Latest entries
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Everyone pays the price as patent holders on seeds stifle innovation
The US is one of a handful of countries that allow patents on plant varieties.
Ars Technica — Published
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Sony releases trailer for Taika Waititi's Klara and the Sun
Tonally, the trailer gives strong vibes akin to the director's 2016 feature Hunt for the Wilderpeople.
Ars Technica — Published
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How to burst the AI bubble: Strike at its roots
Sci-fi author/tech journalist Cory Doctorow on his new book, The Reverse Centaur's Guide to Life After AI.
Ars Technica — Published
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With Starfall, SpaceX eyes an edge in global cargo delivery from orbit
The purpose of Starfall is to support the "transport and delivery of goods through space."
Ars Technica — Published
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Prompt Injection as Role Confusion
Prompt Injection as Role Confusion First, I absolutely love this: This is a blog-style writeup of the paper. I wish every paper would come with one of these. Academic writing is pretty dry - the impact of a paper can be so much higher if you publish a readable version to accompany the formal one. Charles…
Simon Willison — Published
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Porting the Moebius 0.2B image inpainting model to run in the browser with Claude Code
This morning on Hacker News I saw Moebius: 0.2B Lightweight Image Inpainting Framework with 10B-Level Performance, describing a small but effective inpainting model - a model where you can mark regions of an image to remove and the model imagines what should fill the space. The released model required…
Simon Willison — Published
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NDA Project 12
NDA Project 12 🔒 The contents of this AI log will be revealed when/if this game is released publicly.
a327ex — Published
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Private Session 11
Private Session 11 🔒 The contents of this AI log are private and have been uploaded to the website for archival purposes. They may or may not be revealed in the future.
a327ex — Published
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GM installs robots at flagship EV factory after laying off 1,300 workers
US autoworkers union warns of robot automation as dark factory future looms.
Ars Technica — Published
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Report: Kennedy Space Center not ready for era of super heavy rockets
SpaceX has told NASA it plans to launch Starship every eight days from Kennedy.
Ars Technica — Published
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Man used massage gun on his tired eyeballs. It went as well as you'd expect.
He had retinal tears and bruises from squishing his eyeballs with the gun.
Ars Technica — Published
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Polymarket's viral videos showed people winning big, but the bets were fake
"Winning" bets were made on cloned website and would have lost money, WSJ finds.
Ars Technica — Published
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Following user outcry, AMD reinstates memory encryption in consumer CPUs
Critics saw the move as an underhanded way to steer them toward more costly chips.
Ars Technica — Published
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Valve's Steam Machine ships June 29 for $1,049, but you probably won't be able to buy one yet
Valve says it's using a randomized purchase queue to make the experience "less frustrating and more fair."
Ars Technica — Published
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Consistency, But in Excellence Not Appearance
Consistency serves a purpose in visual design, but it seems to have become the purpose of a lot of visual design. Look no further than these evolutions of macOS icons (image courtesy of BasicAppleGuy): The Creator Studio icons are undeniably consistent visually: rounded rectangles, controlled gradients…
Jim Nielsen — Published
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NHTSA investigating alleged Tesla Autopilot crash that killed woman in her home
Tesla touts Autopilot as lifesaving a day after grandmother died in crash.
Ars Technica — Published
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Accessible (I Think) Split-Cell Table Headers by Eric Archived Thoughts [link]
This really isn't the intended take away from Eric's post (which is worth reading), but I needed a CSS rule that targetting Safari (because their support is weird): /* this is gross and I hate it but it works to fix Safari’s layout of the table’s top headers */ @supports (font: -apple-system-body) Gross…
Remy Sharp — Published
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Lucid lays off 1,500 workers in second big cut of the year
The cuts and redundancies are part of a plan to "simplify the company," the CEO says.
Ars Technica — Published
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A US military exercise in space got underway with barely anyone noticing
The Space Force wants to cut the time to field new satellites from years to weeks, days, or hours.
Ars Technica — Published
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1,250 hp hybrid Corvette shatters the Pikes Peak production record
The high-altitude race is a unique test of car and driver.
Ars Technica — Published
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This former hacker saw the light—and now wants to collect all of it
"I don’t know of a bigger question we can answer as humans."
Ars Technica — Published
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How Anthropic may have talked itself into an AI export ban
The company warned about dangers of advanced AI far more than rival OpenAI.
Ars Technica — Published
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Why No Passkeys? Naming the Top Sites That Still Don't Support Them
Back in 2017, Troy Hunt and I built a little website called whynohttps.com. The idea was simple: take the most popular sites on the internet, check which ones still weren't redirecting visitors to HTTPS, and put the laggards on a list for everyone to see. No lecture,
Scott Helme — Published
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Week of the Eclair
Last week I arrived home with a delicious pear frangipane pie from the local bakery. The contents of the cardboard pie box didn’t last long, but on top of it, in a corner, a pink round sticker caught my attention: it read WEEK VAN DE ECLAIR (8th Edition). Today marks the last day of that special week…
Wouter Groeneveld — Published
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FFConf 2026 is live: Things I Learnt [blog]
As with each year for the FFConf web site, I have a distinct idea of the visual style I want. It has zero to do with the content we're presenting each year, but I do love how FFConf's site can be creative. It was like that from the very first web site - the logo was designed in early 2009 in 12 variations…
Remy Sharp — Published
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On the strategic consequences of the US-Iran deal
The US-Iran negotiations are part of a wider shift towards a new world order.
Protesilaos Stavrou — Published
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Modern CSS theming with light-dark(), contrast-color(), and style queries
Combine three new CSS features to build fully adaptive themed components.
Una Kravets — Published
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sqlite-utils 4.0rc1 adds migrations and nested transactions
sqlite-utils is my combined Python library and CLI tool for working with SQLite databases. It provides an extensive set of higher-level operations on top of Python's default sqlite3 package, including support for complex table transformations, automatic table creation from JSON data and a whole lot more…
Simon Willison — Published
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sqlite-utils 4.0rc1
Release: sqlite-utils 4.0rc1 See sqlite-utils 4.0rc1 adds migrations and nested transactions. Tags: sqlite-utils
Simon Willison — Published
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Temporary Cloudflare Accounts for AI agents
Temporary Cloudflare Accounts for AI agents The announcement says this is "for AI agents" but (as is pretty common these days) the AI hook isn't really necessary, this is an interesting feature for everyone else as well. Short version: you can now create a Cloudflare Workers project and run this, without…
Simon Willison — Published
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Trump admin’s coal investments assist plants with repeated violations
At least three coal plants have been repeatedly cited for violating environmental regulations.
Ars Technica — Published
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Obsession, Backrooms, and the new He-Man movie
Obsession and Backrooms are interesting because at first glance it seems Backrooms has higher memetic payload and will suffuse itself into the culture more successfully. I've seen many people comment on the movie and its themes, it's a movie about how therapy bad, it's a movie about how AI bad, it's…
a327ex — Published
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The Steam AI Score
Once AI agents can play games reliably, Valve can secretly create an internal Steam AI Score, a number generated by a collection of agents evaluating each game automatically as they play it. Metrics might range from basic material concerns such as "is the game runnable" to fairly abstract ones like …
a327ex — Published
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Review: Widow's Bay is a boldly original take on comedic horror
An eminently binge-able series that honors classic horror tropes while reinventing them in surprising ways.
Ars Technica — Published
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Big Portuguese wants you to take hormones and transition
@MattZeitlin: what's the origin and function of people (in my experience often academics but not always) saying "right?" after almost every sentence They're onto me. It's not enough for Claude to eviscerate me and call me a weak, pathetic and unsure of himself loser who reflexively invokes the hivemind…
a327ex — Published
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Selfie: relaxing at home
Take a rest while at home.
Protesilaos Stavrou — Published
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Emacs: modus-themes version 5.3.0
Information about the latest version of my highly accessible themes for GNU Emacs.
Protesilaos Stavrou — Published
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Emacs: ef-themes version 2.2.0
Information about the latest version of my colourful-yet-legible themes for GNU Emacs.
Protesilaos Stavrou — Published
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Was talking to my dentist and the conversation turned to his son
Was talking to my dentist and the conversation turned to his son. Kid seems like a high IQ nerdy/obsessive type, he can focus and go deep on the things he cares about, but otherwise just coasts by on things he doesn't. Very much like me. I'm not sure if he was looking for any advice given that I'm similar…
a327ex — Published
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Private Session 10
Private Session 10 🔒 The contents of this AI log are private and have been uploaded to the website for archival purposes. They may or may not be revealed in the future.
a327ex — Published
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Private Session 9
Private Session 9 🔒 The contents of this AI log are private and have been uploaded to the website for archival purposes. They may or may not be revealed in the future.
a327ex — Published
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NDA Project 11
NDA Project 11 🔒 The contents of this AI log will be revealed when/if this game is released publicly.
a327ex — Published
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The UK will scan asylum-seekers’ faces for age checks—despite knowing the tech is flawed
Tests of age-verification technology show the risks of life-altering errors.
Ars Technica — Published
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NDA Project 10
NDA Project 10 🔒 The contents of this AI log will be revealed when/if this game is released publicly.
a327ex — Published
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Quoting Sean Lynch
The real valuable capability MCP offers over skills/CLI is isolating the auth flow outside of the agent’s context window, and potentially out of the harness completely. [...] Maybe the idealized form of MCP is just an auth gateway for the API and nothing else. That’d still be a win. — Sean Lynch, comment…
Simon Willison — Published
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Untitled
In London, a bit tipsy and accidentally on the wrong Underground line. It’s a vibe, and one that makes me wish I actually lived here.
Paul Robert Lloyd — Published
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Full Page Paralysis
You’ve probably heard the term. It’s meant to convey how difficult it can be to start something. “Blank page paralysis”. But for my money, beginning is easy. Finishing is the hard part. In software, they call it “the last 90%”. In logistics, they call it “the last mile”. It’s that final stretch that’s…
Jim Nielsen — Published
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prop-for-that: CSS reacts, JS just listens [link]
This is neat. Effectively injecting a tonne of JavaScript based sensors into the elements that ask for the particular category via data-props-for, such as: With CSS like: @container style(--live-value: 100) { .gauge__num { color: var(--max-tint); } .gauge__flag::after { content: 'max'; } } Lots of useful…
Remy Sharp — Published
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Private Session 8
Private Session 8 🔒 The contents of this AI log are private and have been uploaded to the website for archival purposes. They may or may not be revealed in the future.
a327ex — Published
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Rocket Report: Rebuild begins at Blue Origin launch pad; Relativity targets Mars
A French launch startup is scrapping the name of its rocket, apparently due to a trademark issue.
Ars Technica — Published
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A bouncer in your pocket by Sacha Judd [link]
Sacha has an in depth analysis of the UK's recent announcements around social media websites and children's access to them. I wanted to pull a few quotes: The Internet Watch Foundation reported that child sexual extortion cases in the UK rose 72% in a single year — criminals tricking young people into…
Remy Sharp — Published
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Private Session 7
Private Session 7 🔒 The contents of this AI log are private and have been uploaded to the website for archival purposes. They may or may not be revealed in the future.
a327ex — Published
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Re: how to practice for public speaking?
My response to a question about having the courage to talk in public.
Protesilaos Stavrou — Published
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There Are No Instances in atproto
Like RSS and Google Reader.
Dan Abramov — Published
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Datasette Apps: Host custom HTML applications inside Datasette
Today we launched a new plugin for Datasette, datasette-apps, with this launch announcement post on the Datasette project blog. That post has the what, but I'm going to expand on that a little bit here to provide the why. The TL;DR Datasette Apps are self-contained HTML+JavaScript applications that run…
Simon Willison — Published
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datasette-acl 0.6a0
Release: datasette-acl 0.6a0 This release expands datasette-acl from table-only permissions toward a general resource-sharing system. Alex Garcia did most of the work for this release - we're fleshing out the plugin that will allow multi-user Datasette instances finely grained control over who can access…
Simon Willison — Published
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‘Popa’ Botnet Linked to Publicly-Traded Israeli Firm
For the past four years, a sprawling Android-based botnet called Popa has forced millions of consumer TV boxes to relay Internet traffic linked to advertising fraud, account takeovers, and mass data-scraping efforts. This week, researchers from multiple security firms concluded that the Popa botnet is…
Brian Krebs — Published
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The Panini Sticker World Cup Fever Strikes Again
With the 2026 FIFA World Cup well on its way, the Panini sticker fever has been raging through nearby playgrounds and homes alike. The 2026 edition might be a little bit special as it was recently revealed that Panini lost the exclusive rights. After fifty years of faithful partnership, FIFA moves the…
Wouter Groeneveld — Published
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Interpretation of “The sea is deep” by Nana Mouskouri
Translation of---and philosophical commentary on---a Greek song whose translated title is 'The sea is deep'.
Protesilaos Stavrou — Published
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GLM-5.2 is probably the most powerful text-only open weights LLM
Chinese AI lab Z.ai released GLM-5.2 to their coding plan subscribers on June 13th, and then yesterday (June 16th) released the full open weights under an MIT license. Similar in size to their previous GLM-5 and GLM-5.1 releases this is a 753B parameter, 1.51TB monster - with 40 active parameters (Mixture…
Simon Willison — Published
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Untitled
Ran 5km along the Thames, won the pub quiz then watched England “kick the ball in the square” two more times than Croatia. Pretty much the perfect evening.
Paul Robert Lloyd — Published
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NDA Project 9
NDA Project 9 🔒 The contents of this AI log will be revealed when/if this game is released publicly.
a327ex — Published
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Quoting Charity Majors
What happened in 2025 was this: the economics of code production were turned upside down. Instead of being very hard, time-consuming, and expensive to generate code, it became effectively free and instant. Lines of code went from being treasured, reused, cared for and carefully curated, to being disposable…
Simon Willison — Published
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Symmathesy and Ai with Kent Beck
Jessica Kerr — Published
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Underdubbed
When my brother Pete and I were kids, and our parents were out of town, we ditched school for a week and cut an “album” by recording backing tracks to my dad’s reel-to-reel, then live overdubbing on different instruments and capturing the whole mess on a cassette recorder. We didn’t know what we were…
Jeffrey Zeldman — Published
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In situ Syntax Highlighting in macOS Applications Like Keynote
If you do code-heavy talks in Keynote and want to syntax highlight the code, this might be for you.
Eric Meyer — Published
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Private Session 6
Private Session 6 🔒 The contents of this AI log are private and have been uploaded to the website for archival purposes. They may or may not be revealed in the future.
a327ex — Published
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— a still that plays
Tool: — a still that plays A progressive enchantment Web Component that turns this markup: Into a still frame with a click to play button which loads the GIF on demand. For when you don't want big GIFs to be loaded unless people want to play them. Here's an example that demonstrates the new row editing…
Simon Willison — Published
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NetNewsWire Status
NetNewsWire Status I find this inspiring. Brent Simmons retired a year ago, and his retirement project is making one piece of software really, really good - free from any commercial pressure. The software is NetNewsWire - "it's like podcasts, but for reading" - first released in 2002 and made open source…
Simon Willison — Published
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20 Years of Blogging [blog]
Today is the anniversary of the first blog post on this website from two decades ago. It was about client side JavaScript to automatically (albeit blindly) select the "active" navigation. Ironically, I'd probably do this on the server side these days. Admittedly, it's imported from my prior blog and…
Remy Sharp — Published
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Emacs: testing common colour values with the doric-themes
Code I use to get a preview of common colours that I need to configure for my Doric themes.
Protesilaos Stavrou — Published
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Beyond the want for happy endings
An entry from my journal in which I comment on how I accept the world as-is.
Protesilaos Stavrou — Published
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NDA Project 8
NDA Project 8 🔒 The contents of this AI log will be revealed when/if this game is released publicly.
a327ex — Published
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datasette 1.0a34
Release: datasette 1.0a34 Quoting the release notes: The big feature in this alpha is tools to insert, edit and delete rows within the Datasette interface. These features are available on table pages, and edit and delete are also available as action items on the row page. The inspiration for this feature…
Simon Willison — Published
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datasette-tailscale 0.1a0
Release: datasette-tailscale 0.1a0 A very experimental alpha plugin which lets you do this: datasette tailscale mydata.db \ --ts-authkey tskey-auth-xxxx --ts-hostname datasette-preview This starts a localhost Datasette server with a Tailscale sidecar that connects it to your Tailnet, such that http:…
Simon Willison — Published
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Quoting Georgi Gerganov
I can 100% attest to the fact that Qwen3.6-27B is a very capable local model for coding tasks. Over the last month and a half I've been using it almost daily, either on my M2 Ultra or on my RTX 5090 box. I use it for small mundane tasks at ggml-org - nothing really impressive, but definitely a helpful…
Simon Willison — Published
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Enhancing with CSS Grid Lanes [link]
I've been catching CSS Grid Lanes in the socials this week, but somehow had it in my head that it was to do with the gaps (the lanes) between the grid. It's not, it's masonry (which, why not display: masonry 🤷 There's a also a decent (albeit stiff) video on how it works. TL;DR: mostly you can swap display…
Remy Sharp — Published
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The Fable 5 Export Controls Harm US Cyber Defense
The Fable 5 Export Controls Harm US Cyber Defense I quoted The Atlantic quoting Kate Moussouris earlier, when I should have gone straight to the source. Here she is confirming that the "jailbreak" that got Claude Fable 5 banned under an export control really was "fix this code": The researchers took…
Simon Willison — Published
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Quoting Matteo Wong, The Atlantic
Katie Moussouris, a cybersecurity expert and the CEO of Luta Security, told me that Anthropic shared with her a copy of the White House’s report on the Fable jailbreak to get her appraisal. (She said that she is not being paid by Anthropic.) The report, Moussouris said, involved IT experts asking Fable…
Simon Willison — Published
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Cloudflare CAPTCHA on at least one ampersand
TIL: Cloudflare CAPTCHA on at least one ampersand I'm using Cloudflare's CAPTCHA (they call it a "Web Application Firewall > Custom rules > Managed Challenge" these days) to prevent crawlers from aggresively spidering my faceted search engine on this site, but I got fed up of even simple ?q=term searches…
Simon Willison — Published
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Selfie: sunbathing around my plants
Plants all around me with the sun shining on my face.
Protesilaos Stavrou — Published
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datasette-apps 0.1a3
Release: datasette-apps 0.1a3 Fixed a bug where users without the create-app permission could still create apps. #27 Fixed a bug where it was impossible to grant permission to edit an app to users who were not the app's owner. The rules for edit/delete are now the same as view: if the app is private…
Simon Willison — Published
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∪ of Target Audiences (Accessibility, SEO, AEO/GEO)
Using SEO (search engine optimization) to justify accessibility was only ever a technique for bosses or clients or stakeholders who see accessibility as a cost center and are typically driven more by dashboards or money. Ideally, you want to get past that ASAP to drive better outcomes for humans, not…
Adrian Roselli — 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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How to get hired in 2025
A collection of red flags in software engineers' test assignments
Nikita Prokopov — Published — Updated
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Needy programs
We used to use software; now software started to use us
Nikita Prokopov — Published — Updated
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I am sorry, but everyone is getting syntax highlighting wrong
Applying human ergonomics and design principles to syntax highlighting
Nikita Prokopov — Published — Updated
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datasette-apps 0.1a2
Release: datasette-apps 0.1a2 Custom network/CSP origins for apps are now guarded by a new apps-set-csp permission, with an optional allowed_csp_origins plugin allow-list for non-privileged users. The Datasette Agent app creation tool enforces the same rules. #24 Stored query picker now supports keyboard…
Simon Willison — Published
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datasette-agent 0.3a0
Release: datasette-agent 0.3a0 New tool, execute_write_sql, which requests user approval and then writes to a database - taking user permissions into account. #27 I added a mechanism for asking user approval in datasette agent 0.2a0. The new execute_write_sql tool can now prompt the user for all kinds…
Simon Willison — Published
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"They screwed us": Personality clashes sent Anthropic's models offline
"They screwed us": Personality clashes sent Anthropic's models offline Lots of "source familiar with the administration's thinking" and "source close to Anthropic" in this Axios piece, which is the best collection of behind-the-scenes gossip I've seen about the US government export control Mythos/Fable…
Simon Willison — Published
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The Instructure Canvas Breach (2026): How XSS in a Support Ticket Compromised 275 Million Students
A single support ticket became the front door to 275 million student records. The Canvas breach shows how quickly untrusted user content can become a serious security incident when it is rendered inside privileged internal tooling. This was not an exotic attack chain; it was stored XSS, over-scoped access…
Scott Helme — Published
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Social media to be banned for under-16s in landmark government move to give kids their childhood back - GOV.UK [link]
The UK government has announced they're going ahead with a social media ban for 16 year old and under. In our household we've already had this restriction in place (at a network/DNS level) so it doesn't impact our kids experiences at all, but I do know from talking to the kids that the do wish their…
Remy Sharp — Published
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My Enjoyment From Engagement With Media Deepens As I Grow Older
I am not yet done thinking about nostalgia. In Nostalgia Always Includes a Temporal Context, I claim that we can never fully relive a nostalgic moment from the past precisely because of its temporal context—the past. In this article, I claim that my enjoyment from engaging with media, that in ten or…
Wouter Groeneveld — Published
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Weekly Update 508
Light switches. How on earth is it so hard to find decent light switches?! It sounds ridiculous until you actually spend enough time looking for ones that meet two simple criteria:Aren't stateful (switch is up or down, has to be push-button)Looks goodNow, I'
Troy Hunt — Published
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All tomorrow’s parties.
What happens next? Well, you tell me.
Ethan Marcotte — Published
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Quoting Julia Evans
[...] Instead, I picture a specific person and I just write for them. Often this person is "me, but 3 years ago" or a good friend. — Julia Evans, write for 1 person Tags: writing, julia-evans
Simon Willison — Published
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Why AI hasn’t replaced software engineers, and won’t
Why AI hasn’t replaced software engineers, and won’t Arvind Narayanan and Sayash Kappor take on the question of AI job losses through the lens of a profession that is uniquely suited to AI disruption - software engineering. In this essay, we argue that there is enough evidence to reject the narrative…
Simon Willison — Published