Simon Willison
31 articles archived · Visit source ↗ · RSS
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Simon Willison community 16h ago
CSP Allow-list Experiment
Tool: CSP Allow-list Experiment An experiment that shows that you can load an app in a CSP-protected sandboxed iframe (see previous note ) and have a custom fetch() that intercepts CSP errors and passes them up to the parent window... which can then prompt the user to add that…
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datasette 1.0a29
Release: datasette 1.0a29 New TokenRestrictions.abbreviated(datasette) utility method for creating "_r" dictionaries. #2695 Table headers and column options are now visible even if a table contains zero rows. #2701 Fixed bug with display of column actions dialog on Mobile…
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Quoting Mo Bitar
Now, if your CEO has never heard the phrase Ralph Loop, oh man, you are less than 30 days away from your next promotion. I'm not even exaggerating. Walk into his office, close the door, and say, hey chief, been experimenting with something. It's called Ralph Loops. And I think…
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Quoting Mitchell Hashimoto
The thing about 90% of TDMs [Technical Decision Makers] is that they're motivated primarily by NOT GETTING FIRED. These aren't people who browser Lobsters or push to GH on the weekend. These are people that work 9 to 5, get paid, go home, and NEVER THINK ABOUT WORK AGAIN. So to…
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llm 0.32a2
Release: llm 0.32a2 A bunch of useful stuff in this LLM alpha, but the most important detail is this one: Most reasoning-capable OpenAI models now use the /v1/responses endpoint instead of /v1/chat/completions . This enables interleaved reasoning across tool calls for GPT-5…
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Quoting James Shore
Your AI coding agent, the one you use to write code, needs to reduce your maintenance costs. Not by a little bit, either. You write code twice as quick now? Better hope you’ve halved your maintenance costs. Three times as productive? One third the maintenance costs. Otherwise,…
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Your AI Use Is Breaking My Brain
Your AI Use Is Breaking My Brain Excellent, angry piece by Jason Koebler on how AI writing online is becoming impossible to avoid, filtering it is mentally exhausting and it's even starting to distort regular human writing styles. I particularly liked his use of the term "Zombie…
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Learning on the Shop floor
Learning on the Shop floor Tobias Lütke describes Shopify's internal coding agent tool, River, which operates entirely in public on their Slack: River does not respond to direct messages. She politely declines and suggests to create a public channel for you and her to start…
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Quoting Andrew Quinn
One could say in the first quarter-century of my life, that while I was always fascinated by programming, I could never overcome the guilt of not really knowing whether the tool I am building right now isn’t already superceded by some much better implementation someone else has…
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Quoting Luke Curley
WebRTC is designed to degrade and drop my prompt during poor network conditions. wtf my dude WebRTC aggressively drops audio packets to keep latency low. If you’ve ever heard distorted audio on a conference call, that’s WebRTC baybee. The idea is that conference calls depend on…
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llm-gemini 0.31
Release: llm-gemini 0.31 gemini-3.1-flash-lite is no longer a preview . Here's my write-up of the Gemini 3.1 Flash-Lite Preview model back in March. I don't believe this new non-preview model has changed since then. Tags: llm-release , gemini , llm , google , generative-ai , ai…
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Big Words
Tool: Big Words I'm using my vibe coded macOS presentations tool to put together a talk, and I wanted to add a slide with some text on it. The tool only accepts URLs, so I put together a quick page that accepts query string arguments and turns them into a simple slide. Here's an…
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GitHub Repo Stats
Tool: GitHub Repo Stats One of the things I always look for when evaluating a new GitHub repository is the number of commits it has... but that number isn't visible on GitHub's mobile site layout. I built this tool to fix that, using this prompt: Given a GitHub repo URL or…
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datasette-referrer-policy 0.1
Release: datasette-referrer-policy 0.1 The OpenStreetMap tiles on the Datasette global-power-plants demo weren't displaying correctly. This turned out to be caused by two bugs. The first is that the CAPTCHA I added to that site a few weeks ago was triggering for the .json fetch…
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Our AI started a cafe in Stockholm
Our AI started a cafe in Stockholm Andon Labs previously started an AI-run retail store in San Francisco. Now they're running a similar experiment in Stockholm, Sweden, only this time it's a cafe. These experiments are interesting, and often throw out amusing anecdotes: During…
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datasette-llm 0.1a7
Release: datasette-llm 0.1a7 Mechanism for configuring default options for specific models. Part of Datasette's evolving support mechanism for plugins that use LLMs. It's now possible to configure a model with default options, e.g. to say all enrichment operations should use a…
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llm-echo 0.5a0
Release: llm-echo 0.5a0 New -o thinking 1 option to help test against LLM 0.32a0 and higher. This plugin provides a fake model called "echo" for LLM which doesn't run an LLM at all - it's useful for writing automated tests. You can now do this: uvx --with llm==0.32a1 --with…
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Quoting John Gruber
So it’s well known that Y Combinator owns some stake in OpenAI. But how big is that stake? This seems like devilishly difficult information to obtain. I asked around and a little birdie who knows several OpenAI investors came back with an answer: Y Combinator owns about 0.6…
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Granite 4.1 3B SVG Pelican Gallery
Granite 4.1 3B SVG Pelican Gallery IBM released their Granite 4.1 family of LLMs a few days ago. They're Apache 2.0 licensed and come in 3B, 8B and 30B sizes. Granite 4.1 LLMs: How They’re Built by Granite team member Yousaf Shah describes the training process in detail. Unsloth…
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Quoting Andy Masley
[...] Between 2000 and 2024, farmers sold in total a Colorado-sized chunk of land all on their own, 77 times all land on data center property in 2028, and grew more food than ever on what was left. None of this caused any problems for US food access. And then, in the middle of…
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April 2026 newsletter
I just sent out the April 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: Opus 4.7 and GPT-5.5, both with price increases Claude Mythos and LLM security research…
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