Simon Willison
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Simon Willison community 22d ago
Orchestrions
San Francisco tip: it only costs around $15 ($10 in quarters plus a $5 bill for the self-playing violin) to activate every single Orchestrion in Musée Mécanique . And because most people are bad at allocating their funds you may well be the ONLY person activating the…
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Nativ: Run AI models locally on your Mac
Nativ: Run AI models locally on your Mac Prince Canuma is the developer behind the excellent MLX-VLM Python library for running vision-LLMs using MLX on a Mac. I'm really excited about his new project, which wraps MLX in a full macOS desktop application. It's similar in shape to…
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Reverse-engineering is cheap now
I keep hearing anecdotes from people who used coding agents to reverse-engineer and automate devices in their homes. I think this is an interesting illustration of the impact of the reduced cost of writing code. Prior to agents, it was entirely possible to reverse-engineer home…
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Who’s Afraid of Chinese Models?
Who’s Afraid of Chinese Models? Interesting proposal from Ben Thompson that both addresses the hypocrisy of labs outlawing distillation against their models despite training on unlicensed data, and could help US open models compete more effectively with their Chinese…
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Quoting Sam Altman
We have been having extensive discussions around open source strategy. We will discuss it more at our next board meeting, but one thing we’d like to do soon is to create a language model with the approximate capability of GPT-3 that can run locally on consumer hardware and…
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AI Mania Is Eviscerating Global Decision-Making
AI Mania Is Eviscerating Global Decision-Making Here's an entertaining perspective from Nik Suresh on the AI mania that is overwhelming the large companies that he consults with. It's crammed with spicy anecdotes from anonymous sources. In one extreme case, I have seen an…
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Claude Code uses Bun written in Rust now
In Rewriting Bun in Rust Jarred Sumner made the following claim: Claude Code v2.1.181 (released June 17th) and later use the Rust port of Bun. Startup got 10% faster on Linux but otherwise, barely anyone noticed. Boring is good. I decided to have a poke at my own Claude Code…
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SQLite Query Explainer
Tool: SQLite Query Explainer Julia Evan's, in Learning a few things about running SQLite : Maybe one day I’ll learn to read a query plan. Big same.... which inspired me to have Fable build this interactive explain tool, which runs SQLite in Python in Pyodide in Web Assembly in…
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Claude make Fable 5 permanent
Claude make Fable 5 permanent An update from the @claudeai account on Twitter: Beginning July 20, Claude Fable 5 will be included in all Max and Team Premium plans, at 50% of limits. Pro and Team Standard users will continue to have access to Fable via usage credits, and will…
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nascheme/quixote
nascheme/quixote A certain vintage if Python web nerd might be delighted to learn that the most recent commit to the Quixote web framework was six hours ago . The oldest commit in that repo is from 21 years ago, and that was the initial import of Quixote 2.4 from Subversion into…
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LLM cliché highlighter
Tool: LLM cliché highlighter I got frustrated reading yet another article that was crammed with the clichés of LLM-generated writing - "no fluff, no filler, no jargon" type stuff - so I had Fable 5 vibe code up this app for highlighting ten common patterns that show up in that…
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Spot birds not golf
Suggestion for hyperscalers feeling pressure over data center water use: Buy up a few exclusive country clubs, convert the golf courses into public parks, pay for guides and binoculars to get the previous members into birdwatching - help them embrace a more sustainable hobby!…
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Firefox in WebAssembly
Firefox in WebAssembly This is absurdly cool: Puter compiled Firefox to WebAssembly such that the whole browser runs in another browser. Here's my blog, running in Firefox, running in WebAssembly, running in Chrome: They chose Firefox/Gecko because it has strong single-process…
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Quoting Thibault Sottiaux
On file deletions. We’ve investigated a handful of reports where GPT-5.6 unexpectedly deleted files. What we have found is that this most commonly occurs when: Full access mode is enabled and codex is run without sandboxing protections, including without auto review being…
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Inkling: Our open-weights model
Inkling: Our open-weights model Mira Murati's Thinking Machines Lab just released their first open-weights model. Inkling is "a Mixture-of-Experts transformer with 975B total parameters, 41B active" - an Apache-2.0 licensed multimodal model trained on 45 trillion tokens of text,…
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Mermaid to ASCII art (mermaid-ascii)
Tool: Mermaid to ASCII art (mermaid-ascii) After building the Mermaid to ASCII tool based on Grok Build's Rust code I learned that there's an older, more fully-featured Go library called AlexanderGrooff/mermaid-ascii that implements a similar pattern, so I had Claude Fable 5…
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Quoting Linus Torvalds
I realize that some people really dislike AI, but this is an area where I'm willing to absolutely put my foot down as the top-level maintainer. Linux is not one of those anti-AI projects, and if somebody has issues with that, they can do the open-source thing and fork it. Or…
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Mermaid to Unicode box art (grok-mermaid)
Tool: Mermaid to Unicode box art (grok-mermaid) While exploring the codebase for the newly open-sourced Grok CLI coding agent I came across xai-grok-markdown/src/mermaid.rs , a "self-contained terminal renderer for Mermaid diagrams" written in Rust. I figured it would be fun to…
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xai-org/grok-build, now open source
xai-org/grok-build, now open source xAI's grok CLI tool faced severe community backlash yesterday when it became apparent that running the command in a directory could upload that entire directory to xAI's Google Cloud buckets. One user reported running it in their home…
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Quoting GitHub Changeling
Dependabot now waits until a new release has been available on its registry for at least three days before opening a version update pull request. This cooldown is now the default and requires no configuration. — GitHub Changeling , embracing dependency cooldowns Tags:…
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simonw/pedalican
simonw/pedalican Clearly I wasn't paying attention when these were first announced back in May, but today I accidentally activated a "pet" in Codex Desktop - a little animated robot, reminiscent of Clippy - and then learned you can create your own. So I did, and now I have a…
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lobste.rs is now running on SQLite
lobste.rs is now running on SQLite Community site Lobsters has been planning a migration away from MariaDB since August 2018 - originally targeting PostgreSQL, but last year they decided to investigate SQLite instead. This weekend they completed the migration, and now consider…
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Quoting Armin Ronacher
The shared language of a software project is not English or Python but it is the common understanding of what its concepts mean, where the boundaries are, which invariants matter, who owns what, and why the system has the shape it does. This language is rarely written down in…
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DOOMQL
DOOMQL Peter Gostev built this using GPT-5.6 Sol. This is a lot of fun: DOOMQL started with a deliberately unreasonable question: what if SQLite were the game engine, not merely the place where a game stores data? The result is a small, original Doom-like game in which SQL owns…
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datasette code-frequency chart on GitHub
datasette code-frequency chart on GitHub Out of curiosity I decided to see if I could find a useful illustration of the impact of coding agents and Opus 4.5 class models on my own output. The best I've found so far is this GitHub chart of frequency of code changes to my…
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Directly Responsible Individuals (DRI)
Directly Responsible Individuals (DRI) I went looking for a definition of "Directly Responsible Individuals" and the best I found was in the GitLab handbook. Apparently the term originated at Apple, where it's used to describe the person who is "ultimately accountable for the…
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shot-scraper 1.11
Release: shot-scraper 1.11 Some minor improvements, mainly around command option consistency and making the server: mechanism used by both shot-scraper video and shot-scraper multi work if the server takes longer than a second to start serving traffic. server: processes used by…
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Fable gets another bump
One of the consequences of GPT-5.6 Sol being clearly a Fable/Mythos class model is that Anthropic have, once again, bumped the date that Fable stops being available in their Claude Max plans: We're extending Claude Fable 5 access on all paid plans, as well as keeping Claude…
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sqlite-utils 4.1.1
Release: sqlite-utils 4.1.1 Mainly a fix for an edge case that regular Claude chat spotted while experimenting with the 4.1 release to answer a question about ON DELETE. table.transform() now raises a TransactionError if called while a transaction is open with PRAGMA…
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sqlite-utils 4.1
Release: sqlite-utils 4.1 The first dot-release since 4.0 a few days ago , introducing a number of minor new features. sqlite-utils insert and sqlite-utils upsert now accept a --code option for providing a block of Python code (or a path to a .py file) that defines a rows()…
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Quoting Nilay Patel
The reality is to make augmented reality glasses, you need to put a camera next to your eyes that is continuously recording everything you see and processing that to put information over it. There is not another way around it. And there's certainly not a chip that can fit in the…
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Quoting OpenAI
[...] Work on web and mobile runs in the cloud. Work in the desktop app can also use local files and desktop apps with your permission. At launch, cloud Work conversations do not appear in desktop Work; desktop Work threads and local files remain on that computer. — OpenAI…
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The new GPT-5.6 family: Luna, Terra, Sol
OpenAI's latest flagship model hit general availability this morning , and comes in three sizes: Luna, Terra, and Sol (from smallest to largest). The new models are priced per 1M input/output tokens as Luna $1/$6, Terra $2.50/$15, Sol $5/$30. For comparison, the Claude Opus…
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Introducing Muse Spark 1.1
Introducing Muse Spark 1.1 Following Muse Spark in April , here's Muse Spark 1.1 - the first Spark model to offer an API. Meta claim significant improvements in agentic tool calling and computer use. There are a lot more details are in the Muse Spark 1.1 Evaluation Report . The…
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llm-meta-ai 0.1
Release: llm-meta-ai 0.1 Let's LLM run prompts against the new muse-spark-1.1 model. Tags: llm , meta
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Rewriting Bun in Rust
Rewriting Bun in Rust Jarred Sumner has been promising this blog post ( since May 9th ) about his Zig to Rust rewrite of Bun for significantly longer than it took him to finish the rewrite. Honestly, it was worth the wait. This is a detailed description of an extremely…
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Introducing GPT‑Live
Introducing GPT‑Live OpenAI finally upgraded the model used by ChatGPT voice mode! I've had preview access for a few weeks in the iPhone app, and the new model is very impressive. It also has the ability to spin off harder tasks to GPT-5.5: For questions that require web search,…
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Quoting Kenton Varda
I just declared a moratorium against AI-written change descriptions (e.g. PR and commit messages, also issues/tickets) from my team. AI was writing change descriptions that were worse than useless to me as I tried to review PRs: outlining details of the code that could easily be…
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sqlite-utils 4.0
Release: sqlite-utils 4.0 See sqlite-utils 4.0, now with database schema migrations for details. Tags: sqlite-utils
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