Latest entries
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Interactive explanations
Agentic Engineering Patterns > When we lose track of how code written by our agents works we take on cognitive debt. For a lot of things this doesn't matter: if the code fetches some data from a database and outputs it as JSON the implementation details are likely simple enough that we don't need to…
Simon Willison — Published
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Trump moves to ban Anthropic from the US government
The Defense Department pressured Anthropic to drop restrictions on how its AI can be used by the military.
Ars Technica — Published
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In puzzling outbreak, officials look to cold beer, gross ice, and ChatGPT
An AI chatbot convinced health investigators they had the right answer.
Ars Technica — Published
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Who is the Kimwolf Botmaster “Dort”?
In early January 2026, KrebsOnSecurity revealed how a security researcher disclosed a vulnerability that was used to assemble Kimwolf, the world's largest and most disruptive botnet. Since then, the person in control of Kimwolf -- who goes by the handle "Dort" -- has coordinated a barrage of distributed…
Brian Krebs — Published
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Google quantum-proofs HTTPS by squeezing 15kB of data into 700-byte space
Merkle Tree Certificate support is already in Chrome. Soon, it will be everywhere.
Ars Technica — Published
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The Air Force's new ICBM is nearly ready to fly, but there’s nowhere to put it
"There were assumptions that were made in the strategy that obviously didn’t come to fruition."
Ars Technica — Published
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Anti-Book Book club
The Anti-book book club started as an excuse to meet with friends every month or two. I wanted to document what the idea was and how it worked. Regular book clubs all chose a single book to talk about. There are a few disadvantages to this though: It doesn't cater to personal preferences on the book…
Josh Ghent — Published
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International relations and impunity
Global justice is not attainable. What we can hope for is a viable balance of forces.
Protesilaos Stavrou — Published
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Please, please, please stop using passkeys for encrypting user data
Please, please, please stop using passkeys for encrypting user data Because users lose their passkeys all the time, and may not understand that their data has been irreversibly encrypted using them and can no longer be recovered. Tim Cappalli: To the wider identity industry: please stop promoting and…
Simon Willison — Published
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Under a Paramount-WBD merger, two struggling media giants would unite
Can two declining companies form a profitable one?
Ars Technica — Published
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Photons that aren't actually there influence superconductivity
Interactions between neighboring materials is mediated by virtual photons.
Ars Technica — Published
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An AI agent coding skeptic tries AI agent coding, in excessive detail
An AI agent coding skeptic tries AI agent coding, in excessive detail Another in the genre of "OK, coding agents got good in November" posts, this one is by Max Woolf and is very much worth your time. He describes a sequence of coding agent projects, each more ambitious than the last - starting with…
Simon Willison — Published
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Whoops: US military laser strike takes down CBP drone near Mexican border
Trump admin "incompetence continues to cause chaos in our skies," Duckworth says.
Ars Technica — Published
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The AI apocalypse is nigh in Good Luck, Have Fun, Don't Die
Director Gore Verbinksi and screenwriter Matthew Robinson on the making of this darkly satirical sci-fi film.
Ars Technica — Published
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Computers and the Internet: A Two-Edged Sword
Dave Rupert articulated something in “Priority of idle hands” that’s been growing in my subconscious for years: I had a small, intrusive realization the other day that computers and the internet are probably bad for me […] This is hard to accept because a lot of my work, hobbies, education, entertainment…
Jim Nielsen — Published
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Hyperion author Dan Simmons dies from stroke at 77
I went into Hyperion blind, decades ago, knowing almost nothing about it. I was never the same.
Ars Technica — Published
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Free Claude Max for (large project) open source maintainers
Free Claude Max for (large project) open source maintainers Anthropic are now offering their $200/month Claude Max 20x plan for free to open source maintainers... for six months... and you have to meet the following criteria: Maintainers: You're a primary maintainer or core team member of a public repo…
Simon Willison — Published
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Unicode Explorer using binary search over fetch() HTTP range requests
Unicode Explorer using binary search over fetch() HTTP range requests Here's a little prototype I built this morning from my phone as an experiment in HTTP range requests, and a general example of using LLMs to satisfy curiosity. I've been collecting HTTP range tricks for a while now, and I decided it…
Simon Willison — Published
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How strong is New York's "illegal gambling" case against Valve's loot boxes?
Lawyers tell Ars the state has a tough road ahead, even as Valve is uniquely vulnerable.
Ars Technica — Published
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And the award for the most improved EV goes to... the 2026 Toyota bZ
Toyota's small electric SUV is much-revised, much more efficient, and much better.
Ars Technica — Published
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Netflix cedes Warner Bros. Discovery to Paramount: “No longer financially attractive”
Netflix shares jumped following the announcement.
Ars Technica — Published
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NASA shakes up its Artemis program to speed up lunar return
"Launching SLS every three and a half years or so is not a recipe for success."
Ars Technica — Published
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How to downgrade from macOS 26 Tahoe on a new Mac
Most new Macs can still be downgraded with few downsides. Here's what to know.
Ars Technica — Published
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Block lays off 40% of workforce as it goes all-in on AI tools
CEO says "most companies are late" to realize how much technology will affect employment.
Ars Technica — Published
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Apple says it has "a big week ahead." Here's what we expect to see.
Apple is taking an "ain't broke/don't fix" approach to most of its gadgets.
Ars Technica — Published
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Rocket Report: Vulcan "many months" from flying; Falcon 9 extends reuse milestone
"As the original architect of Vector’s vision, it’s deeply meaningful to bring these assets home."
Ars Technica — Published
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Supply Chain Irony
There is a certain irony that large organisations carry out a myriad of checks, due diligence, impact assessments, contract reviews and more for any and all business they themselves do business with. But, their team of developers npm, pip, or cargo install any and all dependencies built by a single person…
Josh Ghent — Published
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Yes, and...
I teach computer science at Montana State University. I am the father of three sons who all know I am a computer programmer and one of whom, at least, has expressed interest in the field. I love computer programming and try to communicate that love to my sons, the students in my classes and anyone else…
Carson Gross — Published
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Untitled
Just got bitten by a dog, which kinda sums up this Thursday.
Paul Robert Lloyd — Published
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Neanderthals seemed to have a thing for modern human women
"Neanderthal deserts" in our genomes suggest a strong pattern in matings.
Ars Technica — Published
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Perplexity announces "Computer," an AI agent that assigns work to other AI agents
It's also a buttoned-down, ostensibly safer take on the OpenClaw concept.
Ars Technica — Published
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xAI spent $7M building wall that barely muffles annoying power plant noise
“Temu sound wall” not enough to quell fury over xAI’s power plant.
Ars Technica — Published
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Hoard things you know how to do
Agentic Engineering Patterns > Many of my tips for working productively with coding agents are extensions of advice I've found useful in my career without them. Here's a great example of that: hoard things you know how to do. A big part of the skill in building software is understanding what's possible…
Simon Willison — Published
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Quoting Andrej Karpathy
It is hard to communicate how much programming has changed due to AI in the last 2 months: not gradually and over time in the "progress as usual" way, but specifically this last December. There are a number of asterisks but imo coding agents basically didn’t work before December and basically work since…
Simon Willison — Published
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Managing Multiple Development Ecosystem Installs
In the past year, I occasionally required another Java Development Kit besides the usual one defined in $JAVA_HOME to build certain modules against older versions and certain modules against bleeding edge versions. In the Java world, that’s rather trivial thanks to IntelliJ’s project settings: you can…
Wouter Groeneveld — Published
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Google API Keys Weren't Secrets. But then Gemini Changed the Rules.
Google API Keys Weren't Secrets. But then Gemini Changed the Rules. Yikes! It turns out Gemini and Google Maps (and other services) share the same API keys... but Google Maps API keys are designed to be public, since they are embedded directly in web pages. Gemini API keys can be used to access private…
Simon Willison — Published
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Quoting Benedict Evans
If people are only using this a couple of times a week at most, and can’t think of anything to do with it on the average day, it hasn’t changed their life. OpenAI itself admits the problem, talking about a ‘capability gap’ between what the models can do and what people do with them, which seems to me…
Simon Willison — Published
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Todoist Setup 2026
I’ve used Todoist for almost a decade and completed over 50,000 tasks on there. Over time my setup has changed quite a lot. Previously I used a standard GTD setup - one that Todoist itself lends itself to. If you haven’t read Getting things Done, one thing it defines that anything that requires 2 or…
Josh Ghent — Published
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tldraw issue: Move tests to closed source repo
tldraw issue: Move tests to closed source repo It's become very apparent over the past few months that a comprehensive test suite is enough to build a completely fresh implementation of any open source library from scratch, potentially in a different language. This has worrying implications for open…
Simon Willison — Published
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Claude Code Remote Control
Claude Code Remote Control New Claude Code feature dropped yesterday: you can now run a "remote control" session on your computer and then use the Claude Code for web interfaces (on web, iOS and native desktop app) to send prompts to that session. It's a little bit janky right now. Initially when I tried…
Simon Willison — Published
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I vibe coded my dream macOS presentation app
I gave a talk this weekend at Social Science FOO Camp in Mountain View. The event was a classic unconference format where anyone could present a talk without needing to propose it in advance. I grabbed a slot for a talk I titled "The State of LLMs, February 2026 edition", subtitle "It's all changed since…
Simon Willison — Published
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Quoting Kellan Elliott-McCrea
It’s also reasonable for people who entered technology in the last couple of decades because it was good job, or because they enjoyed coding to look at this moment with a real feeling of loss. That feeling of loss though can be hard to understand emotionally for people my age who entered tech because…
Simon Willison — Published
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Linear walkthroughs
Agentic Engineering Patterns > Sometimes it's useful to have a coding agent give you a structured walkthrough of a codebase. Maybe it's existing code you need to get up to speed on, maybe it's your own code that you've forgotten the details of, or maybe you vibe coded the whole thing and need to understand…
Simon Willison — Published
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Against Query Based Compilers
Query based compilers are all the rage these days, so it feels only appropriate to chart some treacherous shoals in those waters.
Alex Kladov — Published
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Power Puttering
You know those tiny jobs you never think to do until you’re sat on the loo with no paper? Yeah me too. To solve those tiny jobs that don’t deserve dedicated time, I decided to start bundling them together into a sort of power hour - hence Power Puttering. I schedule this power puttering time when I know…
Josh Ghent — Published
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Interpretation of “I now begin to remember” by Pavlos Pavlides
Translation of---and philosophical commentary on---a Greek song whose translated title is 'I now begin to remember'.
Protesilaos Stavrou — Published
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go-size-analyzer
go-size-analyzer The Go ecosystem is really good at tooling. I just learned about this tool for analyzing the size of Go binaries using a pleasing treemap view of their bundled dependencies. You can install and run the tool locally, but it's also compiled to WebAssembly and hosted at gsa.zxilly.dev …
Simon Willison — Published
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First run the tests
Agentic Engineering Patterns > Automated tests are no longer optional when working with coding agents. The old excuses for not writing them - that they're time consuming and expensive to constantly rewrite while a codebase is rapidly evolving - no longer hold when an agent can knock them into shape in…
Simon Willison — Published
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Weekly Update 492
The recurring theme this week seems to be around the gap between breaches happening and individual victims finding out about them. It's tempting to blame this on the corporate victim of the breach (the hacked company), but they're simultaneously dealing with a criminal intrusion, a ransom
Troy Hunt — Published
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Rivers of London (Rivers of London, #1) [book]
Vivid voice, fun and dark and original. I wasn't sure what I was getting in to reading Rivers of London (recommended multiple times on socials), especially as I kept finding the teens/young adult book cover for it (reminding me of the multiple covers the Harry Potter books had) - but I decided to jump…
Remy Sharp — Published
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Building Semantic Search on my Content
I've added some pretty cool AI-powered features to kentcdodds.com and I want to tell you all about it.
Kent C. Dodds — Published
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Helping YOU ask ME questions with AI
Here's how I've made it easier for you to call into the Call Kent podcast without having to record yourself and also make yourself anonymous using AI.
Kent C. Dodds — Published
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6 life lessons I discovered while learning to ski
Falling down a mountain strapped to two slender skis feels like an analogy for life.
Paul Robert Lloyd — Published
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Making Icon Sets Easy With Web Origami
Over the years, I’ve used different icon sets on my blog. Right now I use Heroicons. The recommended way to use them is to copy/paste the source from the website directly into your HTML. It’s a pretty straightforward process: Go to the website Search for the icon you want Hover it Click to “Copy SVG…
Jim Nielsen — Published
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Ladybird adopts Rust, with help from AI
Ladybird adopts Rust, with help from AI Really interesting case-study from Andreas Kling on advanced, sophisticated use of coding agents for ambitious coding projects with critical code. After a few years hoping Swift's platform support outside of the Apple ecosystem would mature they switched tracks…
Simon Willison — Published
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Writing about Agentic Engineering Patterns
I've started a new project to collect and document Agentic Engineering Patterns - coding practices and patterns to help get the best results out of this new era of coding agent development we find ourselves entering. I'm using Agentic Engineering to refer to building software using coding agents - tools…
Simon Willison — Published
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Writing code is cheap now
Agentic Engineering Patterns > The biggest challenge in adopting agentic engineering practices is getting comfortable with the consequences of the fact that writing code is cheap now. Code has always been expensive. Producing a few hundred lines of clean, tested code takes most software developers a…
Simon Willison — Published
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Quoting Paul Ford
The paper asked me to explain vibe coding, and I did so, because I think something big is coming there, and I'm deep in, and I worry that normal people are not able to see it and I want them to be prepared. But people can't just read something and hate you quietly; they can't see that you have provided…
Simon Willison — Published
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How to Unsubscribe from Modern Luxury
A few years ago I started getting issues of Modern Luxury in the mail. I had no idea why they started coming, and I tried to get them to stop. This should have been easy, and was instead hard. Here’s my process, in case anyone else is in the same boat. First, if you use it, try to unsubscribe via PaperKarma…
Kyle Kingsbury — Published
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Never Blow Up Your Bridges
Ten years ago, I first met my now colleague who then acted as the internship guide for a couple of graduate students that had their first taste of the industry at my previous (previous) employer. We only had brief contact: I was supposed to guide the interns from the industry side, and he was supposed…
Wouter Groeneveld — Published
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Reply guy
The latest scourge of Twitter is AI bots that reply to your tweets with generic, banal commentary slop, often accompanied by a question to "drive engagement" and waste as much of your time as possible. I just found out that the category name for this genre of software is reply guy tools. Amazing. Tags…
Simon Willison — Published
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Quoting Summer Yue
Nothing humbles you like telling your OpenClaw “confirm before acting” and watching it speedrun deleting your inbox. I couldn’t stop it from my phone. I had to RUN to my Mac mini like I was defusing a bomb. I said “Check this inbox too and suggest what you would archive or delete, don’t action until…
Simon Willison — Published
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The Death of the Software Craftsman
The death of a software craftsman Well, it happens a lot ‘round here You think quality is a common goal That goes to show how little you know Developers work hard over the years to cultivate tools and techniques to improve the quality of the construction of their software. These tools and techniques…
David Bryant Copeland — Published
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Sprites on the Web
In game development, it’s common to use spritesheets for animation, but this technique isn’t as widely used on the web these days. Which is a shame, because we can do some pretty cool stuff with sprites! In this post, we’ll share the niche CSS function you can use to leverage this technique, and explore…
Josh W. Comeau — Published
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Red/green TDD
Agentic Engineering Patterns > "Use red/green TDD" is a pleasingly succinct way to get better results out of a coding agent. TDD stands for Test Driven Development. It's a programming style where you ensure every piece of code you write is accompanied by automated tests that demonstrate the code works…
Simon Willison — Published
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Some Silly Z3 Scripts I Wrote
As part of writing Logic for Programmers I produced a lot of “chaff”, code samples and sections I wrote up and then threw away. Sometimes I found a better example for the same topic, sometimes I threw the topic away entirely. It felt bad to let everything all rot on my hard drive, so I’m sharing a bunch…
Hillel Wayne — Published
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Selfie: a portrait of me by Ro
A sketch of me by Ro.
Protesilaos Stavrou — Published
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The Claude C Compiler: What It Reveals About the Future of Software
The Claude C Compiler: What It Reveals About the Future of Software On February 5th Anthropic's Nicholas Carlini wrote about a project to use parallel Claudes to build a C compiler on top of the brand new Opus 4.6 Chris Lattner (Swift, LLVM, Clang, Mojo) knows more about C compilers than most. He just…
Simon Willison — Published
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London Stock Exchange: Raspberry Pi Holdings plc
London Stock Exchange: Raspberry Pi Holdings plc Striking graph illustrating stock in the UK Raspberry Pi holding company spiking on Tuesday: The Telegraph credited excitement around OpenClaw: Raspberry Pi's stock price has surged 30pc in two days, amid chatter on social media that the company's tiny…
Simon Willison — Published
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How AI Labs Proliferate
SITUATION: there are 14 competing AI labs. “We can’t trust any of these people with super-intelligence. We need to build it ourselves to ensure it’s done right!" “YEAH!” SOON: there are 15 competing AI labs. (See: xkcd on standards.) The irony: “we’re the responsible ones” is each lab’s founding mythology…
Jim Nielsen — Published
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How I think about Codex
How I think about Codex Gabriel Chua (Developer Experience Engineer for APAC at OpenAI) provides his take on the confusing terminology behind the term "Codex", which can refer to a bunch of of different things within the OpenAI ecosystem: In plain terms, Codex is OpenAI’s software engineering agent,…
Simon Willison — Published
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Disintegrate, Reintegrate, Extrude
I wrote last week how my wife and I had to say goodbye to Clementine. Without going into detail, caring for our sick cat took a lot out of us. Since last summer, Clem needed some kind of daily medical care: ear drops, pills, special food, eye lube. Yes,...
Ash Furrow — Published
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Prot Asks: Ro about programmatic thinking, political discourse, and self-discovery through art
In this 3-hour video I talk with Ro about a wide variety of issues that cover programming, politics, and art.
Protesilaos Stavrou — Published
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Quoting Thibault Sottiaux
We’ve made GPT-5.3-Codex-Spark about 30% faster. It is now serving at over 1200 tokens per second. — Thibault Sottiaux, OpenAI Tags: openai, llms, ai, generative-ai, llm-performance
Simon Willison — Published
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Andrej Karpathy talks about "Claws"
Andrej Karpathy talks about "Claws" Andrej Karpathy tweeted a mini-essay about buying a Mac Mini ("The apple store person told me they are selling like hotcakes and everyone is confused") to tinker with Claws: I'm definitely a bit sus'd to run OpenClaw specifically [...] But I do love the concept and…
Simon Willison — Published
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Wrapping Code Comments
I was today years old when I realized that:
Alex Kladov — Published
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Adding TILs, releases, museums, tools and research to my blog
I've been wanting to add indications of my various other online activities to my blog for a while now. I just turned on a new feature I'm calling "beats" (after story beats, naming this was hard!) which adds five new types of content to my site, all corresponding to activity elsewhere. Here's what beats…
Simon Willison — Published
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Taalas serves Llama 3.1 8B at 17,000 tokens/second
Taalas serves Llama 3.1 8B at 17,000 tokens/second This new Canadian hardware startup just announced their first product - a custom hardware implementation of the Llama 3.1 8B model (from July 2024) that can run at a staggering 17,000 tokens/second. I was going to include a video of their demo but it's…
Simon Willison — Published
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‘Starkiller’ Phishing Service Proxies Real Login Pages, MFA
Most phishing websites are little more than static copies of login pages for popular online destinations, and they are often quickly taken down by anti-abuse activists and security firms. But a stealthy new phishing-as-a-service offering lets customers sidestep both of these pitfalls: It uses cleverly…
Brian Krebs — Published
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How I used Cursor to Migrate Frameworks
I upgraded kentcdodds.com from Remix v2 to React Router v7 in a day with over 17k lines of code changed. Here's how I did it.
Kent C. Dodds — Published
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American healthcare
Cooling my heels at the drugstore. The post American healthcare appeared first on Jeffrey Zeldman Presents.
Jeffrey Zeldman — Published
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Selfie: the loquat tree is doing well
Selfie picture of me next to a loquat tree
Protesilaos Stavrou — Published
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border-shape: the future of the non-rectangular web
Learn about new geometry capabilities with this game-changing experimental CSS feature.
Una Kravets — Published
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A Few Rambling Observations on Care
In this new AI world, “taste” is the thing everyone claims is the new supreme skill. But I think “care” is the one I want to see in the products I buy. Can you measure care? Does scale drive out care? If a product conversation is reduced to being arbitrated exclusively by numbers, is care lost? The more…
Jim Nielsen — Published
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You had a story
You had a story you used to tell yourself about how you got here in life. You’d share the story with others. Maybe you’d be at a party, and someone would ask what you do, and you’d say, “I’m a programmer.” And their eyes would perk up and their mind would fill with images of […]
Nolan Lawson — Published
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Generative AI has broken the subject matter expert/editor relationship
Some thoughts about managing a publishing pipeline in a world of generative AI.
Rachel Andrew — Published
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Emacs: confirm package bugs with –init-directory
Information on how to use the Emacs --init-directory flag to identify bugs with packages you rely on.
Protesilaos Stavrou — Published
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Notes on clarifying man pages
Hello! After spending some time working on the Git man pages last year, I’ve been thinking a little more about what makes a good man page. I’ve spent a lot of time writing cheat sheets for tools (tcpdump, git, dig, etc) which have a man page as their primary documentation. This is because I often find…
Julia Evans — Published
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A Note On Presenting Code in Emacs
The other day, I decided it was finally time. It was finally time to open Emacs to demonstrate certain code functionalities in class. The result was predictable: it caused further confusion among already confused students. The root cause wasn’t switching out a familiar WebStorm-like environment for an…
Wouter Groeneveld — Published
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Fostering Community
I shared this in our Slack this morning and wanted to share it here because this is the type of community we’re trying to foster. We want to For now, the ticket for joining our community is purchasing one of […]
Brad Frost — Published
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Weekly Update 491
Well, the ESP32 Bluetooth bridge experiment was a complete failure. Not the radios themselves, they're actually pretty cool, but there's just no way I could get the Yale locks to be reliably operated by them. At a guess, BLE is a bit too passive to detect
Troy Hunt — Published
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Goodbye Clementine
My wife and I said goodbye to our cat Clementine today. We had her for just four years – our time was cut short by cancer. Things have been up and down for months, but at the start of the year we changed priorities to keep her comfortable. Clementine and...
Ash Furrow — Published
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Interpretation of “My old troubles” by Kadinelia
Translation of---and philosophical commentary on---a Greek song whose translated title is 'My old troubles'.
Protesilaos Stavrou — Published
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Untitled
Lovely evening spent in a local pub, drinking beer, eating pie and mash and coming fifth (out of seven teams) in the pub quiz with my fellow quizzer, Becky. A truly wonderful way to start the week.
Paul Robert Lloyd — Published
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Announcing Live AI & Design Systems Jam Sessions!
Ian, TJ, and I are excited to announce live AI & Design Systems Jam Sessions with our AI & Design Systems course community! Our first jam session will be Thursday, February 26 at 10AM ET. In these recurring biweekly Zoom […]
Brad Frost — Published
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The salad bar theory of UX professionalism
Less, but better? Not this week. The post The salad bar theory of UX professionalism appeared first on Jeffrey Zeldman Presents.
Jeffrey Zeldman — Published
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Diagnostics Factory
In Error Codes For Control Flow, I explained that Zig's strongly-typed error codes solve the handling half of error management, leaving reporting to the users. Today, I want to describe my personal default approach to the reporting problem, that is, showing the user a useful error message.
Alex Kladov — Published
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Emacs: I will talk about Emacs and free software (FLOSS @ Oxford)
Information about my upcoming Emacs-related talk for the event 'FLOSS @ Oxford'.
Protesilaos Stavrou — Published
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Days of miracle and wonder
Oprah Winfrey and I have something in common, which is that our favorite album is Paul Simon’s Graceland. I’ve been thinking a lot recently about the opening track, “The Boy in the Bubble”. The song can be read a few different ways, but I read it as an aging man amazed by modernity but also […]
Nolan Lawson — Published
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Selfie: sunshine at last
Selfie picture of me facing the sun while standing under the shade of a tree.
Protesilaos Stavrou — Published