Latest entries

  1. Ding-dong! The Exploration Upper Stage is dead

    The Exploration Upper Stage did not in any way get NASA closer to landing on the Moon.

    Ars TechnicaPublished

  2. Satellite firm pauses imagery after revealing Iran's attacks on US bases

    Planet wants to prevent "adversarial actors" from using images for "Battle Damage Assessment" purposes.

    Ars TechnicaPublished

  3. Fishing crews in the Atlantic keep accidentally dredging up chemical weapons

    Fishing crews face horrifying burns from dredging the dumped chemical weapons.

    Ars TechnicaPublished

  4. Quoting Ally Piechowski

    Questions for developers: “What’s the one area you’re afraid to touch?” “When’s the last time you deployed on a Friday?” “What broke in production in the last 90 days that wasn’t caught by tests?” Questions for the CTO/EM: “What feature has been blocked for over a year?” “Do you have real-time error…

    Simon WillisonPublished

  5. Google's new command-line tool can plug OpenClaw into your Workspace data

    This could make it easier to plug AI into Workspace APIs, but it's not yet an official Google product.

    Ars TechnicaPublished

  6. Feds take notice of iOS vulnerabilities exploited under mysterious circumstances

    The long, strange trip of a large assembly of advanced iOS exploits.

    Ars TechnicaPublished

  7. Asteroid defense mission shifted the orbit of more than its target

    The binary asteroid's orbit around the Sun was affected by the impact.

    Ars TechnicaPublished

  8. How moss helped convict grave robbers of a Chicago cemetery

    Burr Oak Cemetery is the final resting place of Emmett Till and blues singer Willie Dixon, among others.

    Ars TechnicaPublished

  9. Musk fails to block California data disclosure law he fears will ruin xAI

    Musk can't convince judge public doesn’t care about where AI training data comes from.

    Ars TechnicaPublished

  10. Colorado SB26-051 Age Attestation

    Colorado is presently considering a bill, SB26-051, patterned off of California’s AB1043, which establishes civil penalties for software developers who do not request age information for their users. The bills use a broad sense of “Application Store” which would seem to encompass essentially any package…

    Kyle KingsburyPublished

  11. Anthropic and the Pentagon

    Anthropic and the Pentagon This piece by Bruce Schneier and Nathan E. Sanders is the most thoughtful and grounded coverage I've seen of the recent and ongoing Pentagon/OpenAI/Anthropic contract situation. AI models are increasingly commodified. The top-tier offerings have about the same performance,…

    Simon WillisonPublished

  12. Americans trust Fauci over RFK Jr. and career scientists over Trump officials

    RFK Jr. has tried hard to villainize Fauci. Americans still trust Fauci more.

    Ars TechnicaPublished

  13. Climate change sucks, but at least it won't kill your EV battery

    Older EVs, but not newer ones, may lose up to 30 percent range in a warming world.

    Ars TechnicaPublished

  14. Apple users in the US can no longer download ByteDance's Chinese apps

    Move comes in the wake of TikTok's transfer of US operations.

    Ars TechnicaPublished

  15. Reading List 355

    This reading list is courtesy of Vivaldi browser, who pay me decent money to fight for a better web and don’t moan at me for reading all this stuff. We’ve just released a Vivaldi desktop snapshot, with a new onboarding step for people who have visual impairments, require keyboard-only access or use assistive…

    Bruce LawsonPublished

  16. Apple's 512GB Mac Studio vanishes, a quiet acknowledgment of the RAM shortage

    Announcements this week were mostly business as usual, but Apple isn't immune.

    Ars TechnicaPublished

  17. With Gateway likely gone, where will lunar landers rendezvous with Orion?

    "We will challenge every requirement, clear every obstacle, delete every blocker."

    Ars TechnicaPublished

  18. Why are vertebrate eyes so different from those of other animals?

    A new hypothesis proposes that our ancestors lost their eyes, then rebuilt them.

    Ars TechnicaPublished

  19. Tech industry is in tariff hell, even if refunds are automated

    Trade groups urge court to create a simple blueprint for tariff refunds.

    Ars TechnicaPublished

  20. AI startup sues ex-CEO, saying he took 41GB of email and lied on résumé

    Hayden AI also claims co-founder improperly sold over $1.2M in stock.

    Ars TechnicaPublished

  21. Which of these two arcades is the "world largest"—and does it matter?

    While semantics count for some, gamers win either way.

    Ars TechnicaPublished

  22. Rocket Report: SpaceX launch prices are going up; Russia fixes broken launch pad

    It looks like United Launch Alliance will build more upper stages for NASA's SLS rocket.

    Ars TechnicaPublished

  23. Agentic manual testing

    Agentic Engineering Patterns > The defining characteristic of a coding agent is that it can execute the code that it writes. This is what makes coding agents so much more useful than LLMs that simply spit out code without any way to verify it. Never assume that code generated by an LLM works until that…

    Simon WillisonPublished

  24. Clinejection — Compromising Cline's Production Releases just by Prompting an Issue Triager

    Clinejection — Compromising Cline's Production Releases just by Prompting an Issue Triager Adnan Khan describes a devious attack chain against the Cline GitHub repository, which started with a prompt injection attack in the title of an issue opened against the repo. Cline were running AI-powered issue…

    Simon WillisonPublished

  25. Taking it easy

    An entry from my journal where I comment on how I do not worry about what will happen to this world.

    Protesilaos StavrouPublished

  26. Introducing GPT‑5.4

    Introducing GPT‑5.4 Two new API models: gpt-5.4 and gpt-5.4-pro, also available in ChatGPT and Codex CLI. August 31st 2025 knowledge cutoff, 1 million token context window. Priced slightly higher than the GPT-5.2 family with a bump in price for both models if you go above 272,000 tokens. 5.4 beats coding…

    Simon WillisonPublished

  27. Workers report watching Ray-Ban Meta-shot footage of people using the bathroom

    Meta accused of "concealing the facts" about smart glass users' privacy.

    Ars TechnicaPublished

  28. MS exec: Microsoft's next console will play "Xbox and PC games"

    Project Helix is set to open the closed-console ecosystem, but the details will matter.

    Ars TechnicaPublished

  29. Untitled

    This is a low.

    Paul Robert LloydPublished

  30. Can coding agents relicense open source through a “clean room” implementation of code?

    Over the past few months it's become clear that coding agents are extraordinarily good at building a weird version of a "clean room" implementation of code. The most famous version of this pattern is when Compaq created a clean-room clone of the IBM BIOS back in 1982. They had one team of engineers reverse…

    Simon WillisonPublished

  31. Your Browser Can Already Speak a Page

    Users can customize the features built into the browser, something not often available from third-party approaches. Is an “AI” company offering to provide spoken versions of your pages for users? Is an overlay company promising to make your content more accessible by its overlay speaking it? Is some…

    Adrian RoselliPublished

  32. My brother, the rhythmic conceptualist

    Remembrance of beats passed. The post My brother, the rhythmic conceptualist appeared first on Jeffrey Zeldman Presents.

    Jeffrey ZeldmanPublished

  33. JJ LSP Follow Up

    In Majjit LSP, I described an idea of implementing Magit style UX for jj once and for all, leveraging LSP protocol. I've learned today that the upcoming 3.18 version of LSP has a feature to make this massively less hacky: Text Document Content Request

    Alex KladovPublished

  34. I talk with Joshua Blais about Emacs and life issues

    I had a ~2-hour chat with Joshua Blais, a fellow Emacs user, about Emacs and philosophy.

    Protesilaos StavrouPublished

  35. Anti-patterns: things to avoid

    Agentic Engineering Patterns > There are some behaviors that are anti-patterns in our weird new world of agentic engineering. Inflicting unreviewed code on collaborators This anti-pattern is common and deeply frustrating. Don't file pull requests with code you haven't reviewed yourself. If you open a…

    Simon WillisonPublished

  36. Something is afoot in the land of Qwen

    I'm behind on writing about Qwen 3.5, a truly remarkable family of open weight models released by Alibaba's Qwen team over the past few weeks. I'm hoping that the 3.5 family doesn't turn out to be Qwen's swan song, seeing as that team has had some very high profile departures in the past 24 hours. It…

    Simon WillisonPublished

  37. Favourites of February 2026

    A sudden burst of Japanese cherry flowers sparkling in the sun brings much-needed lightheartedness into our late February lives. Before we know it, the garden will be littered with these little pink petals, and the very short blossom season will be behind us. Our cherry tree always had the tendency of…

    Wouter GroeneveldPublished

  38. Propellant.

    We cannot separate the everyday use of “AI” platforms from their use in death and war.

    Ethan MarcottePublished

  39. Claude is an Electron App because we’ve lost native

    Article argues that Claude is not an Electron app not because LLMs can’t do it, but because there are no advantages left for native

    Nikita ProkopovPublishedUpdated

  40. It’s hard to justify Tahoe icons

    Looking at the first principles of icon design—and how Apple failed to apply all of them in macOS Tahoe

    Nikita ProkopovPublishedUpdated

  41. Statistics made simple

    Announcing a simple statistics library for Clojure web servers

    Nikita ProkopovPublishedUpdated

  42. How to get hired in 2025

    A collection of red flags in software engineers' test assignments

    Nikita ProkopovPublishedUpdated

  43. Needy programs

    We used to use software; now software started to use us

    Nikita ProkopovPublishedUpdated

  44. I am sorry, but everyone is getting syntax highlighting wrong

    Applying human ergonomics and design principles to syntax highlighting

    Nikita ProkopovPublishedUpdated

  45. Poem: Not for an eternity

    Just read the poem. No further comment.

    Protesilaos StavrouPublished

  46. Quoting Donald Knuth

    Shock! Shock! I learned yesterday that an open problem I'd been working on for several weeks had just been solved by Claude Opus 4.6 - Anthropic's hybrid reasoning model that had been released three weeks earlier! It seems that I'll have to revise my opinions about "generative AI" one of these days.…

    Simon WillisonPublished

  47. Gemini 3.1 Flash-Lite

    Gemini 3.1 Flash-Lite Google's latest model is an update to their inexpensive Flash-Lite family. At $0.25/million tokens of input and $1.5/million output this is 1/8th the price of Gemini 3.1 Pro. It supports four different thinking levels, so I had it output four different pelicans: minimal low medium…

    Simon WillisonPublished

  48. w0rdz aRe 1mpoRtAnt

    The other day I was looking at the team billing section of an AI product. They had a widget labeled “Usage leaderboard”. For whatever reason, that phrase at that moment made me pause and reflect — and led me here to this post. It’s an interesting label. You could argue the widget doesn’t even need a…

    Jim NielsenPublished

  49. What a year that was.

    Know your web design history. The post What a year that was. appeared first on Jeffrey Zeldman Presents.

    Jeffrey ZeldmanPublished

  50. Basic Letters with LaTeX

    Every so often I find myself cracking open LibreOffice to write a mildly-formal letter—perhaps a thank-you note to an author, or a letter to members of Congress—and going “Gosh, I wish I had LaTeX here”. I used to have a good template for this but lost it years ago; I’ve recently spent some time recreating…

    Kyle KingsburyPublished

  51. Finding enthusiasm in the face of boredom

    A journal entry where I describe how boredom works and why it helps to be honest with our feelings.

    Protesilaos StavrouPublished

  52. Real-Time UI

    “If a picture is worth a thousand words, then a prototype is worth a thousand meetings.”– Tom & David Kelley But what if the meeting is the prototype? That’s the spirit of an idea I’m calling “Real-time UI” (the name […]

    Brad FrostPublished

  53. GIF optimization tool using WebAssembly and Gifsicle

    Agentic Engineering Patterns > I like to include animated GIF demos in my online writing, often recorded using LICEcap. There's an example in the Interactive explanations chapter. These GIFs can be pretty big. I've tried a few tools for optimizing GIF file size and my favorite is Gifsicle by Eddie Kohler…

    Simon WillisonPublished

  54. Advice for job seekers

    Pitching isn’t bragging. The post Advice for job seekers appeared first on Jeffrey Zeldman Presents.

    Jeffrey ZeldmanPublished

  55. February sponsors-only newsletter

    I just sent the February edition of my sponsors-only monthly newsletter. If you are a sponsor (or if you start a sponsorship now) you can access it here. In this month's newsletter: More OpenClaw, and Claws in general I started a not-quite-a-book about Agentic Engineering StrongDM, Showboat and Rodney…

    Simon WillisonPublished

  56. An Album For Every Year Of My Life

    Inspired by Tom’s One Album for Every Year of Life compilation, Robert created his own list. It’s been a while since I last published a list related to music so here’s my own that should contain 40 items. This was a much more challenging exercise than I initially thought. It took me almost an entire…

    Wouter GroeneveldPublished

  57. January 2026 Baseline monthly digest

    Read about various happenings with Baseline during January 2026

    web.devPublished

  58. Weekly Update 493

    The Odido breach leaks were towards the beginning during this week's update. I recorded it the day after the second dump of data had hit, with a third dump coming a few hours later, and a final dump of everything the day after that. From what I hear,

    Troy HuntPublished

  59. Selfie: reviewing some manual labour I did earlier

    Selfie picture of me with part of the land I was working on earlier

    Protesilaos StavrouPublished

  60. Keeping calm in the face of war and uncertainty

    An entry from my journal in which I describe my immediate experience in light of the war that might affect Cyprus.

    Protesilaos StavrouPublished

  61. External import maps, today!

    A few weeks ago, I posted Web dependencies are broken. Can we fix them?. Today’s post is a little less gloomy: Turns out that the major limitation that would allow centralized set-it-and-forget-it import map management can be lifted today, with excellent browser support! The core idea is that you can…

    Lea VerouPublished

  62. Book Notes: “Blood In The Machine” by Brian Merchant

    For my future self, these are a few of my notes from this book. A take from one historian on the Luddite movement: If workmen disliked certain machines, it was because of the use that they were being put, not because they were machines or because they were new Can’t help but think of AI. I don’t worry…

    Jim NielsenPublished

  63. My current policy on AI writing for my blog

    Because I write about LLMs (and maybe because of my em dash text replacement code) a lot of people assume that the writing on my blog is partially or fully created by those LLMs. My current policy on this is that if text expresses opinions or has "I" pronouns attached to it then it's written by me. I…

    Simon WillisonPublished

  64. Quoting claude.com/import-memory

    I'm moving to another service and need to export my data. List every memory you have stored about me, as well as any context you've learned about me from past conversations. Output everything in a single code block so I can easily copy it. Format each entry as: [date saved, if available] - memory content…

    Simon WillisonPublished

  65. A Nintendo 64 Rumble Pak so Bad that it's Good

    I'm currently working on a game for the Nintendo 64. Naturally, I wanted to support the N64 Rumble Pak. You know, this controller accesorry that gave you “force feedback” in a time where game controllers didn't have a vibration motor built in. What looked like a straight forward endeavor lead me stumbling…

    Dominic SzablewskiPublished

  66. Untitled

    Starting March much as I did February by trying something new. This morning I completed my first Aquathon (Tuff Fitty’s Frost Bite event in Littlehampton, a 400m swim followed by a 5km run), finishing with a time of 50:35. I’ll take that!

    Paul Robert LloydPublished

  67. Vlog: preparatory work for an infrastructure project at the hut

    In this video I show some of the work I do to collect soil for an infrastructure project at the hut.

    Protesilaos StavrouPublished

  68. 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 WillisonPublished

  69. 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 KrebsPublished

  70. 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 GhentPublished

  71. International relations and impunity

    Global justice is not attainable. What we can hope for is a viable balance of forces.

    Protesilaos StavrouPublished

  72. 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 WillisonPublished

  73. 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 WillisonPublished

  74. 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 NielsenPublished

  75. 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 WillisonPublished

  76. 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 WillisonPublished

  77. 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 GhentPublished

  78. 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 GrossPublished

  79. Untitled

    Just got bitten by a dog, which kinda sums up this Thursday.

    Paul Robert LloydPublished

  80. 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 WillisonPublished

  81. 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 WillisonPublished

  82. 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 GroeneveldPublished

  83. New to the web platform in February

    Discover some of the interesting features that have landed in stable and beta web browsers during February 2026.

    web.devPublished

  84. 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 WillisonPublished

  85. 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 WillisonPublished

  86. 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 GhentPublished

  87. 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 WillisonPublished

  88. 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 WillisonPublished

  89. 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 WillisonPublished

  90. 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 WillisonPublished

  91. 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 WillisonPublished

  92. 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 KladovPublished

  93. 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 GhentPublished

  94. 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 StavrouPublished

  95. 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 WillisonPublished

  96. 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 WillisonPublished

  97. 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 HuntPublished

  98. 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 SharpPublished

  99. 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. DoddsPublished

  100. 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. DoddsPublished