-old convicted cybercriminal on suspicion of aiding in data thefts and extortions by the prolific hacker group ShinyHunters. In the days immediately following the suspect's arrest, remaining ShinyHunters members dramatically escalated their attacks…
Brian Krebs — Published
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Stalking the stalker
This post's first paragraph is a great example of the same technique I used on the first chapter of It Follows. An early confession of doing something weird, callous, and kind of psychotic, is a great way to pull in readers and keep them interested. I have no data on this, but I'm pretty sure a fair…
a327ex — Published
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AI has replaced the technical need for artists
a327ex — Published
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There are no "rogue" AI agents [link]
I've read so many posts in the last few months about AI agents going "rogue" and this post does a good job of calling absolute bullshit on the language being used by media outlets (and the tech companies themselves). AI cannot think for itself, nor can it take independent actions. But anthropomorphizing…
Remy Sharp — Published
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Weekly Update 523: Live From a Norwegian Fjord
How's that view?! With NDC Oslo now done, it's a little bit of sightseeing before heading to Denmark for GOTO in Copenhagen for Scott's and my "Cyber-broken" talk. In the meantime, this week is mostly about the ShinyHunters trajectory targeting both
Troy Hunt — Published
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Quoting Muse AI Agent
Bad news on the MX Keys Mini pickup. Usman showed up at your building around 9:15 and waited, messaged a bunch of times, and nobody came down. He left angry at 9:38 and left a negative rating. Worse, my auto-reply told him "Yep I'm here!" at 9:27 when you clearly weren't available, which is on me. That's…
Simon Willison — Published
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Loneliness and the act of listening
Note about loneliness and listening.
Protesilaos Stavrou — Published