Latest entries
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Quoting Jannis Leidel
GitHub’s slopocalypse – the flood of AI-generated spam PRs and issues – has made Jazzband’s model of open membership and shared push access untenable. Jazzband was designed for a world where the worst case was someone accidentally merging the wrong PR. In a world where only 1 in 10 AI-generated PRs meets…
Simon Willison — Published
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My fireside chat about agentic engineering at the Pragmatic Summit
I was a speaker last month at the Pragmatic Summit in San Francisco, where I participated in a fireside chat session about Agentic Engineering hosted by Eric Lui from Statsig. The video is available on YouTube. Here are my highlights from the conversation. Stages of AI adoption We started by talking…
Simon Willison — Published
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Staff complain that xAI is flailing because of constant upheaval
Staff complain that the constant upheaval is destroying morale.
Ars Technica — Published
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NASA officials sidestepped questions on Artemis II risks—there's a reason why
"This ought to make for some good reading," NASA's mission management team chair said.
Ars Technica — Published
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Woman sneezes out maggots after fly larvae get trapped in her deviated septum
She made a full recovery, despite the maggots.
Ars Technica — Published
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Slay the Spire 2 is a bit too familiar for its own good
Early Access impressions: New characters shine, but it feels like we've done this before.
Ars Technica — Published
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Figuring out why AIs get flummoxed by some games
When winning depends on intuiting a mathematical function, AIs come up short.
Ars Technica — Published
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Google Fiber will be sold to private equity firm and merge with cable company
GFiber and Astound to merge with Alphabet selling majority stake to Stonepeak.
Ars Technica — Published
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Supply-chain attack using invisible code hits GitHub and other repositories
Unicode that's invisible to the human eye was largely abandoned—until attackers took notice.
Ars Technica — Published
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Adobe settles DOJ cancellation fee lawsuit, will pay $75 million penalty
Adobe says it will also give customers who "qualify" free services but is vague on details.
Ars Technica — Published
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Doubling the voltage: What 800 V architecture really changes in EVs
Confused about electric vehicle voltages? You won't be after reading this.
Ars Technica — Published
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1M context is now generally available for Opus 4.6 and Sonnet 4.6
1M context is now generally available for Opus 4.6 and Sonnet 4.6 Here's what surprised me: Standard pricing now applies across the full 1M window for both models, with no long-context premium. OpenAI and Gemini both charge more for prompts where the token count goes above a certain point - 200,000 for…
Simon Willison — Published
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Another AT&T FirstNet user gets shocking $6,200 bill, at $2 per megabyte
Bizarre FirstNet charge nearly identical to one that hit different user in 2024.
Ars Technica — Published
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Subscribers to Amazon Prime Video with ads lose 4K support on April 10
Amazon says its service requires "significant investment."
Ars Technica — Published
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Quoting Craig Mod
Simply put: It’s a big mess, and no off-the-shelf accounting software does what I need. So after years of pain, I finally sat down last week and started to build my own. It took me about five days. I am now using the best piece of accounting software I’ve ever used. It’s blazing fast. Entirely local…
Simon Willison — Published
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M5 MacBook Air review: Still the best MacBook for almost everybody
The M5 MacBook Air is a minor upgrade, but minor upgrades add up over time.
Ars Technica — Published
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Magnetars drag spacetime to power superluminous supernovae
Frame-dragging may explain an odd pattern seen in the brightest supernovae.
Ars Technica — Published
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Measles vaccinations rose 291% among New Mexico adults during outbreak
Despite anti-vaccine rhetoric, New Mexico residents embraced lifesaving shots.
Ars Technica — Published
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Microsoft is working to eliminate PC gaming's "compiling shaders" wait times
Advanced Shader Delivery uses precompiled shaders for "console-like load times" across PC hardware.
Ars Technica — Published
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Aliens announce their presence in latest Disclosure Day trailer
"That truth will upend the established order of the entire world. If you do this, there's no undoing it."
Ars Technica — Published
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BYD's latest EVs can get close to full charge in just 12 minutes
Carmaker’s technology means EVs can be ready almost as quickly as filling a fuel tank.
Ars Technica — Published
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A die-cut above
Cover art for the 1971 prog-rock LP “Fearless,” by British band Family features a distinctive, die-cut cover design depicting the five band members gradually morphing into a single entity combining features of them all. Tom Brigham, a high school student and friend of mine the year the LP was released…
Jeffrey Zeldman — Published
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Rocket Report: Pentagon needs more missile interceptors; Artemis II clears review
SpaceX has started commissioning a second launch pad at the company's Starbase facility in Texas.
Ars Technica — Published
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Shopify/liquid: Performance: 53% faster parse+render, 61% fewer allocations
Shopify/liquid: Performance: 53% faster parse+render, 61% fewer allocations PR from Shopify CEO Tobias Lütke against Liquid, Shopify's open source Ruby template engine that was somewhat inspired by Django when Tobi first created it back in 2005. Tobi found dozens of new performance micro-optimizations…
Simon Willison — Published
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Selfie: beard and hair are growing
Selfie picture of me from the side showing my beard while holding my hair
Protesilaos Stavrou — Published
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Computing in freedom with GNU Emacs
A holistic introduction to Emacs: how useful it is and how it champions free software.
Protesilaos Stavrou — Published
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contrast-color() beyond black & white
Two techniques that bypass the black-or-white limit of contrast-color() for custom color palettes.
Una Kravets — Published
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The who, what, and why of the attack that has shut down Stryker's Windows network
Company says it doesn't know how long it will take to restore its Microsoft environment.
Ars Technica — Published
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Live Nation director boasted of gouging ticket buyers, "robbing them blind"
Unsealed messages add wrinkle to trial after US agreed to settle with Live Nation.
Ars Technica — Published
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Untitled
Sun-kissed evenings in Porto never fail to impress.
Paul Robert Lloyd — Published
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MALUS - Clean Room as a Service
MALUS - Clean Room as a Service Brutal satire on the whole vibe-porting license washing thing (previously): Finally, liberation from open source license obligations. Our proprietary AI robots independently recreate any open source project from scratch. The result? Legally distinct code with corporate…
Simon Willison — Published
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Coding After Coders: The End of Computer Programming as We Know It
Coding After Coders: The End of Computer Programming as We Know It Epic piece on AI-assisted development by Clive Thompson for the New York Times Magazine, who spoke to more than 70 software developers from companies like Google, Amazon, Microsoft, Apple, plus other individuals including Anil Dash, Thomas…
Simon Willison — Published
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Quoting Les Orchard
Here's what I think is happening: AI-assisted coding is exposing a divide among developers that was always there but maybe less visible. Before AI, both camps were doing the same thing every day. Writing code by hand. Using the same editors, the same languages, the same pull request workflows. The craft…
Simon Willison — Published
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Feature Flagging at Databricks
In late January, I published a post1 (archive) on the Databricks engineering blog about “SAFE”, the feature flagging and experimentation platform I’ve been working on for the past few years. SAFE is what I’ve been spending most of my time on during my time at Databricks, and it’s been rewarding to see…
Ben Congdon — Published
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My Emacs talk for FLOSS @ Oxford
I talked about how to do computing in freedom with GNU Emacs.
Protesilaos Stavrou — Published
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Automated accessible text with contrast-color()
Let the browser pick the most readable text color for any background with this new CSS function.
Una Kravets — Published
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Sorting algorithms
Sorting algorithms Today in animated explanations built using Claude: I've always been a fan of animated demonstrations of sorting algorithms so I decided to spin some up on my phone using Claude Artifacts, then added Python's timsort algorithm, then a feature to run them all at once. Here's the full…
Simon Willison — Published
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Iran-Backed Hackers Claim Wiper Attack on Medtech Firm Stryker
A hacktivist group with links to Iran's intelligence agencies is claiming responsibility for a data-wiping attack against Stryker, a global medical technology company based in Michigan. News reports out of Ireland, Stryker's largest hub outside of the United States, said the company sent home more than…
Brian Krebs — Published
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Quoting John Carmack
It is hard for less experienced developers to appreciate how rarely architecting for future requirements / applications turns out net-positive. — John Carmack, a tweet in June 2021 Tags: john-carmack, software-engineering, yagni
Simon Willison — Published
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Enzyme Detergents are Magic
This is one of those things I probably should have learned a long time ago, but enzyme detergents are magic. I had a pair of white sneakers that acquired some persistent yellow stains in the poly mesh upper—I think someone spilled a drink on them at the bar. I couldn’t get the stain out with Dawn, bleach…
Kyle Kingsbury — Published
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Trying Linux Desktop Yet Again with More Success
Almost a year ago, I returned to the Linux Desktop after almost 20 years. I abandoned it a month or so later out of frustration with a surprising lack of configurability and general exhaustion of addressing the myriad papercuts that come with trying to change computing platforms. In the last few weeks…
David Bryant Copeland — Published
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25 Years Of ADSL Speed
Twenty-five years ago, I captured a screenshot of my FTP client showcasing the download of a SuSE Linux gcc compilation package at the dazzling rate of 439,36 KB/sec: Downloading the gcc cross-compiler for s390x through the ftp.belnet.be mirror. Note the then very new Windows XP Olive theme. For some…
Wouter Groeneveld — Published
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Microsoft Patch Tuesday, March 2026 Edition
Microsoft Corp. today pushed security updates to fix at least 77 vulnerabilities in its Windows operating systems and other software. There are no pressing "zero-day" flaws this month (compared to February's five zero-day treat), but as usual some patches may deserve more rapid attention from organizations…
Brian Krebs — Published
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Simplifying Containers with Cloudflare Sandboxes
How I replaced a long-lived Cloudflare Container with a one-shot Cloudflare Sandbox, deleted most of the control-plane code, and let an agent do the heavy lifting in less than an hour of my own time.
Kent C. Dodds — Published
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AI should help us produce better code
Agentic Engineering Patterns > Many developers worry that outsourcing their code to AI tools will result in a drop in quality, producing bad code that's churned out fast enough that decision makers are willing to overlook its flaws. If adopting coding agents demonstrably reduces the quality of the code…
Simon Willison — Published
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XSS Ranked #1 Top Threat of 2025 by MITRE and CISA
Look who's back! After we completed 2024, XSS managed to get itself ranked as the #1 top threat of the year. I wrote about that, and at the end of the blog post I said "Let's make sure that XSS isn't #1 in
Scott Helme — Published
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Weekly Update 494
Since starting HIBP a dozen and a bit years ago, I've loaded an average of one breach every 4.7 days. That's 959 of them to date, but last week it was five in only two days. That's a few weeks' worth of
Troy Hunt — Published
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Examples for the tcpdump and dig man pages
Hello! My big takeaway from last month’s musings about man pages was that examples in man pages are really great, so I worked on adding (or improving) examples to two of my favourite tools’ man pages. Here they are: the dig man page (now with examples) the tcpdump man page examples (this one is an update…
Julia Evans — Published
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Migrating to Workspaces and Nx
The interesting part of moving kentcdodds.com to npm workspaces was not the file moves. It was everything the file moves broke.
Kent C. Dodds — Published
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A Designer’s Thoughts About This Moment in AI
I was walking my dog in the woods and decided to share my thoughts about the state of AI and the tension between the trajectory of AI companies and the designers/creators/makers of the world who are under a tremendous deal […]
Brad Frost — Published
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Production query plans without production data
Production query plans without production data Radim Marek describes the new pg_restore_relation_stats() and pg_restore_attribute_stats() functions that were introduced in PostgreSQL 18 in September 2025. The PostgreSQL query planner makes use of internal statistics to help it decide how to best execute…
Simon Willison — Published
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Perhaps not Boring Technology after all
A recurring concern I've seen regarding LLMs for programming is that they will push our technology choices towards the tools that are best represented in their training data, making it harder for new, better tools to break through the noise. This was certainly the case a couple of years ago, when asking…
Simon Willison — Published
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pwa.support and the Mediocre State of PWAs
I created pwa.support as a way to both examine any website to see if it can be isntalled as a progressive web app, but also to capture in some detail the depressing state of support for this concept across major browsers and operating systems. I’ve been revisiting desktop Linux since my last attempt…
David Bryant Copeland — Published
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How to win a best paper award
An opinionated perspective on how to do important research that makes a difference (and sometimes win awards).
Nicholas Carlini — Published
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This Thursday I will talk about Emacs @ OxFLOSS (FLOSS @ Oxford)
In this upcoming event I will introduce GNU Emacs to people at the University of Oxford.
Protesilaos Stavrou — Published
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Offloading FFmpeg with Cloudflare
How I moved Call Kent podcast episode processing off my primary Fly.io app server and onto Cloudflare Queues and Containers: what broke, what I missed, and whether it was worth the complexity.
Kent C. Dodds — Published
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How AI Assistants are Moving the Security Goalposts
AI-based assistants or "agents" -- autonomous programs that have access to the user's computer, files, online services and can automate virtually any task -- are growing in popularity with developers and IT workers. But as so many eyebrow-raising headlines over the past few weeks have shown, these powerful…
Brian Krebs — Published
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Two of My Favorite Things Together at Last: Pies and Subdomains
I like pie. And I’ve learned that if I want a pie done right, I gotta do it myself. Somewhere along my pilgrimage to pie perfection, I began taking a photo of each bake — pic or it didn’t happen. Despite all my rhetoric for “owning your own content”, I’ve hypocritically used Instagram to do the deed…
Jim Nielsen — Published
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Quoting Joseph Weizenbaum
What I had not realized is that extremely short exposures to a relatively simple computer program could induce powerful delusional thinking in quite normal people. — Joseph Weizenbaum, creator of ELIZA, in 1976 (via) Tags: ai-ethics, ai, computer-history, internet-archive
Simon Willison — Published
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A Note On Shelling In Emacs
As you no doubt know by now, we Emacs users have the Teenage Mutant Ninja Power. Expert usage of a Heroes in a Hard Shell is no exception. Pizza Time! All silliness aside, the plethora of options available to the Emacs user when it comes to executing shell commands in “terminals”—real or fake—can be…
Wouter Groeneveld — Published
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New coaching prices to reflect the current market
I have lowered the price of my coaching services to 10 EUR per hour.
Protesilaos Stavrou — Published
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Codex for Open Source
Codex for Open Source Anthropic announced six months of free Claude Max for maintainers of popular open source projects (5,000+ stars or 1M+ NPM downloads) on 27th February. Now OpenAI have launched their comparable offer: six months of ChatGPT Pro (same $200/month price as Claude Max) with Codex and…
Simon Willison — Published
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Emacs: four new themes are coming to the ‘doric-themes’
I am developing four new themes for my minimalist 'doric-themes' package.
Protesilaos Stavrou — Published
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Quoting Ally Piechowski
Questions for developers: “What’s the one area you’re afraid to touch?” “When’s the last time you deployed on a Friday?” “What broke in production in the last 90 days that wasn’t caught by tests?” Questions for the CTO/EM: “What feature has been blocked for over a year?” “Do you have real-time error…
Simon Willison — Published
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Colorado SB26-051 Age Attestation
Colorado is presently considering a bill, SB26-051, patterned off of California’s AB1043, which establishes civil penalties for software developers who do not request age information for their users. The bills use a broad sense of “Application Store” which would seem to encompass essentially any package…
Kyle Kingsbury — Published
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Anthropic and the Pentagon
Anthropic and the Pentagon This piece by Bruce Schneier and Nathan E. Sanders is the most thoughtful and grounded coverage I've seen of the recent and ongoing Pentagon/OpenAI/Anthropic contract situation. AI models are increasingly commodified. The top-tier offerings have about the same performance,…
Simon Willison — Published
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Reading List 355
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 a Vivaldi desktop snapshot, with a new onboarding step for people who have visual impairments, require keyboard-only access or use assistive…
Bruce Lawson — Published
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Agentic manual testing
Agentic Engineering Patterns > The defining characteristic of a coding agent is that it can execute the code that it writes. This is what makes coding agents so much more useful than LLMs that simply spit out code without any way to verify it. Never assume that code generated by an LLM works until that…
Simon Willison — Published
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Clinejection — Compromising Cline's Production Releases just by Prompting an Issue Triager
Clinejection — Compromising Cline's Production Releases just by Prompting an Issue Triager Adnan Khan describes a devious attack chain against the Cline GitHub repository, which started with a prompt injection attack in the title of an issue opened against the repo. Cline were running AI-powered issue…
Simon Willison — Published
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Taking it easy
An entry from my journal where I comment on how I do not worry about what will happen to this world.
Protesilaos Stavrou — Published
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Introducing GPT‑5.4
Introducing GPT‑5.4 Two new API models: gpt-5.4 and gpt-5.4-pro, also available in ChatGPT and Codex CLI. August 31st 2025 knowledge cutoff, 1 million token context window. Priced slightly higher than the GPT-5.2 family with a bump in price for both models if you go above 272,000 tokens. 5.4 beats coding…
Simon Willison — Published
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Untitled
This is a low.
Paul Robert Lloyd — Published
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Can coding agents relicense open source through a “clean room” implementation of code?
Over the past few months it's become clear that coding agents are extraordinarily good at building a weird version of a "clean room" implementation of code. The most famous version of this pattern is when Compaq created a clean-room clone of the IBM BIOS back in 1982. They had one team of engineers reverse…
Simon Willison — Published
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Your Browser Can Already Speak a Page
Users can customize the features built into the browser, something not often available from third-party approaches. Is an “AI” company offering to provide spoken versions of your pages for users? Is an overlay company promising to make your content more accessible by its overlay speaking it? Is some…
Adrian Roselli — Published
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My brother, the rhythmic conceptualist
Remembrance of beats passed. The post My brother, the rhythmic conceptualist appeared first on Jeffrey Zeldman Presents.
Jeffrey Zeldman — Published
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JJ LSP Follow Up
In Majjit LSP, I described an idea of implementing Magit style UX for jj once and for all, leveraging LSP protocol. I've learned today that the upcoming 3.18 version of LSP has a feature to make this massively less hacky: Text Document Content Request
Alex Kladov — Published
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I talk with Joshua Blais about Emacs and life issues
I had a ~2-hour chat with Joshua Blais, a fellow Emacs user, about Emacs and philosophy.
Protesilaos Stavrou — Published
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Anti-patterns: things to avoid
Agentic Engineering Patterns > There are some behaviors that are anti-patterns in our weird new world of agentic engineering. Inflicting unreviewed code on collaborators This anti-pattern is common and deeply frustrating. Don't file pull requests with code you haven't reviewed yourself. If you open a…
Simon Willison — Published
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Something is afoot in the land of Qwen
I'm behind on writing about Qwen 3.5, a truly remarkable family of open weight models released by Alibaba's Qwen team over the past few weeks. I'm hoping that the 3.5 family doesn't turn out to be Qwen's swan song, seeing as that team has had some very high profile departures in the past 24 hours. It…
Simon Willison — Published
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Favourites of February 2026
A sudden burst of Japanese cherry flowers sparkling in the sun brings much-needed lightheartedness into our late February lives. Before we know it, the garden will be littered with these little pink petals, and the very short blossom season will be behind us. Our cherry tree always had the tendency of…
Wouter Groeneveld — Published
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Propellant.
We cannot separate the everyday use of “AI” platforms from their use in death and war.
Ethan Marcotte — Published
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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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Poem: Not for an eternity
Just read the poem. No further comment.
Protesilaos Stavrou — Published
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Quoting Donald Knuth
Shock! Shock! I learned yesterday that an open problem I'd been working on for several weeks had just been solved by Claude Opus 4.6 - Anthropic's hybrid reasoning model that had been released three weeks earlier! It seems that I'll have to revise my opinions about "generative AI" one of these days.…
Simon Willison — Published
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Gemini 3.1 Flash-Lite
Gemini 3.1 Flash-Lite Google's latest model is an update to their inexpensive Flash-Lite family. At $0.25/million tokens of input and $1.5/million output this is 1/8th the price of Gemini 3.1 Pro. It supports four different thinking levels, so I had it output four different pelicans: minimal low medium…
Simon Willison — Published
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w0rdz aRe 1mpoRtAnt
The other day I was looking at the team billing section of an AI product. They had a widget labeled “Usage leaderboard”. For whatever reason, that phrase at that moment made me pause and reflect — and led me here to this post. It’s an interesting label. You could argue the widget doesn’t even need a…
Jim Nielsen — Published
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What a year that was.
Know your web design history. The post What a year that was. appeared first on Jeffrey Zeldman Presents.
Jeffrey Zeldman — Published
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Basic Letters with LaTeX
Every so often I find myself cracking open LibreOffice to write a mildly-formal letter—perhaps a thank-you note to an author, or a letter to members of Congress—and going “Gosh, I wish I had LaTeX here”. I used to have a good template for this but lost it years ago; I’ve recently spent some time recreating…
Kyle Kingsbury — Published
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Finding enthusiasm in the face of boredom
A journal entry where I describe how boredom works and why it helps to be honest with our feelings.
Protesilaos Stavrou — Published
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Real-Time UI
“If a picture is worth a thousand words, then a prototype is worth a thousand meetings.”– Tom & David Kelley But what if the meeting is the prototype? That’s the spirit of an idea I’m calling “Real-time UI” (the name […]
Brad Frost — Published
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GIF optimization tool using WebAssembly and Gifsicle
Agentic Engineering Patterns > I like to include animated GIF demos in my online writing, often recorded using LICEcap. There's an example in the Interactive explanations chapter. These GIFs can be pretty big. I've tried a few tools for optimizing GIF file size and my favorite is Gifsicle by Eddie Kohler…
Simon Willison — Published
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Advice for job seekers
Pitching isn’t bragging. The post Advice for job seekers appeared first on Jeffrey Zeldman Presents.
Jeffrey Zeldman — Published
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February sponsors-only newsletter
I just sent the February edition of my sponsors-only monthly newsletter. If you are a sponsor (or if you start a sponsorship now) you can access it here. In this month's newsletter: More OpenClaw, and Claws in general I started a not-quite-a-book about Agentic Engineering StrongDM, Showboat and Rodney…
Simon Willison — Published
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An Album For Every Year Of My Life
Inspired by Tom’s One Album for Every Year of Life compilation, Robert created his own list. It’s been a while since I last published a list related to music so here’s my own that should contain 40 items. This was a much more challenging exercise than I initially thought. It took me almost an entire…
Wouter Groeneveld — Published
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January 2026 Baseline monthly digest
Read about various happenings with Baseline during January 2026
web.dev — Published