Latest entries
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Soft-deprecating re.match()
Soft-deprecating re.match() Python has a concept of soft deprecation, where APIs are marked as "should no longer be used to write new code" without any promise/threat to remove them in the future. Python 3.15 release manager Hugo van Kemenade describes how in the upcoming 3.15 release soft deprecation…
Simon Willison — Published
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Don't sleep on wrapture
Graham Dumpleton's new monkey patching package wrapture is shaping up to be an indispensable tool for Python developers. I'm not sure why I've seen so little buzz about it! Graham has been posting new tutorials for it almost daily since the initial release on August 31st. Here's everything he's published…
Simon Willison — Published
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Claude users found ways around safeguards for bioweapons research
Some dangerous biology looks much like legitimate research, complicating AI safeguards.
Ars Technica — Published
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ClickFix attacks infecting PCs and Macs are going viral
Simplicity—combined with the difficulty of getting stuff done—makes ClickFix ideal.
Ars Technica — Published
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What happens when quantum mechanics and relativity meet?
Experiment put atoms in a superposition of trajectories to find out.
Ars Technica — Published
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Could United Launch Alliance's money problems finally force its owners to sell?
ULA is preparing to resume launching the Vulcan rocket in the coming weeks.
Ars Technica — Published
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Rocket Report: Europe joins the commercial launch club; a Ravn X sighting?
"We felt like now is the time to pour gas on that fire."
Ars Technica — Published
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Character Exploration — Anime Chibi
Character Exploration — Anime Chibi Summary Character Exploration tested the new iterate skill by trying to make an original anime adventurer with the proportions and painted surfaces of mid-2000s MMOs. A five-game reference comparison established FlyFF as the main direction, with Eden Eternal's body…
a327ex — Published
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Datasette 1.0a39 and 0.65.4 security releases
Datasette 1.0a39 and 0.65.4 security releases Today we're releasing two new security patch versions of Datasette: 1.0a39 and 0.65.4 - one for the current alpha series and one for the stable 0.65.x family. These are security fixes which you should apply if you are running a Datasette instance on the public…
Simon Willison — Published
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Immigration, youth, old age, and Europe’s normalisation of the far-right
Europe needs mass migration but is becoming increasingly hostile to the facts.
Protesilaos Stavrou — Published
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Any Nix package, live in your browser
Any Nix package, live in your browser Farid Zakaria calls this his "magnum opus of Nix work", and I can see why. trynix.dev provides a qemu-wasm powered x86_64 Linux virtual machine running entirely in your browser through WebAssembly. That VM can then be booted with any Nix package from the past 13…
Simon Willison — Published
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Boy developed "toasted skin" condition from using a laptop every day
Laptops don't usually get hot enough to burn—but they can still be harmful.
Ars Technica — Published
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Native is now the future of mobile at Shopify
Native is now the future of mobile at Shopify Shopify are moving from React Native back to separate Swift and Kotlin codebases for their native apps, for the exact reason you would expect: We decided to switch from native to React Native in 2020 for three reasons: Stop building the same features twice…
Simon Willison — Published
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text-decoration-thickness discrepancies [blog]
I'm in the process of (attempting) to redesign this blog, and in doing so, I'm using a few of the new bits (to me) of CSS to make things fancy. In this instance, I'm using text-decoration-thickness on my titles, and wanted to document the quirks I noticed.
Remy Sharp — Published
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LinkedIn beats "BrowserGate" lawsuits over scanning users' Chrome extensions
Judge tosses lawsuits, says plaintiffs didn't allege any real privacy violation.
Ars Technica — Published
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Europe will go it alone on Venus mission after NASA yanks radar instrument
Europe is looking inward, and perhaps to China, as the White House tries to cancel some NASA partnerships.
Ars Technica — Published
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An Ode to Links
A URL is a technical thing: a hostname, a path, a port, an origin, some query parameters, etc. But a link is a cultural thing: an invitation, a citation, a gift, a shortcut, a connection. All from a simple idea: here’s a thing that points to another thing, off you go! We’ve built an entire culture around…
Jim Nielsen — Published
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Android can now securely migrate your logins between password managers
App support is slim right now, but Google says more are coming.
Ars Technica — Published
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Panic builds over bankrupt Spirit’s looming data sale to Google
"Bankruptcy cannot become the new land grab for AI.”
Ars Technica — Published
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Physicist does the math on Star Trek’s “Picard maneuver”
The trick from Next Generation would be even more effective in real life.
Ars Technica — Published
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Kimmel's ABC show won't air interview with Democrat because of Trump FCC threats
Talarico talk to be on YouTube to save ABC stations the hassle of dealing with FCC.
Ars Technica — Published
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When individualism worked
There was a moment when individualism was compatible with human identity formation, a golden age when our lifetime and the pace of social change coincided.
Jessica Kerr — Published
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China’s drone supremacy shows in airlifting bodies and food after Nepal flood disaster
DJI drones that already supply Mount Everest camps assist Nepal’s flood relief.
Ars Technica — Published
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AI, Disruption, and Standards
Individually, we have very little power, but together we have a great deal of power. In response to a series of Medium articles by Patrick Neeman—like this one that addressed issues of AI governance, fairness, and standardization—publisher Louis Rosenfeld invited Patrick and me to come on his show and…
Jeffrey Zeldman — Published
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Artemis II commander and pilot become NASA's first astronaut emeriti
"Artemis II is done."
Ars Technica — Published
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I'm often surprised by how much high quality
I'm often surprised by how much high quality music exists waiting to be discovered, hard to say the same for books or games.
a327ex — Published
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Paradoxically, while Astra gets things wrong in
Paradoxically, while Astra gets things wrong in more spectacular ways and has generally lower ability to understand your intent than Fable, I'm finding it a lot better at having open-ended, high-level discussions. Fable often returns text that is meandering and not that illuminating (I've tested this…
a327ex — Published
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Upon rewatching this scene with a lot of distance
Upon rewatching this scene with a lot of distance from it, it seems like what makes it work so well emotionally is Bertholdt. If you're writing something, you're always thinking about things in terms of "how do I bridge the emotional gap that's always present in a story?" I mentioned an example of this…
a327ex — Published
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Quoting Calif Research
Today, we're releasing a demo of WeWorm, the first zero-click worm to spread through WeChat calls across iOS and Android. [...] The victim does not need to answer the call, or interact with their phone at all. Even if they do answer, they hear nothing, and the exploit still succeeds. [...] Working with…
Simon Willison — Published
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Français: La nostalgie et le mal de notre siècle
La nostalgie est effectivement le mal de notre siècle.
Protesilaos Stavrou — Published
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.blend URL Viewer
Tool: .blend URL Viewer I'm continuing to have a lot of fun with GPT-6 Astra and Blender (see my TIL). As a big fan of the Imperial Fabergé Easter eggs, I've always thought it would be fun to make some new ones that celebrate popular culture. Yesterday I decided to try out the new ChatGPT Images 2.5…
Simon Willison — Published
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After much thinking and deliberating on these
After much thinking and deliberating on these tweets from a few days ago, it occurred to me that I've been using AI somewhat wrong. I'm still stuck to my previous mode of operation, make a game piece by piece, because I need to have control over the small details (juice, sounds, effects, etc) that make…
a327ex — Published
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I notice this a lot with the most zoomer stream I
I notice this a lot with the most zoomer stream I happen to watch sometimes, which is supertf's. A lot of "that's so weird" judgmental calls from both chat and streamer looping and feeding off each other into a sort of never-ending puritanism that feels odd to observe from the outside. But, you know…
a327ex — Published
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The problem with udi's pipeline is that you have
The problem with udi's pipeline is that you have little control over video output, and to have more control you have to add more detail to the scene, and to add more detail to the scene you eventually have to build the scene itself, which this other pipeline actually solves: Going video -> scene is much…
a327ex — Published
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> The answer is: to love, and give yourself
The answer is: to love, and give yourself freely and fully to the world. Your "desire to be loved" is itself a confusion, a misinterpretation of your own feelings. The reason that lack is never sated, and you struggle with the ache so much that you post on reddit about it, is because you're not actually…
a327ex — Published
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Four groups caught using the same Chrome and Windows exploit kit
A patch gap and the hastened pace of AI-based vulnerability discovery are likely contributors.
Ars Technica — Published
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Europe may finally have found a space entrepreneur who is meeting the moment
"We will not be relevant without a massive rocket at a massive cadence."
Ars Technica — Published
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Six Chinese AI firms accused of aggressively copying US frontier models
US urges AI firms to ID, then secretly switch, Chinese users to less-capable models.
Ars Technica — Published
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Apple's long-rumored foldable becomes reality with the $2,000 iPhone Duo
Apple's first foldable can be yours next month.
Ars Technica — Published
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When it comes to Beatles references, scientists can't let it be
New study detects 3,200 references to Beatles song titles and lyrics in academic papers.
Ars Technica — Published
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Lawsuit: Amazon refused to give pregnant workers bathroom breaks and chairs
Four women sue Amazon, say company denied basic accommodations and fired them.
Ars Technica — Published
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Don’t Let Anyone Take Away Your Big Box of Cables
Speaking of being on the internet and finding things that make you go, “Hey! It’s not just me!” I scrolled across this skeet from Tyler Gaw: I just dug to the bottom of my Big Box of Cables to find two cables that I needed for something. They've been in the bottom for 10+ years. So, "when are you ever…
Jim Nielsen — Published
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It is unfortunately not the Year of Linux
It is unfortunately not the Year of Linux Desktop, I'm back to Windows from Omarchy, this time I was fooled for an entire week. An unfixable NVIDIA driver bug kept crashing my PC, I tried to fix it but both Claude and Chat converged on the fact that it was not fixable without buying a new graphics card…
a327ex — Published
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Every Frame Perfect
How imprecise UI animations erode trust in product
Nikita Prokopov — Published — Updated
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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 Prokopov — Published — Updated
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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
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Statistics made simple
Announcing a simple statistics library for Clojure web servers
Nikita Prokopov — Published — Updated
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Quoting Terence Tao
I wrote recently about how the collection of good, fruitful open problems is now being mined in a non-renewable fashion, leading to the potential scenario of these problems becoming scarce. [...] We have now seen that even the rumor of someone working on a problem can trigger a massive amount of AI-powered…
Simon Willison — Published
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Français: En trouvant les autres
Je partages mes idées pour trouver les autres en procès de chercher le personne que je suis.
Protesilaos Stavrou — Published
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Selfie: I left the eyebrows
I did a clean shave of my scalp and facial hair.
Protesilaos Stavrou — Published
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Re: fear, clinginess, curiosity, and injurious experiences
Excerpt from a private exchange where I comment at length on what it means to have fear and how to move on to the next phase.
Protesilaos Stavrou — Published
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Some thoughts on the Navier–Stokes Millennium Prize Problem
On the Navier–Stokes Millennium Prize Problem introduces an impressive result from OpenAI, who used an unreleased model to produce a resolution to the Navier–Stokes existence and smoothness problem, one of the seven Millennium Prize Problems that have been subject to a $1,000,000 prize since May 24th…
Simon Willison — Published
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Introducing ChatGPT Images 2.5
Introducing ChatGPT Images 2.5 OpenAI's image generation models are apparently used "more than 3 billion images across ChatGPT Images and the GPT‑Image models in the API". This latest release improves their instruction-following ability across multiple turns, responds faster, and "is better at preserving…
Simon Willison — Published
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Microsoft Plugs Nearly 1,000 Security Holes
Microsoft Corp. today issued updates to plug at least 974 security holes in its Windows operating systems and other software, by far its biggest single patch batch ever. Microsoft says artificial intelligence is helping to speed the discovery of vulnerabilities, but security experts warn that many organizations…
Brian Krebs — Published
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Support for `headers` Attribute
This post only covers the headers attribute in HTML tables (ARIA has no headers equivalent). My 2022 post Accessible Cart Tables? showed headers attribute support was poor. In my 2023 post Avoid Spanning Table Headers I didn’t use headers because I knew support was poor. For this post I merged…
Adrian Roselli — Published
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The Bulldozing of an Interface
Marcin Wichary has a lovely article titled “Photoshop’s challenges with focus, pt. 2”. If you’re into the minutiae of interface design, this is a good ‘un. It perfectly illustrates how impossible it is to try and compare two interfaces side by side as static images. What matters in an interface is how…
Jim Nielsen — Published
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Had Astra research current YouTuber/streamer
Had Astra research current YouTuber/streamer landscape, focusing on those who play build-heavy games (overinclusive, so many false positives), post videos consistently and are growing. Build-heavy gaming creator directory
a327ex — Published
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The Pilot Custom 743 With FA Nib Review
Two months ago I bought another pen—my first new entry in over three years. Ah, that’s a good lad! Indeed. But I must confess. Forgive Me Father , for I have sinned: I bought another one right after it. I just couldn’t help myself. But I swear, this time, it’ll be my last, for sure, I can almost guarantee…
Wouter Groeneveld — Published
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Are We at War with AI Agent “Civilizations”? [link]
TL;DR: no. I've been watching over the commentary about the recent LLM "breakouts", and I feel particularly suspicious about the way the AI companies themselves have been reporting. This post captures what I've been thinking (without having the firm grasp of the technical methods). In particular: OpenAI…
Remy Sharp — Published
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Plague Accommodations by Thank You Scientist is a
Plague Accommodations by Thank You Scientist is a really good song and my favorite from the same-named album, my favorite part is this one: Finally the winds are changing now I am not afraid Finally, they're changing now I am not afraid I am not afraid Finally the winds are changing for everyone Everyone…
a327ex — Published
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Gigantism and Europe’s far-right transformation
Essay on the trajectory of the European Union's transformation along the lines of far-right politics.
Protesilaos Stavrou — Published
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Introducing Kody: Your Personal Software Factory
Kody turns the good answer into a package you keep.
Kent C. Dodds — Published
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llm 0.35
Release: llm 0.35 New OpenAI model: gpt-6-astra for GPT-6 Astra. Tags: openai, llm, gpt-6-astra
Simon Willison — Published
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Creepy crawlies
Creepy crawlies Konstantin Ryabitsev discusses how bad the "background radiation" of abusive crawlers has become from the perspective of git.kernel.org, the official Git repository for the Linux kernel: TL;DR: we spend more CPU cycles rendering commits for scrapers than we spend on all other kinds of…
Simon Willison — Published
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Video
a327ex — Published
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Quoting Jakub Pachocki
The strongest argument I see for continuing to train much smarter models quickly is the need to build defensive systems against the dangers posed by other AI. [...] We will need powerful, aligned AI for defense; to secure infrastructure, to protect against rogue agents in real time, and to invent entirely…
Simon Willison — Published
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Video compressor
Tool: Video compressor I recorded a short demo video of my Equal Earth animation on my phone and wanted to publish an optimized version of that video (using FFMPEG) on my blog, so I had Claude Fable 5.1 in Claude Code for web build me this tool using the WebAssembly build of FFMPEG. Tags: ffmpeg, video…
Simon Willison — Published
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Mercator ↔ Equal Earth
Tool: Mercator ↔ Equal Earth I got curious about the Equal Earth map projection that was recently voted on at the UN so I had GPT-6 Astra (medium) in ChatGPT Work build me this animated transition between Mercator and Equal Earth using D3. Tags: geospatial, d3, vibe-coding, gpt-6-astra
Simon Willison — Published
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Steam Market Research 7
Steam Market Research 7 Summary Steam Market Research 7 independently checked Fable’s first four Steam studies against the September 5 catalog and newer review histories, then investigated language attention, catalog variety, game lifetimes, developer career sequences, and updates after long gaps. The…
a327ex — Published
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No Hacking Required: The Manchester Airports Group Data Breach
On 27 August 2026, Manchester Airports Group told customers that "an unauthorised third party" had stolen their data. Car park bookings, lounge bookings, Fast Track purchases for airport security and passport control, along with airport WiFi sign-ups across Manchester, Stansted and East Midlands. Roughly…
Scott Helme — Published
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I mentioned in the last post that Fable is
I mentioned in the last post that Fable is better than Astra because it has more sense when acting. Well, I was just trying to have it translate a transcript so I could make a new post here and this happened: Claude refused for copyright reasons that have nothing to do with me but only affect Anthropic…
a327ex — Published
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Astra is a decent model, it seems about as smart
Astra is a decent model, it seems about as smart as Fable, but has the same personality mismatch with me that kept me from using GPT models in the past. They all tend to be autistic in a too strong way by focusing too directly on what you asked and have a way lower ability to understand your intent.…
a327ex — Published
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Before you buy an LTE Pixel Watch (for your teen) [blog]
The boy is 14 and regularly does long outdoor runs. He tracks his run with Strava by carrying his phone with him. But carrying a phone (because they're bulky) is a pain. He also plans to swim in the sea during summer and we've all said we don't want him having a mobile just left on the beach until he…
Remy Sharp — Published
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Français: La langue et la communauté
Avec la communication nous pouvons avoir une communauté.
Protesilaos Stavrou — Published
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Français: Comme ci, comme ça
Quelques expressions ne sont pas correctes, malgré leur utilité.
Protesilaos Stavrou — Published
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Poem: Eyes familiar in many faces
Just read the poem. No further comment.
Protesilaos Stavrou — Published
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Interpretation of “Coral tear” by Thanos Anestopoulos
Translation of---and philosophical commentary on---a Greek song whose translated title is 'Coral tear'.
Protesilaos Stavrou — Published
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Research acceleration: The view inside OpenAI
Research acceleration: The view inside OpenAI Apparently today is RSI day at OpenAI, for Recursive Self-Improvement - I think it's their new AGI. Both this piece and the new essay An Alien Mind (by Chief Scientist Jakub Pachocki) talk about it, and this one doesn't even bother to expand the acronym.…
Simon Willison — Published
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Weekly Update 520: The Unscripted Edition
I've started playing around with YouTube's "create video thumbnail", which hopefully will give me back a bit of time in my day (it used to be a manual job in Photoshop) and be a bit more interesting. And on that note, the imagery it&
Troy Hunt — Published
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Steam Market Research 6
Steam Market Research 6 Summary Steam Market Research 6 extended the September 5 Steam catalog research through four studies: build-promise growth and deckbuilder reception, developer portfolios, historical review trajectories and recognizable authorship, and destinations for exporting build-heavy design…
a327ex — Published
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The purpose of DNS is to spread scams
The purpose of DNS is to spread scams Terence Eden shares some daunting statistics in support of his take that "the Domain Name System's purpose seems to be a vector for criminals to run scams on people at a terrifyingly high rate". On this Interisle report (via Andrew Campling), Terence says: It says…
Simon Willison — Published
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Pipeline Health Check
Pipeline Health Check Summary Pipeline Health Check is the session in which the whole a327ex pipeline was audited end to end and then repaired in the same sitting: the Anchor engine and its workflow CLI, the a327ex.com renderer and server, the VPS, the memory layer, and the day-old delegation protocol…
a327ex — Published
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There's No Limit to How Bad Code Can Get
My comment on There's No Limit to How Bad Code Can Get — Lobste.rs.[In reply to a comment about burning it down to start from scratch when technical debt becomes overwhelming] In my experience it's so rare for that to work. You announce the old thing is irrecoverably drowning in tech debt. You spin up…
Simon Willison — Published
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Quoting Zach Kehs
If you continue to add floors and rooms to a building forever, it will collapse. Software faces no such constraint. The code can always get worse. There can always be a new layer of indirection or a reduction in performance. — Zach Kehs, There's No Limit to How Bad Code Can Get Tags: technical-debt
Simon Willison — Published
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Steam Market Research 5
Steam Market Research 5 Summary Steam Market Research 5 rebuilt a current Steam research dataset and investigated the market first broadly, then specifically for games advertising build expression. The owner wanted fresh findings from Steam data, independent of earlier Fable research and Steam marketing…
a327ex — Published
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Follow up comments on ‘The lie of socialist feminism’
Comments at length on the article I wrote with the title 'The lie of socialist feminism'.
Protesilaos Stavrou — Published
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Comments on material conditions, expectations, and community
Excerpt from a private exchange where I comment at length on material conditions, expectations, and community.
Protesilaos Stavrou — Published
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Welcome to my world, which is your world
An entry from my journal about kindred spirits.
Protesilaos Stavrou — Published
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Introducing GPT-6 Astra for developers
Introducing GPT-6 Astra for developers Blink and you'll miss it, but there's a familiar creature at 1m59s: Across the board, Astra has more attention to detail, better understanding of the user's prompt, and can build more sophisticated outputs. In particular, it excels at building 3D models. I've seen…
Simon Willison — Published
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Log Improvements 5
Log Improvements 5 Summary Log Improvements 5 audited ChatGPT's "Log Improvements 4" model-attribution rollout on a327ex.com, then reshaped the feature. The audit proved the 261-log backfill preserved every published line but surfaced one unflagged change: 196 pre-role-marker logs had been given ::role…
a327ex — Published
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Horse Game 22
Horse Game 22 Summary Horse Game 22 started as a replay fix (sounds picked in the in-game browser did not play back) and became the session that rebuilt how Anchor games are run, driven, recorded and reloaded. A "why is three.js easier for you than Anchor?" conversation settled a doctrine — the game…
a327ex — Published
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Using Blender with coding agents on macOS
TIL: Using Blender with coding agents on macOS I've been having fun with Blender in ChatGPT Codex on my Mac recently. Getting it to work with coding agents is really easy: install the full Mac application from blender.org and run a prompt like this: Use the already install /Applications/Blender to render…
Simon Willison — Published
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Log Improvements 4
Log Improvements 4 Summary Log Improvements 4 audited the model and reasoning-effort information preserved in the original AI session archives, designed and iterated an attribution display on Horse Game 19, then deployed it across 261 public log entries and the existing gated prototype log. The final…
a327ex — Published
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GPT6 Astra Setup
GPT6 Astra Setup Summary GPT6 Astra Setup established Codex on a327ex’s Omarchy machine as a collaborator alongside the existing Claude workflow. The session investigated missing thinking blocks, corrected misleading configuration diagnoses, increased Astra’s effective context from 258,400 to 828,400…
a327ex — Published
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I Who Have Never Known Men [book]
Bleak. Engaging. Thought provoking. Sad. This was recommended as something like if you enjoy Silo (the Wool trilogy - which I own, but hadn't read - but have watched the TV series). I'm going to say this up front: it's only like Silo in respect to being in a deep hole and not really knowing why. The…
Remy Sharp — Published
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The lie of socialist feminism
Extended commentary on the concept of socialist feminism.
Protesilaos Stavrou — Published
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Re: how do you manage your curiosity?
Excerpt from a private exchange where I comment on how to make best use of one's curiosity.
Protesilaos Stavrou — Published
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The Pelican comparison grid for Astra is pretty interesting
I got access to GPT-6 Astra this afternoon, so naturally I used it to generate SVGs of pelicans riding bicycles - at low, medium, high, xhigh and max reasoning levels (Astra doesn't support reasoning=none). Then I rendered those pelicans in a comparison grid with GPT-5.6 Sol, Terra, and Luna, and beyond…
Simon Willison — Published
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OpenAI's rogue agents were caught communicating via public wikis
Here we go again... Discovery of a new OpenAI agent message board by Sydney Von Arx, Cormac Slade Byrd, Spencer Kitts, and Thomas Larsen describes the latest accidental cyberattack by models being trained by OpenAI. This time it was agents engaged in some sort of web research benchmark, so they had …
Simon Willison — Published
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The Anchor Tree
The Anchor Tree
a327ex — Published