Latest entries
-
Untitled
Fuck me, the conclusion to season 2 of The Night Manager was quite unexpected. Wow.
Paul Robert Lloyd — Published
-
Trump orders the military to make agreements with coal power plants
The administration's "reasoning" for doing so has little connection to reality.
Ars Technica — Published
-
El Paso airport closed after military used new anti-drone laser to zap party balloon
"I want to be very, very clear that this should’ve never happened."
Ars Technica — Published
-
Once-hobbled Lumma Stealer is back with lures that are hard to resist
ClickFix bait, combined with advanced Castleloader malware, is installing Lumma "at scale."
Ars Technica — Published
-
Byte magazine artist Robert Tinney, who illustrated the birth of PCs, dies at 78
He became one of the first to visualize personal computing by painting vivid cover art.
Ars Technica — Published
-
Yes, Rocket Lab is blowing up engines. No, it's not a big deal, CEO says.
"We are in the part of the program where we are doing very nasty things to the engine."
Ars Technica — Published
-
Quoting Andrew Deck for Niemen Lab
An AI-generated report, delivered directly to the email inboxes of journalists, was an essential tool in the Times’ coverage. It was also one of the first signals that conservative media was turning against the administration [...] Built in-house and known internally as the “Manosphere Report,” the tool…
Simon Willison — Published
-
Did seabird poop fuel rise of Chincha in Peru?
Guano dramatically boosted the production of maize, and the surplus helped fuel the Chincha Kingdom’s economy.
Ars Technica — Published
-
OpenAI researcher quits over ChatGPT ads, warns of "Facebook" path
Zoë Hitzig resigned on the same day OpenAI began testing ads in its chatbot.
Ars Technica — Published
-
"Windows 11 26H1" is a special version of Windows exclusively for new Arm PCs
Arm PCs have enjoyed special treatment from Microsoft for the past two years.
Ars Technica — Published
-
Google recovers "deleted" Nest video in high-profile abduction case
Users only get three hours of free Nest video storage, but Google can retrieve videos much later.
Ars Technica — Published
-
US decides SpaceX is like an airline, exempting it from Labor Relations Act
US labels SpaceX a common carrier by air, will regulate firm under railway law.
Ars Technica — Published
-
Apple releases iOS 26.3 with updates that mainly benefit non-Apple devices
It's getting a little easier to move from iOS to Android, if that's your thing.
Ars Technica — Published
-
China showcases new Moon ship and reusable rocket in one extraordinary test
The test marks a significant step in China's push to land humans on the Moon by 2030.
Ars Technica — Published
-
Skills in OpenAI API
Skills in OpenAI API OpenAI's adoption of Skills continues to gain ground. You can now use Skills directly in the OpenAI API with their shell tool. You can zip skills up and upload them first, but I think an even neater interface is the ability to send skills with the JSON request as inline base64-encoded…
Simon Willison — Published
-
Unresponsive Buttons on My Fastest Hardware Ever
This is one of those small things that drives me nuts. Why? I don’t know. I think it has something to do with the fact that I have a computer that is faster than any computer I’ve ever used in my entire life — and yet, clicking on buttons results in slight but perceptible delays. Let me explain. Imagine…
Jim Nielsen — Published
-
GLM-5: From Vibe Coding to Agentic Engineering
GLM-5: From Vibe Coding to Agentic Engineering This is a huge new MIT-licensed model: 754B parameters and 1.51TB on Hugging Face twice the size of GLM-4.7 which was 368B and 717GB (4.5 and 4.6 were around that size too). It's interesting to see Z.ai take a position on what we should call professional…
Simon Willison — Published
-
Smart home PSA: Apple's "new architecture" for Home app becomes mandatory today
Updated Home app is required for Matter support and some types of accessories.
Ars Technica — Published
-
cysqlite - a new sqlite driver
cysqlite - a new sqlite driver Charles Leifer has been maintaining pysqlite3 - a fork of the Python standard library's sqlite3 module that makes it much easier to run upgraded SQLite versions - since 2018. He's been working on a ground-up Cython rewrite called cysqlite for almost as long, but it's finally…
Simon Willison — Published
-
App certainty and interoperability: Apple’s pinky promises to CMA
TL;DR: If Apple decides to kick you in the face, it must give you 5 minutes notice. And if you think it was too hard a kick, you can complain to Apple, which will investigate Apple. If the CMA believes Apple routinely gives you less than 5 minutes notice, or routinely kicks you too hard, […]
Bruce Lawson — Published
-
What's next after the Trump administration revokes key finding on climate change?
The EPA is revoking the finding for legal, not scientific, reasons.
Ars Technica — Published
-
The Feds closed air space around El Paso on Wednesday to address "cartel" drones
Violators were told they would be shot down.
Ars Technica — Published
-
America, it's time to think beyond leather for luxury car seats
Some brands are already ahead of the curve, while others leave the US in the cold.
Ars Technica — Published
-
FDA refuses to review Moderna's mRNA flu vaccine
The move comes amid RFK Jr.'s relentless efforts to enact his anti-vaccine agenda.
Ars Technica — Published
-
Programming Aphorisms
A meta programming post --- looking at my thought process when coding and trying to pin down what is programming knowledge. Turns out, a significant fraction of that is just reducing new problems to a vocabulary of known tricks. This is a personal, descriptive post, not a prescriptive post for you.
Alex Kladov — Published
-
Emacs: institution-calendar package (University of Oxford/Cambridge, etc.)
The institution-calendar package for GNU Emacs augments the calendar buffer with indicators about term weeks (e.g. for university semesters).
Protesilaos Stavrou — Published
-
SpaceX's next-gen Super Heavy booster aces four days of "cryoproof" testing
The next Starship flight is a key precursor for more ambitious missions.
Ars Technica — Published
-
Archive.today CAPTCHA page executes DDoS; Wikipedia considers banning site
DDoS hit blog that tried to uncover Archive.today founder's identity in 2023.
Ars Technica — Published
-
Yet another co-founder departs Elon Musk's xAI
Tony Wu leaves a company now entangled with social media, space-based IPOs.
Ars Technica — Published
-
Introducing Showboat and Rodney, so agents can demo what they’ve built
A key challenge working with coding agents is having them both test what they’ve built and demonstrate that software to you, their overseer. This goes beyond automated tests - we need artifacts that show their progress and help us see exactly what the agent-produced software is able to do. I’ve just…
Simon Willison — Published
-
A Note on File History in Emacs
Once you start digging beyond the surface, you discover that an ancient piece of text editing software called Emacs was light years ahead of its time. It already contained a clipboard history (kill-ring) and automatic saves/backups decades before contemporary editors took a half-baked stab at mimicking…
Wouter Groeneveld — Published
-
Works in Progress
New tunes from an old maker. The post Works in Progress appeared first on Jeffrey Zeldman Presents.
Jeffrey Zeldman — Published
-
Shades of Halftone
An interactive deep dive into building halftone shaders in GLSL, covering everything from classic dot patterns and CMYK color separation to Moiré interference, gooey effects, and animated displacement.
Maxime Heckel — Published
-
The guerrilla fighters
In this journal entry I comment on how I do not try to control people's impression of me.
Protesilaos Stavrou — Published
-
Structured Context Engineering for File-Native Agentic Systems
Structured Context Engineering for File-Native Agentic Systems New paper by Damon McMillan exploring challenging LLM context tasks involving large SQL schemas (up to 10,000 tables) across different models and file formats: Using SQL generation as a proxy for programmatic agent operations, we present…
Simon Willison — Published
-
A Brief History of App Icons From Apple’s Creator Studio
I recently updated my collection of macOS icons to include Apple’s new “Creator Studio” family of icons. Doing this — in tandem with seeing funny things like this post on Mastodon — got me thinking about the history of these icons. I built a feature on my icon gallery sites that’s useful for comparing…
Jim Nielsen — Published
-
DNS-PERSIST-01; Handling Domain Control Validation in a short-lived certificate World
This year, we have a new method for Domain Control Validation arriving called DNS-PERSIST-01. It is quite a fundamental change from how we do DCV now, so let's take a look at the benefits and the drawbacks.First, a quick recapWhen you approach a Certificate Authority, like
Scott Helme — Published
-
AI Doesn’t Reduce Work—It Intensifies It
AI Doesn’t Reduce Work—It Intensifies It Aruna Ranganathan and Xingqi Maggie Ye from Berkeley Haas School of Business report initial findings in the HBR from their April to December 2025 study of 200 employees at a "U.S.-based technology company". This captures an effect I've been observing in my own…
Simon Willison — Published
-
Untitled
I bloody love Lyon.
Paul Robert Lloyd — Published
-
Claude Code for Designers
FIRST, the disclaimers: Some of my favorite writers—folks who are as anti-fascist and pro-democracy as they come—publish on Substack, but I read and recommend their work less and less frequently, because Substack has a Nazi problem. To wit: Awkward: Substack’s Nazi Problem Substack call themselves a…
Jeffrey Zeldman — Published
-
Weekly Update 490
A big "thank you" to everyone who helped me troubleshoot the problem with my "Print Screen" button on the new PC. Try as we all might, none of us could figure out why it refused to bind to SnagIt and instead insisted on dumping the entire
Troy Hunt — Published
-
Emacs: doric-themes version 1.0.0
Minimalist themes for GNU Emacs to complement my ef-themes (maximalist) and modus-themes (moderate).
Protesilaos Stavrou — Published
-
Kākāpō mug by Karen James
Friend and neighbour Karen James made me a Kākāpō mug. It has a charismatic Kākāpō, four Kākāpō chicks (in celebration of the 2026 breeding season) and even has some rimu fruit! I love it so much. Tags: kakapo, art
Simon Willison — Published
-
Untitled
Don’t cry because it’s over, smile because it happened.
Paul Robert Lloyd — Published
-
Quoting Thomas Ptacek
People on the orange site are laughing at this, assuming it's just an ad and that there's nothing to it. Vulnerability researchers I talk to do not think this is a joke. As an erstwhile vuln researcher myself: do not bet against LLMs on this. Axios: Anthropic's Claude Opus 4.6 uncovers 500 zero-day flaws…
Simon Willison — Published
-
Prot Asks: Eric about free software, art, religion, and cosmic consistency
I talk with .
Protesilaos Stavrou — Published
-
Vouch
Vouch Mitchell Hashimoto's new system to help address the deluge of worthless AI-generated PRs faced by open source projects now that the friction involved in contributing has dropped so low. He says: The idea is simple: Unvouched users can't contribute to your projects. Very bad users can be explicitly…
Simon Willison — Published
-
Claude: Speed up responses with fast mode
Claude: Speed up responses with fast mode New "research preview" from Anthropic today: you can now access a faster version of their frontier model Claude Opus 4.6 by typing /fast in Claude Code... but at a cost that's 6x the normal price. Opus is usually $5/million input and $25/million output. The new…
Simon Willison — Published
-
Quoting David Crawshaw
I am having more fun programming than I ever have, because so many more of the programs I wish I could find the time to write actually exist. I wish I could share this joy with the people who are fearful about the changes agents are bringing. The fear itself I understand, I have fear more broadly about…
Simon Willison — Published
-
We mourn our craft
I didn’t ask for this and neither did you. I didn’t ask for a robot to consume every blog post and piece of code I ever wrote and parrot it back so that some hack could make money off of it. I didn’t ask for the role of a programmer to be reduced to that […]
Nolan Lawson — Published
-
How StrongDM's AI team build serious software without even looking at the code
Last week I hinted at a demo I had seen from a team implementing what Dan Shapiro called the Dark Factory level of AI adoption, where no human even looks at the code the coding agents are producing. That team was part of StrongDM, and they've just shared the first public description of how they are working…
Simon Willison — Published
-
Creating Buttons To Remember Things
My wife recently bought a device to scratch her creative crafting itch: a button press. At first, I dismissed it as yet another thing requiring space in her increasingly messy atelier. I don’t know how we manage to do it but we seem to be experts in gathering things that gather things themselves: dust…
Wouter Groeneveld — Published
-
Quoting Tom Dale
I don't know why this week became the tipping point, but nearly every software engineer I've talked to is experiencing some degree of mental health crisis. [...] Many people assuming I meant job loss anxiety but that's just one presentation. I'm seeing near-manic episodes triggered by watching software…
Simon Willison — Published
-
Running Pydantic's Monty Rust sandboxed Python subset in WebAssembly
There's a jargon-filled headline for you! Everyone's building sandboxes for running untrusted code right now, and Pydantic's latest attempt, Monty, provides a custom Python-like language (a subset of Python) in Rust and makes it available as both a Rust library and a Python package. I got it working…
Simon Willison — Published
-
Honoring Mobile OS Text Size
If your users scale the text size in Android or iDeviceOS, that doesn’t always affect the size of text on a web page. It’s a function of browser and authored code, as opposed to a standardized approach. That may be changing. Support The current state of affairs in the three…
Adrian Roselli — Published
-
Study Finds Obvious Truth Everybody Knows
Researchers at Anthropic published their findings around how AI assistance impacts the formation of coding skills: We found that using AI assistance led to a statistically significant decrease in mastery […] Using AI sped up the task slightly, but this didn’t reach the threshold of statistical significance…
Jim Nielsen — Published
-
An Update on Heroku
An Update on Heroku An ominous headline to see on the official Heroku blog and yes, it's bad news. Today, Heroku is transitioning to a sustaining engineering model focused on stability, security, reliability, and support. Heroku remains an actively supported, production-ready platform, with an emphasis…
Simon Willison — Published
-
Quoting Karel D'Oosterlinck
When I want to quickly implement a one-off experiment in a part of the codebase I am unfamiliar with, I get codex to do extensive due diligence. Codex explores relevant slack channels, reads related discussions, fetches experimental branches from those discussions, and cherry picks useful changes for…
Simon Willison — Published
-
CI In a Box
I wrote box, a thin wrapper around ssh for running commands on remote machines. I want a box-shaped interface for CI:
Alex Kladov — Published
-
Re: Self haircut tips
Excerpt from a private exchange where I comment on how I cut my hair.
Protesilaos Stavrou — Published
-
Mitchell Hashimoto: My AI Adoption Journey
Mitchell Hashimoto: My AI Adoption Journey Some really good and unconventional tips in here for getting to a place with coding agents where they demonstrably improve your workflow and productivity. I particularly liked: Reproduce your own work - when learning to use coding agents Mitchell went through…
Simon Willison — Published
-
Opus 4.6 and Codex 5.3
Two major new model releases today, within about 15 minutes of each other. Anthropic released Opus 4.6. Here's its pelican: OpenAI release GPT-5.3-Codex, albeit only via their Codex app, not yet in their API. Here's its pelican: I've had a bit of preview access to both of these models and to be honest…
Simon Willison — Published
-
You Know What? Just Don’t Split Words into Letters
This is an unplanned part two for Barriers from Links with ARIA. The title reflects my exasperation because this isn’t new, I’ve simply failed to be explicit about it over the last decade or so. In 2012 I vented about TypeButter using for each letter. In 2020…
Adrian Roselli — Published
-
Spotlighting The World Factbook as We Bid a Fond Farewell
Spotlighting The World Factbook as We Bid a Fond Farewell Somewhat devastating news today from CIA: One of CIA’s oldest and most recognizable intelligence publications, The World Factbook, has sunset. There's not even a hint as to why they decided to stop maintaining this publication, which has been…
Simon Willison — Published
-
The Imperial Units Strike Back
I lived in the United States for six years, during which time I refused to learn Fahrenheit. I was forced to give in to using inches because, unlike every tape measure I owned in Canada that had both inches and centimetres, every measuring tape I could...
Ash Furrow — Published
-
Let's compile Quake like it's 1997!
Fabien Sanglard — Published
-
Selfie: WEBP means selfies are back on the menu
Selfie picture of me topless with some wild land in the background.
Protesilaos Stavrou — Published
-
Emacs: new Doric themes ‘doric-jade’ and ‘doric-copper’
I am developing two new themes for my minimalistic 'doric-themes' package for Emacs.
Protesilaos Stavrou — Published
-
Voxtral transcribes at the speed of sound
Voxtral transcribes at the speed of sound Mistral just released Voxtral Transcribe 2 - a family of two new models, one open weights, for transcribing audio to text. This is the latest in their Whisper-like model family, and a sequel to the original Voxtral which they released in July 2025. Voxtral Realtime…
Simon Willison — Published
-
“A streamlined newspaper for a streamlined era”
Posted today for no particular reason. The post “A streamlined newspaper for a streamlined era” appeared first on Jeffrey Zeldman Presents.
Jeffrey Zeldman — Published
-
Trudging Through Nonsense
Last week Anthropic released a report on disempowerment patterns in real-world AI usage which finds that roughly one in 1,000 to one in 10,000 conversations with their LLM, Claude, fundamentally compromises the user’s beliefs, values, or actions. They note that the prevalence of moderate to severe “disempowerment…
Kyle Kingsbury — Published
-
Distributing Go binaries like sqlite-scanner through PyPI using go-to-wheel
I've been exploring Go for building small, fast and self-contained binary applications recently. I'm enjoying how there's generally one obvious way to do things and the resulting code is boring and readable - and something that LLMs are very competent at writing. The one catch is distribution, but it…
Simon Willison — Published
-
Favourites of January 2026
The end of the start of another year has ended. So now all there is left to do is to look forward to the end of the next month, starting effective immediately, and of course ending after the end of the end we are going to look forward to. Quite the end-eavour. I guess I’ll end these ramblings by ending…
Wouter Groeneveld — Published
-
Weekly Update 489
This week I'm in Hong Kong, and the day after recording, I gave the talk shown in the image above at INTERPOL's Cybercrime Expert Group. I posted a little about this on Facebook and LinkedIn, but thought I'd expand on what really stuck with
Troy Hunt — Published
-
Interpretation of “God himself” by Blé (Giorgia Kefalá)
Translation of---and philosophical commentary on---a Greek song whose translated title is 'God Himself'.
Protesilaos Stavrou — Published
-
Emacs: beframe version 1.5.0
Information about the latest version of my beframe package for GNU Emacs.
Protesilaos Stavrou — Published
-
Introducing Deno Sandbox
Introducing Deno Sandbox Here's a new hosted sandbox product from the Deno team. It's actually unrelated to Deno itself - this is part of their Deno Deploy SaaS platform. As such, you don't even need to use JavaScript to access it - you can create and execute code in a hosted sandbox using their deno…
Simon Willison — Published
-
Saying “No” In an Age of Abundance
You’ve probably heard this famous quote from Steve Jobs about saying ‘no’: People think focus means saying yes to the thing you’ve got to focus on. But that’s not what it means at all. It means saying no to the hundred other good ideas that there are. You have to pick carefully. I’m actually as proud…
Jim Nielsen — Published
-
Untitled
This has been one of the most intense weeks of my life, both physically challenging and mentally exhausting. And it’s only Tuesday.
Paul Robert Lloyd — Published
-
Try text scaling support [link]
I've had a larger phone because I got fed up with squinting at my screen, but because of that I also have the OS level font bumped to 115% (and I know Jule, my wife, has it bumped to 125%). This meta tag will use the system font size to adjust the font. Importantly, Josh also points out that the default…
Remy Sharp — Published
-
January sponsors-only newsletter is out
I just sent the January 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 the newsletter for January: LLM predictions for 2026 Coding agents get even more attention Clawdbot/Moltbot/OpenClaw went very viral Kakapo breeding…
Simon Willison — Published
-
Quoting Brandon Sanderson
This is the difference between Data and a large language model, at least the ones operating right now. Data created art because he wanted to grow. He wanted to become something. He wanted to understand. Art is the means by which we become what we want to be. [...] The book, the painting, the film script…
Simon Willison — Published
-
Introducing the Codex app
Introducing the Codex app OpenAI just released a new macOS app for their Codex coding agent. I've had a few days of preview access - it's a solid app that provides a nice UI over the capabilities of the Codex CLI agent and adds some interesting new features, most notably first-class support for Skills…
Simon Willison — Published
-
A Social Network for A.I. Bots Only. No Humans Allowed.
A Social Network for A.I. Bots Only. No Humans Allowed. I talked to Cade Metz for this New York Times piece on OpenClaw and Moltbook. Cade reached out after seeing my blog post about that from the other day. In a first for me, they decided to send a photographer, Jason Henry, to my home to take some…
Simon Willison — Published
-
The European Space Agency got hacked, and now we own the domain used!
It's not often that two of my interests align so well, but we're talking about space rockets and cyber security! Whilst Magecart and Magecart-style attacks might not be the most common attack vector at the moment, they are still happening with worrying frequency, and they are
Scott Helme — Published
-
Untitled
Gone skiing.
Paul Robert Lloyd — Published
-
Bear Head (Dogs of War, #2) [book]
Really enjoyed this follow up to Dogs of War. I accidentally read Dogs of War in 2018 - I never went looking for it and loved it. Equally, I can't remember when I found out about Bear Head but I knew I wanted to read it if it existed in the same universe. So finally I get around to it. Overall well written…
Remy Sharp — Published
-
JS Bin down in 2026 [blog]
January 27th I got an email notification saying that JS Bin had become unavailable. Then next day real life human beings were asking what's going on. By 11pm on the 30th the last of the issues were resolved. Earlier today Jake asked me: what went wrong? Fucking, everything.
Remy Sharp — Published
-
Interpretation of “You stopped evoking love” by Pyx Lax
Translation of---and philosophical commentary on---a Greek song whose translated title is 'You stopped evoking love'.
Protesilaos Stavrou — Published
-
TIL: Running OpenClaw in Docker
TIL: Running OpenClaw in Docker I've been running OpenClaw using Docker on my Mac. Here are the first in my ongoing notes on how I set that up and the commands I'm using to administer it. Use their Docker Compose configuration Answering all of those questions Running administrative commands Setting up…
Simon Willison — Published
-
The Browser’s Little White Lies
So I’m making a thing and I want it to be styled different if the link’s been visited. Rather than build something myself in JavaScript, I figure I’ll just hook into the browser’s mechanism for tracking if a link’s been visited (a sensible approach, if I do say so myself). Why write JavaScript when a…
Jim Nielsen — Published
-
15 years of blogging
My first blog post was published just under 15 years ago in March of 2011. Since then, I’ve published 151 posts, including this one. (If I was a numerologist, I’d think it had something to do with Pokémon.) This blog has covered a wide variety of topics, including Pokémon in fact (I wrote the first …
Nolan Lawson — Published
-
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 Prokopov — Published — Updated
-
Statistics made simple
Announcing a simple statistics library for Clojure web servers
Nikita Prokopov — Published — Updated
-
How to get hired in 2025
A collection of red flags in software engineers' test assignments
Nikita Prokopov — Published — Updated
-
Needy programs
We used to use software; now software started to use us
Nikita Prokopov — Published — Updated
-
I am sorry, but everyone is getting syntax highlighting wrong
Applying human ergonomics and design principles to syntax highlighting
Nikita Prokopov — Published — Updated
-
Interpretation of “I am not another” by Christos Thivaios
Translation of---and philosophical commentary on---a Greek song whose translated title is 'I am not another'.
Protesilaos Stavrou — Published
-
Quoting Andrej Karpathy
Originally in 2019, GPT-2 was trained by OpenAI on 32 TPU v3 chips for 168 hours (7 days), with $8/hour/TPUv3 back then, for a total cost of approx. $43K. It achieves 0.256525 CORE score, which is an ensemble metric introduced in the DCLM paper over 22 evaluations like ARC/MMLU/etc. As of the last few…
Simon Willison — Published
-
Banning Syntax Highlighting Steroids
I’ve always flip-flopped between so-called “light” and “dark” modes when it comes to code editors. A 2004 screenshot of a random C file opened in GVim proves I was an realy adopter of dark mode, although I never really liked the contemporary Dracula themes when they first appeared. Sure, it was cool…
Wouter Groeneveld — Published