Latest entries
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Spending deal comes with a bonus: Blocking political control of grants
Congress pauses the OMB's attempt to rewrite how research is funded.
Ars Technica — Published
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I rented a car, and within hours, my driver's license was for sale
The FBI is reportedly investigating a massive data breach that is unfolding in real time.
Ars Technica — Published
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FCC plans robocall scorecard to grade phone companies on spam call blocking
Carrier scorecards may include call-blocking stats and data on customer complaints.
Ars Technica — Published
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Wary of Artemis IV timeline, NASA is changing lunar spacesuit design
"Requirements are being adjusted to reflect near-term mission needs."
Ars Technica — Published
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Google releases Gemini 3.8 Flash, its third Flash model in six weeks
Google's Pro model updates are seemingly paused, but there's yet another Gemini Flash today.
Ars Technica — Published
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Trump may be forced to reveal secret rules feds use for AI safety testing
Trump’s secret reviews of frontier AI models may hide corruption, lawsuit says.
Ars Technica — Published
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llm-gemini 0.34
Release: llm-gemini 0.34 New model gemini-3.8-flash for Gemini 3.8 Flash, with low, medium and high thinking levels. #146 Fixed async responses failing to record the resolved model version. Thanks, Charlie Tonneslan. #137 Google released Gemini 3.8 Flash (and 3.8 Flash Cyber, but that's available to…
Simon Willison — Published
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US court rules Google will not have to sell ad exchange after losing antitrust case
The DOJ proved to the court that Google acted illegally, but it won't get the big win it wanted.
Ars Technica — Published
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Toyohiro Akiyama, first Japanese citizen and journalist in space, dies at 84
He reported from space that only "fat" Japanese tree frogs enjoyed weightlessness.
Ars Technica — Published
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Claude's new system prompt really doesn't want to reproduce song lyrics
Anthropic publish the system prompts for their Claude consumer applications (Claude.ai and the Claude mobile apps - sadly not for Claude Cowork or Claude Code). I love that they do this, and that they share not just the current prompts but historic changes to their prompts as well. They used to keep…
Simon Willison — Published
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The Army just used a 20-kilowatt laser to take out three drones
The Army says its laser system can track and destroy hostile drones.
Ars Technica — Published
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Is Russia's rival to Starlink failing? Here's what we know.
At least three of the first 32 Rassvet satellites likely suffered outright failures, and more may be in trouble.
Ars Technica — Published
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BGP hijack infecting networks caused by a comedy of errors that’s not funny at all
What can we learn from a BGP hijacking that poisoned production software? Plenty.
Ars Technica — Published
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Quoting Rick Brewster
Direct2D has always been the biggest hurdle for Paint.NET on WINE, and it's clear that it will never be completed enough for Paint.NET's use. And I can't just "disable" the use of Direct2D. So, instead, Paint.NET now has an internal, from-scratch, clean-room reverse-engineered rewrite of Direct2D that…
Simon Willison — Published
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Lookdev
Lookdev Summary Lookdev: a four-round art-style exploration that converged on a style the owner will actually build games in, then ported it to Anchor 3. Starting question: which visual styles can Claude author with minimal owner juicing/filtering? Five candidate styles (voxel, PS1, low-poly, toon, Blender…
a327ex — Published
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Horse Game 21
Horse Game 21 Summary Horse Game (KNIGHT VS. PAWNS) session that redesigned the entire sound system onto an explicit signals → moments → layers model and built the in-game sound picker — the two halves of the F7 audio workflow fixed at once. The old wired-handle interception system (digit-stripped moment…
a327ex — Published
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Static Allocation, Constant Work
In reply to this email:
Alex Kladov — Published
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What Makes LLM Tokenization Slow?
Exploring the performance of byte-pair encoding by optimizing a GPT-2 tokenizer.
Andrew Healey — Published
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So, what happened to my Claude Code series?
I started off this year writing a lot, and wanted to keep up the pace. I did good at first! And then… I didn’t manage to. In some ways, this is because I have just been super busy! I’ve never had less free time, and I’m okay with that. There’s a tremendous amount of good things…
Steve Klabnik — Published
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The best dark mode toggle is probably none
About a month ago, I wrote an article recommending that if you are going to have an always visible control for switching between light and dark mode, it should be a two-state toggle that alternates between system and whatever the current opposite of system is, not a tri-state one (system, light, dark…
Lea Verou — Published
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Claude Fable 5.1 made me a really nice animated pelican
Today is Claude Fable (and Mythos) 5.1 day. Anthropic say that Fable 5.1 "sets a new standard for coding, knowledge work, and long-running problem-solving tasks". Their announcement spends a notable amount of time on scientific research, boasting of a 52.6% score on the brand new Terminal-Bench-Science…
Simon Willison — Published
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Here's our first look—and drive—of the 2027 Range Rover Electric
333 miles of real-world range with uncompromised comfort and off-road ability.
Ars Technica — Published
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Untitled
Had a fun evening “ragging on The Telegraph” with Dorian Lynskey and Ian Dunt at the magnificent Union Chapel.
Paul Robert Lloyd — Published
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FBI Probes Service Selling 153M+ Drivers Licenses
A new identity theft service launched on the dark web this week is selling digital scans of more than 153 million drivers licenses from people in the United States and Canada. Based on interviews with individuals whose licenses are available for purchase on this service, it appears to be siphoning images…
Brian Krebs — Published
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Weekly Update 519: Breaches & Data Integrity
It does feel like I've bitten off too much and am now chewing like crazy this week. The 3D printing talk with Elle in Oslo, the "normal" NDC infosec talk, the cyber-broken talk with Scott in Copenhagen and then those ratbag hackers keep dumping more
Troy Hunt — Published
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Tweet
a327ex — Published
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Research roundup: 7 cool science stories we almost missed
"Black hole stars," making cookies from plastic, tiny sound-powered drones, and more.
Ars Technica — Published
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Codex bundles LibreOffice
I was poking around in my ~/.cache/ folder using OmniDiskSweeper when I spotted something interesting. The OpenAI Codex desktop app (since rebranded to just ChatGPT) has 1.7GB of stuff in there in a folder called codex-primary-runtime, including a full Python installation, a full Node.js installation…
Simon Willison — Published
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Nobody Believes It, Everybody Does It
Speaking of things we know individually, but let slide collectively, here’s Jeremy Keith talking about how we all used Flash: Remember when almost every website had a Flash intro? Everyone knew they were annoying and uneccessary, but everyone else was doing it. And here’s John Gruber writing about his…
Jim Nielsen — Published
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A newborn and child reportedly died of measles; CDC isn't counting them
Historically, state health departments determine cases and deaths, not the CDC.
Ars Technica — Published
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GeoJSON Map Viewer
Tool: GeoJSON Map Viewer I was helping Natalie gather some maps of local political boundaries (for the Granada Community Services District and the Midcoast Community Council) and found a need to display some GeoJSON files on a map and export that as a PNG. I asked GPT-5.6-Sol for suggestions of tools…
Simon Willison — Published
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New Android Drop adds remembered items in Find Hub, makes anti-nausea dots official
New features are rolling out across the Android ecosystem starting today.
Ars Technica — Published
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FTC alleges Amazon illegally made $20 billion by rigging billions of ad auctions
FTC says firm replaces actual ad-auction results "with higher prices set by Amazon."
Ars Technica — Published
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This is what a supercar was like a century ago
When the average car could only do 40 mph, this Bentley could break 100.
Ars Technica — Published
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Quoting Tarn Adams
They took the letters from me! I have to talk about dwarf behavior now. I can't even talk about dwarf AI. It doesn't exist. It's dwarf behavior, and they misbehave sometimes — Tarn Adams, co-creator of Dwarf Fortress Tags: ai, game-design
Simon Willison — Published
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datasette-mcp 0.2
Release: datasette-mcp 0.2 "rows" from execute_sql is now an array of objects. Previously it was an array of arrays. This should help weaker models avoid losing track of which positional array element maps to which column. #1 Now depends on mcp>=2.1.1. This is the first non-alpha release of the plugin…
Simon Willison — Published
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Python 3.15.0 candidate 2 is here!
Python 3.15.0 candidate 2 is here! Hugo van Kemenade (release manager for Python 3.14 and 3.15) announces the final release candidate for Python 3.15, scheduled for release in October: Entering the release candidate phase, only reviewed code changes which are clear bug fixes are allowed between this…
Simon Willison — Published
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It turns out that Orion's much-maligned heat shield performed really well
Independent safety officials also have high praise for changes by NASA leadership.
Ars Technica — Published
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Evaluating a Success Criterion
Sidney Paget illustration of Sherlock Holmes from Strand Magazine, December 1892, p.646, but I added papers from his March 1893 (p.281 of Strand Magazine) illustration and then two versions of the W3C logo to the front page. When performing a WCAG evaluation (or review or audit), it’s easy to get…
Adrian Roselli — Published
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Tales o’ Tech: Suffering Fools
Why first impressions are often correct. Today’s jerk is tomorrow’s techno-fascist. The post Tales o’ Tech: Suffering Fools appeared first on Jeffrey Zeldman Presents.
Jeffrey Zeldman — Published
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Bring Back The Noise With HDD Synth
The modernisation of some of the vintage components in old computers comes with its own set of challenges. Things break: thirty plus year old hard drives stop spinning, floppy drive components such as a simple elastic rubber to get mechanical things moving disintegrate, and of course plenty of capacitors…
Wouter Groeneveld — Published
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Without new landers or rovers, it's helicopters or bust for NASA's Mars program
NASA's cost estimate for SR-1 Freedom is $2.1 billion, but that doesn't include the helicopters.
Ars Technica — Published
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Private group wants to launch "cheapest possible" mission to Alpha Centauri
"We could really be facing the great filter."
Ars Technica — Published
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A Crash Course in Predicate Logic
I started writing Logic for Programmers because there weren’t any good resources on logic for, uh, programmers. Now that the book’s out, the new problem is that there aren’t any good free resources on logic for programmers. So, to solve that problem (and maybe hype the book a little), I converted the…
Hillel Wayne — Published
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Introducing wrapture
Introducing wrapture New from Graham Dumpleton (of wrapt, mod_wsgi, and New Relic's Python agent fame), who describes Wrapture as taking the monkeypatching ideas from wrapt and extending them to apply to testing and tracing at the same time. Wrapture (full documentation here) makes it easy to wrap any…
Simon Willison — Published
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Quoting Andrew Digby
325 #kakapo! The chicks from this year's record breeding season are now juveniles and so have been added to the population. In 1995 there were just 51 kākāpō left. Recovery of critically endangered species is possible with sustained effort. — Andrew Digby, providing the best news of the year Tags: kakapo
Simon Willison — Published
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My Experience Has Nuance, Yours Is a Data Point
Eric Bailey has a fun little post about how we need more than a few icons to express the nuance of our shared human experience. For example, he suggests Netflix provide some feedback buttons to indicate the kinds of experiences we all share consuming and rating media: “Just because I expressed interest…
Jim Nielsen — Published
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My swap from Windows to Omarchy is going well and
My swap from Windows to Omarchy is going well and I think this will serve as my daily driver from now on. Compared to the start of the year, agents are much smarter and understand the system much better now so it's easier for them to get it to behave however you want. Below is a video of my taskbar,…
a327ex — Published
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On not becoming a cyborg
I was a voracious reader as a kid, and I noticed a funny phenomenon: whatever writer I had most recently read, my next paper for English class would sound like them. If I read a bunch of Stephen King, I’d sound like Stephen King. If I read the Narnia series, I’d sound like C.S. Lewis […]
Nolan Lawson — Published
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Video
a327ex — Published
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Tweet
a327ex — Published
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If the goal of Soul Society is creating beings
If the goal of Soul Society is creating beings who act righteously both when they hold power and when power is held over them, we can view the trial of thousands of lives as a selection mechanism for self-guiding righteousness. Only those whose action generation is completely unconditional, and thus…
a327ex — Published
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Video
a327ex — Published
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Cancelation Terminology
A short note explaining the difference between synchronous cancelation, asynchronous cancelation, and graceful shutdown. I am not too attached to these specific three terms, but I want to call your attention to the three things behind them, which are important not to confuse with each other.
Alex Kladov — Published
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Introducing vulnbrocards.com
TL;DR: I’ve turned my April post on Brocards for vulnerability triage into a more permanent website. You can now link to each brocard directly, like this, without having to worry about link rot1. My blog’s URLs should be very stable, but a separate domain and site ↩
William Woodruff — Published
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Understanding ChatGPT Work
OpenAI announced ChatGPT Work on July 9th, and have been furiously iterating on it ever since. It is an extraordinarily confusing and very powerful product. Here's what I've figured out about it so far. ChatGPT Work is actually two products The more interesting version of ChatGPT Work is the one that…
Simon Willison — Published
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Video
a327ex — Published
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Video
a327ex — Published
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Who are we Now?
This is based on my keynote at RubyConf 2026. Video, references There’s a philosopher in Naples, Italy, way back in the 1700s who understood something important to software today. Giambattista Vico lived early in the Enlightenment, when mathematical and experimental thinking were all the rage. René Des…
Jessica Kerr — Published
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Testing message posting on the website from
Testing message posting on the website from Omarchy.
a327ex — Published
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About idols
An essay on idols, indirectness, and truth.
Protesilaos Stavrou — Published
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Introducing Hy4 Preview
Introducing Hy4 Preview New open weight text input (no vision) LLM from Chinese company Tencent today: 770B total parameters, 49B active parameters, 1M token context window, 1.56TB on Hugging Face. This is a big size increase from their previous Hy3 in July, which was 295B, 21B active, 256,000 context…
Simon Willison — Published
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Mix
The start of a beautiful weekend. The post Mix appeared first on Jeffrey Zeldman Presents.
Jeffrey Zeldman — Published
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I'm adding items to Horse Game and I was thinking
I'm adding items to Horse Game and I was thinking about how before I test if the game is actually fun beyond the initial fun the concept itself carries, I'll have added around 150 items, and they're all 100% finished, so it's quite a bit of work to gamble on a game that might not be fun. But ultimately…
a327ex — Published
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It does seem Backrooms has higher memetic payload
It does seem Backrooms has higher memetic payload and will suffuse itself into the culture more successfully, more than I assumed back here, but it's still up in the air which of the two will last longer I think. It is interesting though how well Backrooms has held up memetically, for, in retrospect…
a327ex — Published
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Video
a327ex — Published
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Projects like the tweet below and the recently
Projects like the tweet below and the recently successful Sir, We Have an Orc Problem look very fun to make. They're also very fun to watch (have not played the Orc game because I can simulate how fun it is in my head, perhaps a few more roguelite elements next time...), something about watching what…
a327ex — Published
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Was working on the boy's voice from the "Go
Was working on the boy's voice from the "Go Forth, My Unstoppable Machine!!!" log and, as you can now see in the log itself, Claude was generating HTML artifacts to show me the various voices and possible variations. Eventually I said I was going to the gym and that I would continue iterating with him…
a327ex — Published
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Emacs: completion-preview-mode and the Completions buffer (Emacs 31)
The built-in completion-preview-mode combines nicely with the Completions buffer. This is excellent in Emacs 31.
Protesilaos Stavrou — Published
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Just a rumour of a bug is enough to find a security exploit these days
Just a rumour of a bug is enough to find a security exploit these days Anil Madhavapeddy is a professor of computer science at Cambridge and a core maintainer of the OCaml compiler. In this somewhat alarming post he reports that security issues in OCaml projects are seeing evidence of attempted exploits…
Simon Willison — Published
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Go Forth, My Unstoppable Machine!!! 1
Go Forth, My Unstoppable Machine!!! 1 Summary Session span: 2026-08-12 → 2026-08-28. The session that conceived the game, pivoted the release sequencing, and executed the first capability test (the boy's VOICE) end-to-end: from "do packs exist?" to a fine-tuned local TTS model producing designed, blended…
a327ex — Published
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Français: Petit à petit
J'ai de patience pour apprendre la langue française et pour créer des connections avec les gens.
Protesilaos Stavrou — Published
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Breaking Claude Code Opus 5 Auto Mode
Breaking Claude Code Opus 5 Auto Mode Anthropic are putting a great deal of faith in Claude Code's auto mode for protecting their coding agent users against prompt injection attacks. They recently made that the default and have made bold claims about its effectiveness. Johann Rehberger is one of the…
Simon Willison — Published
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A Calendar View For My Blog
807 blog posts across 14 years. That’s how much I’ve published on my blog at the time of this writing. And here’s the question I’ve been turning over in my mind: “How do I convey that kind of volume across time in a more interesting way than a mere reverse-chronological list?” I’m not hating on reverse…
Jim Nielsen — Published
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Two Alleged ‘TeamPCP’ Hackers Arrested in Australia
Authorities in Australia have arrested two men believed to be members of TeamPCP, a prolific cybercrime and data extortion group blamed for perpetrating the longest running spree of software supply chain attacks ever. In a statement released today, the Australian Federal Police (AFP) said two unnamed…
Brian Krebs — Published
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16 for Tia [blog]
Tia would have turned 16 this year. Another marker that wouldn't come to be. After Tia was lost and born to stillbirth on 31 August 2010, we quickly had a slew of firsts. The first Christmas without her. First mother's day. First birthday. First day at nursery, first day of school. Not turning 10. 16…
Remy Sharp — Published
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Games: Bravely Default II
A Japanese Role Playing Game with great gameplay.
Protesilaos Stavrou — Published
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Qwen3.8-Flash-Next
Qwen3.8-Flash-Next Another open weights model from Qwen. This one is "a multimodal MoE model that also serves as an early preview of the architecture used in Qwen4". It's pretty big: 125B tokens, but only 6B active which means it gets a significant performance boost. I've been trying it out on a DGX…
Simon Willison — Published
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The 2.1.1 “specific timings” Clause
Many simplified, intro, or “plain-English” WCAG re-interpretations frame Success Criterion 2.1.1 Keyboard as ensuring a control or widget or thing can be operated with a keyboard. Some go further and also ask you to consider keyboard-like devices. Very few (I counted 1 out of 10) pay attention to the…
Adrian Roselli — Published
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Reading List 361
(Last Updated on 31 August 2026) Crikey, it’s been ages since I posted a reading list, so here’s every tab I had saved in my “Reading List” Vivaldi workspace. Apologies if some have been posted before! Multiple-column layout, rows, rules, and floats by Rachel Andrew. Marginalia – a search engine that…
Bruce Lawson — Published
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Quoting Paul Dix
The fact that AI wrote 1M LOC and then refined it over the course of the next couple of months to produce a reliable piece of software that is currently running on millions of developer machines is absolutely mind blowing. And you can say, “well it’s not that impressive because they had an oracle to…
Simon Willison — Published
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Forty-One
This blog post serves as a not so gentle reminder that I should practice what I preach: when I turned forty, I wrote: Once things settle down, I hope to finally start writing that own philosophical work. Things didn’t settle down. Perhaps that’s the excuse. Still, compiling my own philosophy is still…
Wouter Groeneveld — Published
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Log Improvements 3
Log Improvements 3 Summary Session span: 2026-08-25 evening → 2026-08-26 (one sitting). The "Log Improvements 3" session: the privacy system rebuilt around the owner's private-sessions-only design, the entire 46-log sealed back catalog retrofitted to real names, the SPR/engine folder unification into…
a327ex — Published
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Controlling when CSS custom property values are computed
The default might not be what you expect, and it has a big impact on your styles.
Jake Archibald — Published
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Français: Emacs en direct avec Sacha Chua et Fabrice Niessen @ 2026-08-27 14:30 Europe/Athènes
Nous allons avoir une discussion sur le sujet d'Emacs.
Protesilaos Stavrou — Published
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EVE Online: The Move to Python 3 Begins!
EVE Online: The Move to Python 3 Begins! EVE Online has been one of the most interesting case studies in Python at scale for over twenty years now. They've been running on Stackless Python since their launch in 2003, and their last major upgrade was 16 years ago, to Stackless Python 2.7 in 2010. Their…
Simon Willison — Published
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ABA Games Variations — WIND RANG 1
ABA Games Variations — WIND RANG 1 Summary ABA Games — WIND RANG 1 A Grok session that (1) learned Anchor 3's new .apr replay pipeline and patched Grok's converter/end-session path so logs can weave playable/sealed replay cards, then (2) started the WIND RANG variation as ABAgames/windrang: ToTeMoJi…
a327ex — Published
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A Cautionary Tale About Data Breach Claims, Verification and Carhartt
You're not going to believe this, but turns out you can't always take criminals at their word. Actually, I'll walk that back a bit as it may not even be the cybercrime guys who got this wrong, but it all starts here: 🚨Cyber
Troy Hunt — Published
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Log Improvements 2
Log Improvements 2 Summary Session span: 2026-08-25 (one marathon day). The "Log Improvements 2" session: Grok converter parity, spr republish, replays going public with safe packaging, the inline replay player and its performance war (ending at an engine-level shader fix), and — the session's second…
a327ex — Published
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Have You Heard the Good News About Microlighter?
Dave Rupert wrote about shipping microlighter: a tool for handling syntax highlighting using the CSS Custom Highlights API. I saw his post the day he released it, and I had an implementation PR up for my blog by end of day. Then, like I do with so many things, I let it sit there. This is the period where…
Jim Nielsen — Published
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Log Improvements 1
Log Improvements 1 Summary This session designed, named, and built SPR — the workflow system that now runs a327ex.com's publishing pipeline — across five phases in two days, plus an engine-level replay fix and a full visual redesign of how logs read. It began as an infrastructure audit ahead of the Omarchy…
a327ex — Published
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Français: Écouter de la musique pour créer des connections interpersonnel
Les arts sont importants pour créer des connections interpersonnel.
Protesilaos Stavrou — Published
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Selfie: on a warm August evening
I was out on a walk, wearing a white shirt and sunglasses.
Protesilaos Stavrou — Published
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Poem: Hymn to the falcon (Ύμνος στο γεράκι)
Just read the poem. No further comment.
Protesilaos Stavrou — Published
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llm-anthropic 0.27
Release: llm-anthropic 0.27 This release of the Anthropic plugin for LLM mainly provides compatibility with the recently released anthropic v1.0.0 Python library, which switches from httpx to httpx2. OpenAI made the same change in their v3.0.0 release two weeks ago. Anthropic provide this migration guide…
Simon Willison — Published
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The ultimate road trip combo: Starlink Mini + UniFi Travel Router
I recently went on an epic road trip around Europe, covering 1,645 miles (2,647 km), and we took in some amazing sights and locations. As a tech geek, I was worried about my connectivity on the trip, so before we set off, I came up with a plan!
Scott Helme — Published
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Your executable is a SQLite database
Your executable is a SQLite database Farid Zakaria describes a neat Linux pattern for creating a SQLite database file that can be directly used as an executable binary. The trick sets the SQLite file format's 4-byte application ID (68 bytes into the file) to SELF, standing for Structured Executable …
Simon Willison — Published
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Her Glamorous Life
Snow White—17 years old—didn’t come meowing for food when I entered the kitchen at 6 a.m. An hour later I found her lying motionless on the sofa. I stared until she moved, slightly, nestling her face more deeply between her back paws. The post Her Glamorous Life appeared first on Jeffrey Zeldman Presents…
Jeffrey Zeldman — Published
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Multiple-column layout, rows, rules, and floats
Recently implemented in Chrome are two of my top asks for CSS—the concept of rows in multiple-column layout, and gap decorations for rows and columns in grid, flexbox, and multicol. Rows (using column-wrap) provide a way to use multicol on the web without risking scrolling up and down to read if the…
Rachel Andrew — Published
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The Red Mailbox
The Red Mailbox next to our village’s primary school is my primary drop-off point for writing letters. Over the decades, its bright deep red brilliance has been gradually replaced by a patina of sunburned broken red. And yet, The Red Mailbox persists. It still exists. It existed over thirty years ago…
Wouter Groeneveld — Published