Simon Willison
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Simon Willison community 19d ago
datasette-agent 0.2a0
Release: datasette-agent 0.2a0 Highlights from the release notes: Tools can now ask the user questions mid-execution. Tools that declare a context parameter receive a ToolContext object, and await context.ask_user(...) can ask a yes/no, multiple-choice ( options=[...] ) or…
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DiffusionGemma
DiffusionGemma Last May Google briefly released an experimental Gemini Diffusion model. I tried the preview at the time and recorded it running at 857 tokens/second. It was an exciting model, but Google made no further announcements about it. That research has returned in the…
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Quoting Jeremy Howard
Easy solution to slow down recursive AI self improvement: The lab with the top-ranked model must agree THEY must not use it for working on frontier AI But everyone else should have access to it. By definition, this means the frontier doesn't advance. It also has the critical…
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Initial impressions of Claude Fable 5
I didn't have early access to today's Claude Fable 5 release, but I've spent the past ~5.5 hours putting it through its paces. My initial impressions are that this is something of a beast . It's slow, expensive and has been quite happily churning through everything I've thrown…
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Quoting Andrej Karpathy
I feel a lot of things changing as working software increasingly comes out on a tap. The Jevon's paradox kicks in and I feel my own demand for software growing substantially. You can ask for anything - explainers, visualizers, dashboards, bespoke single-use apps (e.g. a full…
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Siri AI at WWDC 2026
Given how badly burned anyone who took Apple's 2024 WWDC Apple Intelligence announcements at face value was, I'm holding to a strict "I'll believe it when I see it" policy for everything they announced today . The new Siri AI features do at least look feasible with today's…
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datasette-agent-edit 0.1a0
Release: datasette-agent-edit 0.1a0 I'm planning several plugins for Datasette Agent which can make edits to existing pieces of text - things like collaborative Markdown editing, updating large SQL queries, and editing SVG files. Agentic editing of text is a little tricky to get…
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micropython-wasm 0.1a2
Release: micropython-wasm 0.1a2 I added a CLI to micropython-wasm ( issue #7 ), inspired by the first draft of the blog entry when I realized it would be a great way to illustrate the Try it yourself section. Tags: python , sandboxing , webassembly , micropython
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OpenAI Help: Lockdown Mode
OpenAI Help: Lockdown Mode OpenAI first teased this in February , but now it's live and "rolling out to eligible personal accounts, including Free, Go, Plus, and Pro, and self-serve ChatGPT Business accounts": Lockdown Mode is designed to help prevent the final stage of data…
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Quoting Andreas Kling
We will no longer accept public pull requests. [...] A substantial patch used to imply substantial effort, and that effort was a reasonable proxy for good faith. That assumption no longer holds. [...] Whether code was typed by hand is beside the point. What matters is who is…
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Quoting Emanuel Maiberg, 404 Media
After this story was published Google's spokesperson reached out and asked us to publish a slightly different version of that statement. The new statement no longer stated that "it's critical that we maintain humans in the loop." — Emanuel Maiberg, 404 Media , Google…
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Microsoft's new MAI models
Microsoft announced two new text LLMs this morning - MAI-Thinking-1 (reasoning, 35B parameters, available to "select early partners") and MAI-Code-1-Flash (5B parameters, "purpose-built for GitHub Copilot and VS Code to deliver high performance and lower cost [...] rolling out…
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datasette-agent-micropython 0.1a0
Release: datasette-agent-micropython 0.1a0 I want Datasette Agent to be able to generate and execute Python code safely. This alpha is looking promising so far. GPT-5.5 has so far failed to break out of the sandbox! Tags: python , sandboxing , datasette , webassembly ,…
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Pasted File Editor
Tool: Pasted File Editor I really like how you can paste a large volume of text into claude.ai (or the Claude desktop/mobile apps) and it will detect it as a large paste and turn it into a file attachment instead. I decided to have Codex desktop build me a version of that as a…
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May 2026 newsletter
I just sent out the May edition of my sponsors-only monthly newsletter . If you are a sponsor (or if you start a sponsorship now) you can access it here . This month: Al got expensive, and Anthropic had a really good month The model releases were a little disappointing…
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datasette 1.0a32
Release: datasette 1.0a32 A minor bugfix release. Fixes a bug with INSERT ... RETURNING queries via the new /db/-/execute-write endpoint and a bunch of base_url issues which showed up when I was experimenting with Service Workers yesterday. Tags: datasette ,…
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Quoting Karen Kwok for Reuters Breakingviews
Anthropic defines “run-rate revenue” in two parts. Use the last 28 days of sales from customers charged on a consumption basis and multiply it by 13. Then, multiply the monthly subscription take by 12, and add the two together. — Karen Kwok for Reuters Breakingviews ,…
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How we contain Claude across products
How we contain Claude across products A complaint I often have about sandboxing products is that they are rarely thoroughly documented , and in the absence of detailed documentation it's hard to know how much I can trust them. Anthropic just published a fantastic overview of how…
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I Am Retiring from Tech to Live Offline
I Am Retiring from Tech to Live Offline I've seen a lot of posts on forums from people threatening to quit their careers over AI. This is not one of those: Chad Whitacre is taking concrete steps, starting with this typewritten, scanned letter I'm retiring from tech. Well,…
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datasette 1.0a31
Release: datasette 1.0a31 Another significant alpha release, with two new headline features. Datasette now offers users with the necessary permissions the ability to both execute write queries against their database and to save stored queries (renamed from "canned queries") both…
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Anthropic's run-rate revenue hits $47 billion
The most interesting thing about Anthropic's $65B Series H announcement is this line (emphasis mine): Since our Series G in February, adoption has continued to grow across global enterprise customers, and our run-rate revenue crossed $47 billion earlier this month. Anthropic…
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llm-anthropic 0.25.1
Release: llm-anthropic 0.25.1 New model: Claude Opus 4.8 ( claude-opus-4.8 ). New -o fast 1 option for fast mode , for organizations with that feature enabled on their account. Default max_tokens for each model now defaults to that model's maximum output rather than 8,192. #72…
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markdown-svg-renderer
Tool: markdown-svg-renderer A slightly customized Markdown rendering tool with special treatment for fenced code SVG blocks - it both renders the image and provides a tab for switching to the code view. You can paste in Markdown or give it a URL to a CORS-enabled Markdown file…
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sqlite AGENTS.md
sqlite AGENTS.md SQLite gained an AGENTS.md file five days ago - but it's not intended for their own development, it's presumably aimed at people who are pointing agents at the SQLite codebase. It includes: SQLite does not accept pull requests without prior agreement and/or…
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Quoting Kyle Ferrana
PICARD: Data, shields up DATA: Brilliant! Shields can reduce damage we sustain. Not immunity. Not hubris. Just prudence. It's not precaution—it's strategy. [camera shakes] WORF: HULL BREACHES ON NINE DECKS DATA: Here's what happened: you told me to raise shields, and I didn't…
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The pressure
The pressure Daniel Stenberg on the unprecedented level of pressure the curl team are facing right now thanks to the deluge of (credible) AI-assisted security issues being reported. The rate of incoming security reports is 4-5 times higher than it was in 2024 and double the…
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Microsoft Copilot Cowork Exfiltrates Files
Microsoft Copilot Cowork Exfiltrates Files The biggest challenge in designing agentic systems continues to be preventing them from enabling attackers to exfiltrate data. In this case Microsoft Copilot Cowork (yes, that's a real product name ) was allowing agents to send emails…
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Quoting Paul Graham
A lot of the emails I get from founders are now written in a hard-hitting journalistic style. I know they're written by AI, because no founder ever wrote this way before. And once you realize something is written by AI, it's hard not to ignore it. I have never knowingly finished…
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Quoting Corey Quinn
I cannot believe I'm saying this, but getting the literal Pope to canonize your product's specific technical limitations as a spiritual treatise is the single greatest act of vendor lobbying I have ever seen. — Corey Quinn , on Anthropic co-founder Christopher Olah's…
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Notes on Pope Leo XIV's encyclical on AI
Dropped this morning by the Vatican: Magnifica Humanitas of His Holiness Pope Leo XIV on Safeguarding the Human Person in the Time of Artificial Intelligence . This is a very interesting document. It's some of the clearest writing I've seen on the ethics of integrating AI into…
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California Brown Pelican, Snowy Egret, California Sea Lion, Harbor Seal
California Brown Pelican, Snowy Egret, California Sea Lion, Harbor Seal, in San Mateo County, CA, US We took our new folding kayak out in the harbor and saw sea lions and harbor seals chilling on the docks.
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datasette 1.0a30
Release: datasette 1.0a30 The big new feature in this alpha is a new customizable "Jump to..." menu, described in detail in The extensible "Jump to" menu in Datasette 1.0a30 on the Datasette blog. You can try it out by hitting / on latest.datasette.io - it looks like this: The…
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datasette-agent 0.1a4
Release: datasette-agent 0.1a4 Taking advantage of the new makeJumpSections() JavaScript plugin hook added in Datasette 1.0a30 , datasette-agent now presents this "Start a new agent chat" interface as part of the Jump to menu, any time you hit / : You can try this out by signing…
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datasette-fixtures 0.1a0
Release: datasette-fixtures 0.1a0 One of the smaller features in Datasette 1.0a30 is this: New documented datasette.fixtures.populate_fixture_database(conn) helper for creating the fixture database tables used by Datasette's own tests, intended for plugin test suites. This new…
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Quoting Armin Ronacher
The most frustrating failure mode right now is that people submit issues that are not in their own voice. They contain an observed problem somewhere, but it has been thrown into a clanker and the clanker reworded it and made a huge mess of it. Typically, it was prompted so badly…
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