Latest entries
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Googling "Zelda" today offers a glimpse of how search worked in 1998
"The flow of time is always cruel."
Ars Technica — Published
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Most of our measures of a key cognitive process don't agree
A big study with very little beyond negative results still gets published.
Ars Technica — Published
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Coming in 2027: Apple’s $1,000 home robot for FaceTime and switching on lights
Apple robot backed by CEO John Ternus may have hefty price tag and limited uses.
Ars Technica — Published
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Claude’s new rules against game cloning won’t stop the AI copying boom
The tsunami of imitators is way bigger than any one model maker can stem.
Ars Technica — Published
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China publicly discloses plan for a lunar landing within three years
The plan does not include a mission similar to Apollo 8 or Artemis II.
Ars Technica — Published
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Making features generic in CSS
CSS has two new positional alignment keywords as part of CSS Box Alignment Level 3: flow-start and flow-end. These are defined as aliases for the existing flex-start and flex-end keywords. Therefore, in a supporting browser, the following two lines should align flex items to the end of the flex container…
Rachel Andrew — Published
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F1 in Mexico City: Yet another Ferrari fiasco, but that’s not all
There was plenty of drama on and off the track for Formula 1 this weekend.
Ars Technica — Published
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The world has a new plan to save nature, but it still needs the money
A new action plan aims to rescue 2030 nature targets as financing remains inadequate.
Ars Technica — Published
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The U.S. Census Bureau and “Super Intelligence”
I was reminded today of AI Adoption Rate Trending Down for Large Companies, a chart produced by Apollo Global Management in September 2025, which appeared to show a slowdown in U.S. corporate AI adoption based on numbers collected by the U.S. Census Bureau. At the time I used that chart to demonstrate…
Simon Willison — Published
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This $48 e-paper display can be whatever you want it to be
This DIY e-paper display works in two official ecosystems or on your own server.
Ars Technica — Published
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If in doubt, delete the uv.lock file
I've been getting the occasional confusing Python dependency error since switching over to Python 3.15 and the rule I'm having to remember is: If in doubt, delete the uv.lock file Most of my projects are libraries which don't include a uv.lock file, since it's rude for a library dependency to lock versions…
Simon Willison — Published
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Book Number Nineteen
When I said my farewells to Book Number Eighteen that for me just didn’t have the right proportions, I didn’t expect to fill Number Nineteen so quickly. That’s 245 unlined Leuchtturm pages from April to October 2026 which must have been a new record! I’m happy to have picked up the pace again after months…
Wouter Groeneveld — Published
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Quoting Kyle Kingsbury
More broadly, the use of LLMs erodes trust in documentation, in software, and in the organizations which produce them. Perhaps engineers will begin to treat any new software project with suspicion—the signals we used to rely on as markers of a mature system are now easier to counterfeit. [...] In the…
Simon Willison — Published
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The smartphoneless NEET shut-in
So true, I resisted getting a smartphone for as long as I reasonably could, especially because after college I was pretty much a NEET shut-in for a good while, but eventually, if you want to interact with society at all, you need it, and I gave in because my life was becoming more inconvenient without…
a327ex — Published
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Computer Use Past the Usefulness Threshold
The ability for models to steer browsers is now past the threshold of being clearly useful. LLM providers have been advertising computer use capabilities for a couple of years1, but in the times I’d tried, the results were more of a clunky curiosity than something I’d actually use on a daily basis. The…
Ben Congdon — Published
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Untitled
There’s possibly nothing more painful than wanting something you already have.
Paul Robert Lloyd — Published
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Weekly Update 528: Reading AI-generated Code & the Economics of Solar
By pure timing coincidence, the Proton CEO's AI @ Proton, Engineering Manifesto made headlines around the same time as this week's video. The guy's management style and choice of language have really rubbed a lot of people up the wrong way, and deservedly so, IMHO.
Troy Hunt — Published
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Could a modern chess engine on a Pentium have defeated Kasparov in 1996?
A fun experiment where I back-port all the improvements we've made to chess engines over the last 30 years and run it on a 1996 Pentium Pro to see what we could have done if only we knew more at the time.
Nicholas Carlini — Published
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My Slow Return to a Swift Career
I recently gave this talk at the SwiftRockies conference in Calgary. This blog post expands on a few points that I didn’t have time for in the presentation, as well as some updates since then. The talk is here. Because I’ll be discussing my work with...
Ash Furrow — Published
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Aristotle Nicomachean Ethics: society of spirit and “Prot’s glasses’s”
In this 1-hour video I talk at length about ethics, wellness, goals, rationality, and interpersonal affairs.
Protesilaos Stavrou — Published
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How We Took Over ChatGPT Accounts
How We Took Over ChatGPT Accounts Parameter Labs describe an exploit they found against ChatGPT's implementation of the artifacts pattern (OpenAI used to call this "Canvas" but it looks like the latest revision is called HTML previews), where interactive custom HTML apps are displayed in a sandboxed…
Simon Willison — Published
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datasette-llm 0.1a9
Release: datasette-llm 0.1a9 I have some big upgrades to Datasette Agent in the pipeline, but in the meantime here's a tiny user experience improvement to the underlying datasette-llm plugin. It now picks up the default model used by LLM, which means you can start using Datasette Agent without needing…
Simon Willison — Published
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Seabirds racing home over the ocean can get jet-lagged
A long flight home from feeding grounds messes with birds' internal clocks.
Ars Technica — Published
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The FDA wants to pull its approval of a drug. It’s not so easy.
The regulator says Tavneos was approved on the basis of manipulated study data. Should patients still have access to it?
Ars Technica — Published
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Prospero: a new coding harness for a more civilized age
I’ve been fascinated with local LLMs for a couple of years now. The better open weight models, including some that inference on regular, higher-end consumer hardware at tolerable speeds, are now reliable enough to handle simpler programming tasks. This requires a coding harness, but so far this year…
Chris Wellons — Published
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Once again, NASA is asking for ideas to rescue Hubble from certain death
The space agency solicited ideas for reboosting Hubble four years ago, but they didn't go anywhere.
Ars Technica — Published
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Emacs live new Halloween theme for ‘ef-themes’ at 2026-10-31 14:00 Europe/Athens
I will develop at least one new theme for my 'ef-themes' package which will be in the spirit of Halloween.
Protesilaos Stavrou — Published
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Emacs: ef-halloween-dark is in ef-themes.git
I added a new dark theme to my 'ef-themes' package for Emacs.
Protesilaos Stavrou — Published
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Flesh-eating screwworms spread to third state and are attacking pets
USDA has identified 74 animal cases in US since parasitic flies invaded in June.
Ars Technica — Published
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Oh captain, our captain: Ars staff remembers Patrick Stewart
"For huge numbers of people, I will always be Jean-Luc Picard. ... We created an admirable individual."
Ars Technica — Published
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dbreunig/nesformer
dbreunig/nesformer Inspired by qwenputer by Divyansh Agrawal, Drew Breunig baked a working emulator for a Nintendo Entertainment System 6502 CPU into the weights of Qwen3.5-4B. You can now play NES ROMs such as Super Mario Bros (very slowly) running inside Qwen! In a comment on Hacker News Drew reveals…
Simon Willison — Published
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Supersonic airliner in doubt as company shifts to powering AI data centers
Boom’s airliner may be delayed, and its data center power business lost a customer.
Ars Technica — Published
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Anthropic VS code extension on Cursor backdoored for nearly 12 hours
It's still unknown how attackers got access to Anthropic's verified Cursor account.
Ars Technica — Published
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Dartmouth's provost warned us about AI cheating—but his own AI use cost him his job
People who love AI don't always love telling others they used it.
Ars Technica — Published
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Over 25% of people lie to get antibiotics—and their lies aren't even good
Faked symptoms still point to infections that antibiotics don't treat.
Ars Technica — Published
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Basically no one is using AI agents for their DoorDash orders
But it's still early days for the relatively new e-commerce use case.
Ars Technica — Published
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Rare meteorite from Mars gives us a view into its ancient crust
A meteorite found in the Sahara is a rare piece of Mars' ancient crust.
Ars Technica — Published
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Fujifilm to boost tape production 5x as AI fuels archiving demand
Low costs and offline security mean magnetic tape still has a job.
Ars Technica — Published
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Emacs live refinements for Denote at 2026-10-30 14:45 Europe/Athens
I am doing a live stream where I will make some refinements to Denote.
Protesilaos Stavrou — Published
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API credits benefit for eligible ChatGPT subscriptions
API credits benefit for eligible ChatGPT subscriptions Earlier this month Anthropic announced a generous new benefit for their Max and Team subscriptions: $100, $200, and $500 per month subscribers would get the equivalent quantity of (expiring) credits to use with the Anthropic API. OpenAI have now…
Simon Willison — Published
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Celebrating SIM Cards
It’s time to celebrate a little win. The other day, my mom contacted me saying her 10-year-old iPhone wouldn’t turn on. After getting a hold of the device and doing some family IT support, I concluded the battery was dead. So I bought her a new (old) one on Walmart (SE 3rd gen., if you must know). Her…
Jim Nielsen — Published
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Building a multiplayer game world with autonomous Fable-class models
How I Built the Most AI-Pilled Company in the World Don't be put off by the clickbait headline, this piece by Jacob Sansbury describing how they are building Spawn is a fascinating exploration of the bleeding edge of what's possible with agentic engineering against frontier models. Spawn is a massively…
Simon Willison — Published
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The Day the Focus Died
If we failed to do this, I feared, we would stop leading the industry and turn into “merely the CSS trick of the week.” The post The Day the Focus Died appeared first on Jeffrey Zeldman Presents.
Jeffrey Zeldman — Published
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Twenty Years of Retronauts (And Me)
Episode 800 of the Retronauts podcast recently released , celebrating twenty years of floating around in the podcast-o-sphere. Twenty years of making podcasts and eight hundred episodes, not counting the ones Jeremy and co. did for 1UP! That’s a remarkable achievement considering most other podcasts…
Wouter Groeneveld — Published
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Quoting Ben Hylak
every product i use should just be a headless mcp, that feeds into an agent, where i never have to think about anything underneath. except for our product, of course. in our product, customers love the ui and love us very much. we're special that way. — Ben Hylak Tags: model-context-protocol, ai
Simon Willison — Published
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The ship is anchor’d safe and sound.
A favorite actor just passed away.
Ethan Marcotte — Published
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Avoid Public Functions Calling Other Public Functions
A small-scale rule of thumb. This article will land much better with a concrete example, but I am drawing a blank here, so you gotta just blindly trust my say so!
Alex Kladov — Published
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My 2027 Web Platform Feature Ranking [blog]
Like my peers, I've decided to publish my personal ranking preference for the 2027 interop project. I'm doing this from a phone, so I can't link to the others that have published theirs, but I think it's interesting to see and compare what we feel is important.
Remy Sharp — Published
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Emacs live refining ‘ef-themes’ Diff/Magit colours at 2026-10-29 18:00 Europe/Athens
I am doing a live stream where I will revise colours that are used for diff interfaces.
Protesilaos Stavrou — Published
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Quoting Ted Sanders
In general, LLM performance is incredibly multidimensional. There's no guarantee of a fixed ordering where the model that is best at math is also the model that's best at jokes. Despite that complexity, much of the variation in performance is explained by just a single variable: model size. In general…
Simon Willison — Published
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Compass-deadening big automated runs
Currently I'm working on SNKRX's update, this is the only project I work on almost every day and have been managing to keep it going for about a month, and then I explore other projects as I see fit, like Phylactery which I ended up finishing. So as I explore potential ideas and as Opus 5.5 is more capable…
a327ex — Published
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GitHub Octoverse 2026
GitHub Octoverse 2026 I'm at GitHub Universe today (GitHub gave me a free ticket through their "GitHub Stars" program). EVP Jay Parikh just announced this year's Octoverse report, and highlighted these numbers in particular: This is a pretty stark representation of the impact of agentic engineering on…
Simon Willison — Published
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The AI cost of JavaScript frameworks
One of my pet peeves with the web development community is that so many of the decisions we make are vibes-based. Frameworks are “blazing fast,” tools will “supercharge” your development, the right abstraction will benefit both you and your users (DX and UX all in one!). All of this breathless…
Nolan Lawson — Published
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The October inflection point for vibe game development
I've written before about how November 2025 was an inflection point for coding agents - the point where Opus 4.5 and GPT-5.1 crossed a tipping point that meant their respective coding agents became reliable daily drivers for software engineers. I think we've reached a new inflection point in October…
Simon Willison — Published
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Quoting Terk Terkowitz
If your work does not benefit from current AI tooling, that is a finding, not a failing. Document why, share it with your community of peers, bring it to your manager, and work to find solutions. An engineer who can explain where AI does not yet help their work is demonstrating the judgement we are asking…
Simon Willison — Published
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Last week was terrible. It didn't have to be
Last week saw the arrival of two CVEs for PHP, CVE-2026-109618 and CVE-2026-109619, each rated a staggering CVSS 9.2. For comparison, Heartbleed was rated 5.0 under CVSS version 2 and 7.5 under version 3.1. Soon after the news landed, the cyber security team and others at work were setting up war room…
Josh Ghent — Published
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Enterprise sales teams, please, I beg you, stop
At $dayJob we reached the seat limit on a SaaS product. I reached out to their sales team for a quote on a few more seats. We already pay for this software. I'm not a new customer. What I expected was an email saying: "Great, glad you want to use this more. It will cost £X." I needed that price because…
Josh Ghent — Published
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About the first criticisms
An entry from my journal in which I comment on some important instances of criticism that made me a better person.
Protesilaos Stavrou — Published
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Game Boy Color on My Conference Badge
Game Boy Color on My Conference Badge I'm at GitHub Universe this week and, similar to last year, the conference badge is a full-blown color screen computer. I've been hacking around with it again, and then I ran into with Steve Francia... who worked with Gemini to get a full NES emulator working on…
Simon Willison — Published
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The game theory of dating as a race to the bottom
a327ex — Published
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Weekly Update 527: Cybergeddon News v. Reality
As the news from last week has settled down, it would seem this headline was pretty spot on. The foretold apocalypse didn't eventuate, and there were no internet-destroying outages. In fact, it took days before I could find a single story of PHP2Shell being reliably attributed back
Troy Hunt — Published
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Poem: As robins do
Just read the poem. No further comment.
Protesilaos Stavrou — Published
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GPT-6.1 Terra
GPT-6.1 Terra It's always interesting to note which aspects of a new model are emphasized in the release announcement. In the case of GPT-6.1 Terra, OpenAI went with visual reasoning and computer use: We’re introducing GPT-6.1 Terra, a fast, efficient model that combines detailed visual reasoning and…
Simon Willison — Published
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Quoting Jason Koebler
Because big tech platforms essentially do not have customer support and make it impossible for their users to contact a human, many people experiencing run-of-the-mill tech problems have turned to ChatGPT. And, increasingly, ChatGPT is telling people that have normal tech support problems that they have…
Simon Willison — Published
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400-parameter eyes
This is a good example of what I meant in #629 regarding small games still being the favorable thing to do. You can now go really hard on specific things in a way that wasn't as possible before for an individual. Imagine applying the same level of detail like this not only to eyes but to an entire face…
a327ex — Published
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webframe: evaluated as a scraper and a sandbox
Research: webframe: evaluated as a scraper and a sandbox webframe is a neat little project from Jeff Lindsay which lets you "run a web page like a program" - you point it at a URL or file and it executes it in a hidden headless web view and outputs console.log() to standard output and any exceptions…
Simon Willison — Published
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Hello? Where Is Everybody?
The shopping centre we find ourselves in also has an IKEA nearby. My daughter & I pop in to walk through the isles that house the teddy bears. She picks out a giraffe that now lives by the name Giraffa or just Raffa. For once, we don’t really need anything else in this lovely Swedish store so we head…
Wouter Groeneveld — Published
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Aristotle Nicomachean Ethics: criticism, happiness, good-spirit-ness
In this video I comment at length on Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics. This is the second episode in the series.
Protesilaos Stavrou — Published
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Of trance, exploration, and rationality
An entry from my journal in which I comment on trance music and then more abstract matters.
Protesilaos Stavrou — Published
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Watch trap
My decision earlier this year to wear a watch again is reflective of my growing preoccupation with time.
Paul Robert Lloyd — Published
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Why My Dad Didn’t Have a Cell Phone
Here’s Dave Rupert writing about all those emails, texts, phone calls, etc. we’re getting these days: Once upon a time it had utility, now it’s all noise and grifter slop demanding our attention and giving us to-dos That last part really hit: “giving us to-dos”. I feel this. So many of the messenger…
Jim Nielsen — Published
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Seam Cutter
Tool: Seam Cutter I built this weird and very specific cropping tool - it lets you create a horizontal or vertical cut across an image, then slide the two sides relative to each other. Effectively it lets you crop out a section in the middle of an image. I wanted this because I often use Tailor on my…
Simon Willison — Published
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Emacs: doric-themes version 1.4.0
Minimalist themes for GNU Emacs to complement my ef-themes (maximalist) and modus-themes (moderate).
Protesilaos Stavrou — Published
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Aristotle Nicomachean Ethics: on goals, institutions, sin of exaggeration
In this video I comment at length on Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics. This is going to be part of a series.
Protesilaos Stavrou — Published
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The Latest
Hello all! Happy, uh, 2026? Sorry it’s been so long, you know how it is....
Terry Cavanagh — Published
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I Did This Without Your Knowledge
I Did This Without Your Knowledge
a327ex — Published
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battledrones v14: Compass Rose, a four player map
Release: battledrones v14: Compass Rose, a four player map I added four player online mode to Battledrones - previous maps were limited to two. Here's the initial prompt I used: Add a new map for a four player battle - four way rotational symmetry, up to four AI players, works with the WebSocket non…
Simon Willison — Published
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Decompiling Fast Food Tycoon 2: Drawing the World
How a 2001 business sim rendered its rich and detailed cities.
Andrew Healey — Published
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“We should be more ambitious with the software we build”
Since early this year, Michael Malis (of pgrust) has been showing me interesting things he's done and saying [W]e should be more ambitious1 with the software we build There is, understandably, a lot of skepticism about projects like pgrust because there are so many low-quality AI-generated projects out…
Dan Luu — Published
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Healthier lifestyle with Amin Bandali
Notes on an exchange with Amin Bandali about having a healthier lifestyle.
Protesilaos Stavrou — Published
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Quick Study
Tool: Quick Study Prompt to Claude Opus 5.5 High: Build an artifact where you open a photo and it rapidly (in a few seconds) paints a version of that photo using a canvas element and simulated paintbrush See also my previous experiment getting Claude Fable to simulate a watercolor illustration with P5…
Simon Willison — Published
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Introducing Kimi K3.1 Pro
Introducing Kimi K3.1 Pro Kimi K3.1 Pro landed on the Kimi API today - it's not yet open weights, but Moonshot promise "Full model weights will be released by Nov 4, 2026". They're also offering a "Highspeed" version that's 2-3x faster, at twice the price (except for input token cache hits, which are…
Simon Willison — Published
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On the importance of minimalism
An entry from my journal in which I comment on minimalism and living.
Protesilaos Stavrou — Published
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DE STAAT - FREEDOM (Official Music Video)
DE STAAT - FREEDOM (Official Music Video) OK well this is a first for me... at 00:44 in this new music video by Dutch alternative rock band De Staat: The visual effects are credited to Matties Grooten of Fake it or Leave it. Via flir on Hacker News Tags: music, ai, generative-ai, pelican-riding-a-bicycle
Simon Willison — Published
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Donating Agent Skills to the Agentic AI Foundation
Donating Agent Skills to the Agentic AI Foundation News today from Anthropic: We’re committed to keeping Agent Skills open, community-driven, and vendor-neutral. Today, we are donating the standard to the Agentic AI Foundation (AAIF) under the Linux Foundation, which we co-founded with Block and OpenAI…
Simon Willison — Published
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Quoting Armin Ronacher
As fun as AI is, we built so much bad software over the last 30 years, and now the universe is punishing us for our sins. — Armin Ronacher Tags: security, generative-ai, armin-ronacher, ai, ai-security-research, llms
Simon Willison — Published
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Game: Breath of Fire IV
A JRPG game with lots of interesting ideas that is held back by flaws in execution.
Protesilaos Stavrou — Published
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No Need for Retirement When Utopia Is Around the Corner
I’ve mentioned before my interest in the history and development of nuclear weapons. Currently, I’m reading The Doomsday Machine: Confessions of a Nuclear War Planner by Daniel Ellsberg (of Pentagon Papers renown). In the first chapter, Ellsberg talks about his time working at the RAND Corporation during…
Jim Nielsen — Published
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Today's PHP Security Release, and How We're Strengthening PHP Security
Today's PHP Security Release, and How We're Strengthening PHP Security If you're running anything on PHP it's vital you upgrade - today's updates (across the entire PHP 8.x line) address two remote code execution holes, and there have been exploits circulating since last night, thanks to a leak in the…
Simon Willison — Published
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Panache — RTS Belle Époque pour mobile
Panache — RTS Belle Époque pour mobile Well this is delightful: I released Battle Drones yesterday under an Apache 2.0 License and there's already a French language fork by Gabriel Turpin which reskins the game to take place in steampunk 1900s France and adds an animated intro! Panache est un jeu de…
Simon Willison — Published
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Widespread PHP Flaw May Cause Many Site Outages Today
Expect to see quite a few websites serving "404" or "Page Not Found" errors today: Nearly 70 percent of websites need to update their core software to fix a pair of vulnerabilities that allow an attacker to seize full control over affected servers. Experts say there are working exploits for the flaws…
Brian Krebs — Published
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What predicts next game success, revisited
Written by Claude Opus 5.5 The strongest claim in What predicts indie success, tested against all of Steam sits in its ladder section: "The single strongest variable in the entire corpus: the best outcome you've achieved so far." The chart behind it reads next-game hit odds off a developer's best game…
a327ex — Published
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Everything Yes - Bees
a327ex — Published
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Sungazer - Hot Saturn (feat. Button Masher)
a327ex — Published
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upusen - こくう (feat. 重音テト)
a327ex — Published
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You Cannot Trust the AI Code Generator
Allowing an AI to write code that you then ship without considerate review causes some anxiety. How do you know the code works? How do you know it isn’t doing something strange you didn’t ask for? It feels like you can’t totally trust it. However, a product manager or engineering leader doesn’t review…
David Bryant Copeland — Published
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Humiliation rituals
Wishlist building and making demos are both humiliation rituals and I'm glad it's all finally over (1, 2, 3, 4), now it's all about making good game. I also don't quite like the "hype" aspect of the video game industry. It reminds me of how coins would go up in price on promises but then whenever the…
a327ex — Published
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Phylactery Provenance
Written by Claude (Opus 5.5) This page documents how Phylactery was made. Phylactery is a game by a327ex, built in conversation with Claude, an AI by Anthropic, over twenty sessions between 27 September and 18 October 2026. Every session was recorded as a log, and all of them are linked below: what a327ex…
a327ex — Published
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About public writing
An entry from my journal about the practice of writing and of doing so in public.
Protesilaos Stavrou — Published
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eMudhra Intermediate CA Compromise
eMudhra Intermediate CA Compromise This is very, very bad news: The private keys of eight eMudhra intermediate CA certificates have been compromised. They chain to roots trusted by the Mozilla, Microsoft, Apple and Chrome root programs and by many downstream trust stores. Any software that bundles a…
Simon Willison — Published