Latest entries
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Winter silence
An entry from my journal where I comment on how exposure to nature helps me understand my place in the world.
Protesilaos Stavrou — Published
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Claude's new constitution
Claude's new constitution Late last year Richard Weiss found something interesting while poking around with the just-released Claude Opus 4.5: he was able to talk the model into regurgitating a document which was not part of the system prompt but appeared instead to be baked in during training, and which…
Simon Willison — Published
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Judge orders stop to FBI search of devices seized from Washington Post reporter
Order says gov't must stop search while court reviews Washington Post motions.
Ars Technica — Published
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Millions of people imperiled through sign-in links sent by SMS
Even well-known services with millions of users are exposing sensitive data.
Ars Technica — Published
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mRNA cancer vaccine shows protection at 5-year follow-up, Moderna and Merck say
The vaccines are tailor-made to target each patient's unique cancer.
Ars Technica — Published
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Trump FCC threatens to enforce equal-time rule on late-night talk shows
FCC disputes long-standing view that the shows are exempt from equal-time rule.
Ars Technica — Published
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Why adding modern controls to 1996's Tomb Raider simply doesn't work
For our C:\ArsGames series, we look at the controls conundrum of early 3D.
Ars Technica — Published
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Kioxia's memory is "sold out" for 2026, prolonging a "high-end and expensive phase"
Kioxia is spinning up more manufacturing capacity, but relief will come slowly.
Ars Technica — Published
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Watch a robot swarm "bloom" like a garden
The Swarm Garden: An array of modular robot agents that adapt to changing conditions for living architecture.
Ars Technica — Published
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Spotify won court order against Anna’s Archive, taking down .org domain
Lawsuit was filed under seal; Anna's Archive wasn't notified until after takedown.
Ars Technica — Published
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Another Jeff Bezos company has announced plans to develop a megaconstellation
With data speeds of up to 6Tbps, one could stream a lot of HD movies.
Ars Technica — Published
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Here's Volvo's new EX60 $60,000 electric midsize SUV
The EX60 goes into production in April 2026.
Ars Technica — Published
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Declaring Systems Bankruptcy
For years and years, I’ve helped teams evaluate their systems, fix their systems, tweak their systems, and evolve their systems. And sometimes it’s even been necessary to help teams declare bankruptcy on their systems, blow them up, and start anew. […]
Brad Frost — Published
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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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Has Gemini surpassed ChatGPT? We put the AI models to the test.
Did Apple make the right choice in partnering with Google for Siri's AI features?
Ars Technica — Published
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Zillow removed climate risk scores. This climate expert is restoring them.
Real estate website scrubbed data under pressure from California real estate brokers.
Ars Technica — Published
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Wikipedia volunteers spent years cataloging AI tells. Now there's a plugin to avoid them.
The web's best guide to spotting AI writing has become a manual for hiding it.
Ars Technica — Published
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Webb reveals a planetary nebula with phenomenal clarity, and it is spectacular
The colors show the star’s final breath transforming into the raw ingredients for new worlds.
Ars Technica — Published
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Zuck stuck on Trump’s bad side: FTC appeals loss in Meta monopoly case
FTC will appeal ruling that found Meta has no monopoly in social networking.
Ars Technica — Published
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Electricity use of AI coding agents
Electricity use of AI coding agents Previous work estimating the energy and water cost of LLMs has generally focused on the cost per prompt using a consumer-level system such as ChatGPT. Simon P. Couch notes that coding agents such as Claude Code use way more tokens in response to tasks, often burning…
Simon Willison — Published
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Verizon starts requiring 365 days of paid service before it will unlock phones
Verizon changed prepaid brands' policy a week after FCC waived unlocking rule.
Ars Technica — Published
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Google temporarily disabled YouTube's advanced captions without warning
Google says SRV3 captions were causing playback errors, so it has "temporarily" disabled them.
Ars Technica — Published
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Flesh-eating flies are eating their way through Mexico, CDC warns
Eight animal cases in Mexico's Tamaulipas spur CDC to warn doctors of festering wounds.
Ars Technica — Published
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Macaque facial gestures are more than just a reflex, study finds
Study is first to implant micro-electrode arrays to record neurons as they produce facial gestures.
Ars Technica — Published
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Netflix to pay all cash for Warner Bros. to fend off Paramount hostile takeover
Netflix and Warner seek quick shareholder vote as Paramount tries to upend deal.
Ars Technica — Published
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New Year, New Website — Same Old Me
I redesigned my www website. Why? The end of year / holiday break is a great time to work on such things. I wanted to scratch an itch. Websites are a worry stone [gestures at current state of the world] Do I really need a reason? Nope. I read something along the lines of “If you ship something that shows…
Jim Nielsen — Published
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Giving University Exams in the Age of Chatbots
Giving University Exams in the Age of Chatbots Detailed and thoughtful description of an open-book and open-chatbot exam run by Ploum at École Polytechnique de Louvain for an "Open Source Strategies" class. Students were told they could use chatbots during the exam but they had to announce their intention…
Simon Willison — Published
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Another Major Bike Service
Last month I handed in my bike for another major repair service. It was sorely needed: a slight push on the pedals caused the chain to drop a gear, the front light wiring was broken since forever, and shifting in general always required two good clicks on the handlebar instead of just one. This year…
Wouter Groeneveld — Published
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Vibecoding #2
I feel like I got substantial value out of Claude today, and want to document it. I am at the tail end of AI adoption, so I don't expect to say anything particularly useful or novel. However, I am constantly complaining about the lack of boring AI posts, so it's only proper if I write one.
Alex Kladov — Published
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Naked Power
Twitter's descent into a gutter of the lowest order has been gut-wrenching: Elon Musk’s Grok and the Mass Undressing Scandal As I draft this, a week later, it appears pressure from civil society, investigations by regulators, and outright bans on multiple continents have forced Musk to back down to an…
Alex Russell — Published
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jordanhubbard/nanolang
jordanhubbard/nanolang Plenty of people have mused about what a new programming language specifically designed to be used by LLMs might look like. Jordan Hubbard (co-founder of FreeBSD, with serious stints at Apple and NVIDIA) just released exactly that. A minimal, LLM-friendly programming language with…
Simon Willison — Published
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Bainbridge Island Mochi Tsuki
Last weekend we took the ferry to Bainbridge Island to see a Mochi Tsuki event. I read about the history of Japanese immigrants on Bainbridge island. I saw people making mochi, a taiko drummer group, and traditional dances. It was a lot of fun, and I learned a lot. Definitely recommend this event!
Aaron Patterson — Published
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Frankenwine: Multiple personas in a Wine process
I came across a recent article on making Linux system calls from a Wine process. Windows programs running under Wine are still normal Linux processes and may interact with the Linux kernel like any other process. None of this was surprising, and the demonstration works just as I expect. Still, it got…
Chris Wellons — Published
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Blink and you'll miss them: 6-day certificates are here!
What a great way to start 2026! Let's Encrypt have now made their short-lived certificates available, so you can go and start using them right away.It wasn't long ago when the announcement came that by 2029, all certificates will be reduced to a maximum of
Scott Helme — Published
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Scaling long-running autonomous coding
Scaling long-running autonomous coding Wilson Lin at Cursor has been doing some experiments to see how far you can push a large fleet of "autonomous" coding agents: This post describes what we've learned from running hundreds of concurrent agents on a single project, coordinating their work, and watching…
Simon Willison — Published
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I find them on the street & shadow.
It wasn’t until the end of our chat that I learned her name.
Ethan Marcotte — Published
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Emacs: easily set timers with TMR
Video demo of my 'tmr' package for Emacs. It helps you set timers interactively and provides relevant utilities.
Protesilaos Stavrou — Published
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FLUX.2-klein-4B Pure C Implementation
FLUX.2-klein-4B Pure C Implementation On 15th January Black Forest Labs, a lab formed by the creators of the original Stable Diffusion, released black-forest-labs/FLUX.2-klein-4B - an Apache 2.0 licensed 4 billion parameter version of their FLUX.2 family. Salvatore Sanfilippo (antirez) decided to build…
Simon Willison — Published
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Easy Measures Doing, Simple Measures Understanding
In his talk, I like the way Jake Nations pits easy vs. simple: Easy means you can add it to your system quickly. Simple means you can understand the work that you’ve done. I like this framing. Easy means you can do with little effort. Simple means you can understand what you do with little effort. In…
Jim Nielsen — Published
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Weekly Update 487
I thought Scott would cop it first when he posted about what his solar system really cost him last year. "You're so gonna get that stupid AI-slop response from some people", I joked. But no, he got other stupid responses instead! And I got the AI-slop
Troy Hunt — Published
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Emacs: notmuch-indicator version 1.3.0
Information about my notmuch email counter for the mode line of GNU Emacs.
Protesilaos Stavrou — Published
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A Social Filesystem
Formats over apps.
Dan Abramov — Published
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Quoting Jeremy Daer
[On agents using CLI tools in place of REST APIs] To save on context window, yes, but moreso to improve accuracy and success rate when multiple tool calls are involved, particularly when calls must be correctly chained e.g. for pagination, rate-limit backoff, and recognizing authentication failures.…
Simon Willison — Published
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Emacs: doric-themes version 0.6.0
Minimalist themes for GNU Emacs to complement my ef-themes (maximalist) and modus-themes (moderate).
Protesilaos Stavrou — Published
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Our approach to advertising and expanding access to ChatGPT
Our approach to advertising and expanding access to ChatGPT OpenAI's long-rumored introduction of ads to ChatGPT just became a whole lot more concrete: In the coming weeks, we’re also planning to start testing ads in the U.S. for the free and Go tiers, so more people can benefit from our tools with fewer…
Simon Willison — Published
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Weekly Update 486
I’m in Oslo! Flighty is telling me I’ve flown in or out of here 43 times since a visit in 2014 set me on a new path professionally and, many years later, personally. It’s special here, like a second home that just feels…
Troy Hunt — Published
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Nuance and Garage Doors
I got some wonderful bit of Hemmingway-esque consulting advice from the garage door repair guy.
Brad Frost — Published
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Is QSpy still cool? Let's play QuakeWorld!
Fabien Sanglard — Published
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Teaching dogs and learning from them
An entry from my journal where I comment on how I interact with dogs and what I have learnt from them for life in general.
Protesilaos Stavrou — Published
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Building Critical Infrastructure with htmx: Network Automation for the Paris 2024 Olympics
A Bit of Background During my 6 years at Cisco, I developed numerous web applications to assist network engineers with highly complex operations, both in terms of the volume of tasks to accomplish and the rigor of procedures to follow. Networking is a specialized field in its own right, where the slightest…
Carson Gross — Published
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Open Responses
Open Responses This is the standardization effort I've most wanted in the world of LLMs: a vendor-neutral specification for the JSON API that clients can use to talk to hosted LLMs. Open Responses aims to provide exactly that as a documented standard, derived from OpenAI's Responses API. I was hoping…
Simon Willison — Published
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The Design & Implementation of Sprites
The Design & Implementation of Sprites I wrote about Sprites last week Here's Thomas Ptacek from Fly with the insider details on how they work under the hood. I like this framing of them as "disposable computers": Sprites are ball-point disposable computers. Whatever mark you mean to make, we’ve rigged…
Simon Willison — Published
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Customizing The Emacs Email Experience With Mu4e
You all knew this was coming. After thinking about my email workflow I had to put it to practice. The grand plan was to force myself to learn more about Emacs by doing email in it with the added advantage of freeing up Mac Mail to manage my Exchange work emails there. Anything is better than staring…
Wouter Groeneveld — Published
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Quoting Boaz Barak, Gabriel Wu, Jeremy Chen and Manas Joglekar
When we optimize responses using a reward model as a proxy for “goodness” in reinforcement learning, models sometimes learn to “hack” this proxy and output an answer that only “looks good” to it (because coming up with an answer that is actually good can be hard). The philosophy behind confessions is…
Simon Willison — Published
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How to think about Gas Town
I want to continue with my series on how you can use Claude Code for software development, but I have at least two posts I need to write first. This post is one of those two. Thanks for all of the kind words you all have said about the first post in the series, I’ll absolutely be continuing it, hopefully…
Steve Klabnik — Published
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Podcast: На Маке нет никаких шкафов @ Думаем дальше
С Ильей Бирманом провожаем Алана Дая, вспоминая, в чём состоят достижения Мака, Джобса и ХИГа (но и Винду добрым словом тоже вспоминаем).
Nikita Prokopov — Published
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Claude Cowork Exfiltrates Files
Claude Cowork Exfiltrates Files Claude Cowork defaults to allowing outbound HTTP traffic to only a specific list of domains, to help protect the user against prompt injection attacks that exfiltrate their data. Prompt Armor found a creative workaround: Anthropic's API domain is on that list, so they…
Simon Willison — Published
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Live Region Support
This post does not discuss whether live regions are good, nor is it a post about the best way to use them. This post only covers how they are exposed to the audience who experiences them — screen reader users. Written by a non-screen-reader user. If you’re here because your…
Adrian Roselli — Published
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Patch Tuesday, January 2026 Edition
Microsoft today issued patches to plug at least 113 security holes in its various Windows operating systems and supported software. Eight of the vulnerabilities earned Microsoft's most-dire "critical" rating, and the company warns that attackers are already exploiting one of the bugs fixed today.
Brian Krebs — Published
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Building a 1997 Quake PC: Benchmarking GLquake
Fabien Sanglard — Published
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Next steps for the hut
Information about what still needs to be done for the hut project to be viable for an average person.
Protesilaos Stavrou — Published
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Anthropic invests $1.5 million in the Python Software Foundation and open source security
Anthropic invests $1.5 million in the Python Software Foundation and open source security This is outstanding news, especially given our decision to withdraw from that NSF grant application back in October. We are thrilled to announce that Anthropic has entered into a two-year partnership with the Python…
Simon Willison — Published
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Who Decides Who Doesn’t Deserve Privacy?
Remember the Ashley Madison data breach? That was now more than a decade ago, yet it arguably remains the single most noteworthy data breach of all time. There are many reasons for this accolade, but chief among them is that by virtue of the site being expressly designed to facilitate
Troy Hunt — Published
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What a Year of Solar and Batteries Really Saved Us in 2025
Throughout 2025, I spoke a few times about our home energy solution, including our grid usage, our solar array and our Tesla Powerwall batteries. Now that I have a full year of data, I wanted to take a look at exactly how everything is working out, and, in alignment with
Scott Helme — Published
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Bytes I can delete after all this time [blog]
For the last few years my work-work has mostly focused on back end software (particularly around APIs). This meant that any front end work I was doing was for myself. Being an long-in-the-tooth old dog, I tend to learn and trick, and roll it out again and again typically without taking the time to find…
Remy Sharp — Published
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Building a 1997 Quake PC: Benchmarking Vquake
Fabien Sanglard — Published
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♫ Change by Tears for Fears
♫ Change by Tears for FearsI wasn’t blown away by Marty Supreme, but it has given me a new found appreciation of Tears for Fears.
Paul Robert Lloyd — Published
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Superhuman AI Exfiltrates Emails
Superhuman AI Exfiltrates Emails Classic prompt injection attack: When asked to summarize the user’s recent mail, a prompt injection in an untrusted email manipulated Superhuman AI to submit content from dozens of other sensitive emails (including financial, legal, and medical information) in the user’s…
Simon Willison — Published
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First impressions of Claude Cowork, Anthropic's general agent
New from Anthropic today is Claude Cowork, a "research preview" that they describe as "Claude Code for the rest of your work". It's currently available only to Max subscribers ($100 or $200 per month plans) as part of the updated Claude Desktop macOS application. Update 16th January 2026: it's now also…
Simon Willison — Published
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Working with AI: Do Things Right
Today, a quick example of introducing determinism when an AI struggles. I give it a simple instruction, it screws it up, I tell it to write a program to do things right.
Jessica Kerr — Published
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Building a 1997 Quake PC: Benchmarking Quake
Fabien Sanglard — Published
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Redesigning my microkernel from the ground up
As you may recall, circa 2022-2023 I was working on a microkernel written in Hare named Helios. Helios was largely inspired by and modelled after the design of seL4 and was my first major foray into modern OS development that was serious enough to get to a somewhat useful state of functionality, with…
Drew DeVault — Published
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Don't fall into the anti-AI hype
Don't fall into the anti-AI hype I'm glad someone was brave enough to say this. There is a lot of anti-AI sentiment in the software development community these days. Much of it is justified, but if you let people convince you that AI isn't genuinely useful for software developers or that this whole thing…
Simon Willison — Published
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My answers to the questions I posed about porting open source code with LLMs
Last month I wrote about porting JustHTML from Python to JavaScript using Codex CLI and GPT-5.2 in a few hours while also buying a Christmas tree and watching Knives Out 3. I ended that post with a series of open questions about the ethics and legality of this style of work. Alexander Petros on lobste.rs…
Simon Willison — Published
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In The Beginning There Was Slop
I’ve been slowly reading my copy of “The Internet Phone Book” and I recently read an essay in it by Elan Ullendorff called “The New Turing Test”. Elan argues that what matters in a work isn’t the tools used to make it, but the “expressiveness” of the work itself (was it made “from someone, for someone…
Jim Nielsen — Published
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TIL from taking Neon I at the Crucible
TIL from taking Neon I at the Crucible Things I learned about making neon signs after a week long intensive evening class at the Crucible in Oakland. Tags: art, til
Simon Willison — Published
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Quoting Linus Torvalds
Also note that the python visualizer tool has been basically written by vibe-coding. I know more about analog filters -- and that's not saying much -- than I do about python. It started out as my typical "google and do the monkey-see-monkey-do" kind of programming, but then I cut out the middle-man …
Simon Willison — Published
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A Software Library with No Code
A Software Library with No Code Provocative experiment from Drew Breunig, who designed a new library for time formatting ("3 hours ago" kind of thing) called "whenwords" that has no code at all, just a carefully written specification, an AGENTS.md and a collection of conformance tests in a YAML file…
Simon Willison — Published
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Working with AI: How does it Know?
Is the AI going to do what I want?
Jessica Kerr — Published
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Favourites of December (And a Short 2025 Recap)
A late happy new year to everyone! I almost forgot to publish last month’s favourite (blog) posts, and since last month was the last one of 2025, let’s do a short recap as well. Previous month’s recap: November 2025. Last year was another eventful year. Browse the full 2025 Brain Baking archive for more…
Wouter Groeneveld — Published
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My best tricks from 13 years of losing weight
Over the years, I tried many techniques and tricks that helped me lose weight. In this article, I want to share the best of them! Maybe some of them can be useful for you, as well. Big picture In the summer of 2012, I decided that I wanted to lose weight. I had been more or less overweight throughout…
Sebastian Morr — Published
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To the brightest dog
Just read the poem. No further comment.
Protesilaos Stavrou — Published
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Fly's new Sprites.dev addresses both developer sandboxes and API sandboxes at the same time
New from Fly.io today: Sprites.dev. Here's their blog post and YouTube demo. It's an interesting new product that's quite difficult to explain - Fly call it "Stateful sandbox environments with checkpoint & restore" but I see it as hitting two of my current favorite problems: a safe development environment…
Simon Willison — Published
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Brief Note on Application Keyboard Shortcuts
Identifying keyboard shortcuts for an application is mostly an internationalization problem. It’s also not a new problem. A recent (to me) example is the WordPress Gutenberg team starting to discuss keyboard shortcuts in 2017, addressing what will and won’t work across keyboards for different languages…
Adrian Roselli — Published
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Reading List 352
This reading list is courtesy of Vivaldi browser, who pay me decent money to fight for a better web and don’t moan at me for reading all this stuff. We’ve just released Vivaldi 7.7 for desktop and mobile, with features requested by our users instead of planet-burning plagiarism-filled Generative AI.…
Bruce Lawson — Published
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Emacs: my ‘oxford-calendar’ package
My new package for Emacs to display Oxford University academic terms in the 'M-x calendar'.
Protesilaos Stavrou — Published
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The rainy days
Entry from my journal about keeping a sense of perspective when things are not going our way.
Protesilaos Stavrou — Published
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Who Benefited from the Aisuru and Kimwolf Botnets?
Our first story of 2026 revealed how a destructive new botnet called Kimwolf rapidly grew to infect more than two million devices by mass-compromising a vast number of unofficial Android TV streaming boxes. Today, we'll dig through digital clues left behind by the hackers, network operators, and cybercrime…
Brian Krebs — Published
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LLM predictions for 2026, shared with Oxide and Friends
I joined a recording of the Oxide and Friends podcast on Tuesday to talk about 1, 3 and 6 year predictions for the tech industry. This is my second appearance on their annual predictions episode, you can see my predictions from January 2025 here. Here's the page for this year's episode, with options…
Simon Willison — Published
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How Google Got Its Groove Back and Edged Ahead of OpenAI
How Google Got Its Groove Back and Edged Ahead of OpenAI I picked up a few interesting tidbits from this Wall Street Journal piece on Google's recent hard won success with Gemini. Here's the origin of the name "Nano Banana": Naina Raisinghani, known inside Google for working late into the night, needed…
Simon Willison — Published
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DMA review consultation responses
Because I’m so the rock ‘n’ roll, I’ve been reading the summary of responses to the first review of the Digital Markets Act. There were “450 contributions submitted by a broad range of interested parties, including small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs), gatekeepers, civil society organisations, academics…
Bruce Lawson — Published
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Building a 1997 Quake PC!
Fabien Sanglard — Published
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A data model for Git (and other docs updates)
Hello! This past fall, I decided to take some time to work on Git’s documentation. I’ve been thinking about working on open source docs for a long time – usually if I think the documentation for something could be improved, I’ll write a blog post or a zine or something. But this time I wondered: could…
Julia Evans — Published
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Thinking about email workflows
This Emacs thing is getting out of hand and eating away all my free time. Now I know what they mean with the saying “diving into a rabbit hole” (and never seeing the bottom of it). We’re at 1k lines of Elisp code and I still add items to the TODO list that don’t work well enough on a daily basis. For…
Wouter Groeneveld — Published
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The AI Security Shakedown
Matthias Ott shared a link to a post from Anthropic titled “Disrupting the first reported AI-orchestrated cyber espionage campaign”, which I read because I’m interested in the messy intersection of AI and security. I gotta say: I don’t know if I’ve ever read anything quite like this article. At first…
Jim Nielsen — Published
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Quoting Adam Wathan
[...] the reality is that 75% of the people on our engineering team lost their jobs here yesterday because of the brutal impact AI has had on our business. And every second I spend trying to do fun free things for the community like this is a second I'm not spending trying to turn the business around…
Simon Willison — Published