Simon Willison
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Simon Willison community 1mo ago
Mad House — Usborne Creepy Computer Games
Tool: Mad House — Usborne Creepy Computer Games Via Hacker News I learned that UK publisher Usborne published free PDFs of their 1980s Computer Books , some of which I remember working through on my Commodore 64 as a child. These were so great! Beautifully illustrated books with…
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On the <dl>
On the <dl> I learned a few new-to-me things about the <dl> element from this article by Ben Meyer: A <dt> can be followed by multiple <dd> You can optionally group the <dt> and <dd> elements in a <div> for styling - but only a <div> . You can label them using ARIA. They've been…
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pydantic-monty investigation
Research: pydantic-monty investigation It's been a few months since I last poked at Monty , the sandboxed subset of Python implemented in Rust. I had Claude Code look at the most recent release. Importantly the max_duration_secs , max_memory , max_allocations , and…
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Datasette Agent
We just announced the first release of Datasette Agent , a new extensible AI assistant for Datasette. I've been working on my LLM Python library for just over three years now, and Datasette Agent represents the moment that LLM and Datasette finally come together. I'm really…
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Quoting SpaceX S-1
We have the ability to use compute resources to support our proprietary AI applications (such as Grok 5, which is currently being trained at COLOSSUS II), while also providing access to select compute capacity to third-party customers. For example, in May 2026, we entered into…
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Google I/O, Gemini Spark, Antigravity
It's hard to find much to write about Google I/O this year because I have a policy of not writing about anything that I can't try out myself, and a lot of the big announcements are "coming soon". I actually prefer to write about things that are in general availability, because…
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datasette-agent-charts 0.1a1
Release: datasette-agent-charts 0.1a1 More color! Bar and waffle charts without a color column are shaded by magnitude with a sequential color scheme; color columns holding text values use the observable10 categorical scheme. #2 Now checks execute-sql permission before running…
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llm-gemini 0.32a0
Release: llm-gemini 0.32a0 Compatible with llm>=0.32a0 alpha - adds the ability to stream reasoning tokens. Tags: gemini , llm
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datasette-llm 0.1a8
Release: datasette-llm 0.1a8 Fix for bug where llm_prompt_context() hook did not fully collect chains of responses. #7
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The last six months in LLMs in five minutes
I put together these annotated slides from my five minute lightning talk at PyCon US 2026, using the latest iteration of my annotated presentation tool . # I presented this lightning talk at PyCon US 2026, attempting to summarize the last six months of developments in LLMs in…
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Warelay -> OpenClaw
In preparation for a lightning talk I'm giving at PyCon US this afternoon I decided to figure out how many names OpenClaw has actually had since that first commit back in November. Thanks to this first_line_history.py tool ( code here ) the answer, according to the Git history…
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Quoting Julia Evans
[...] in the last 10 years I’ve learned to really love and respect CSS as a technology. So I decided years ago that I wanted to react to “CSS is hard” by getting better at CSS and taking it seriously as a technology, instead of devaluing it. Doing that changed everything for me:…
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inaturalist-clumper 0.1
Release: inaturalist-clumper 0.1 Part of the infrastructure I use for publishing my iNaturalist sightings on my blog . I've been running this in production for a few weeks now, inspiring some iterations on how it works, so I decided to ship a 0.1 release. You can see an example…
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datasette-llm-limits 0.1a0
Release: datasette-llm-limits 0.1a0 This plugin works in conjunction with datasette-llm and datasette-llm-accountant to let you configure a per-user (or global) spending limit for LLM usage inside of Datasette. Configuration looks something like this: plugins :…
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Not so locked in any more
This Mitchell Hashimoto quote about Bun migrating from Zig to Rust reminded me of a similar conversation I had at a conference last week. I was talking to someone who worked for a medium sized technology company with a pair of legacy/ legendary iPhone and Android apps. They told…
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Quoting Mitchell Hashimoto
[...] On the interesting side is how fungible programming languages are nowadays. Programming languages used to be LOCK IN, and they're increasingly not so. You think the Bun rewrite in Rust is good for Rust? Bun has shown they can be in probably any language they want in…
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datasette-ip-rate-limit 0.1a0
Release: datasette-ip-rate-limit 0.1a0 The datasette.io site was being hammered by poorly-behaved crawlers, so I had Codex (GPT-5.5 xhigh) build a configurable rate limiting plugin to block IPs that were hammering specific areas of the site too quickly. Here's the production…
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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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Using LLM in the shebang line of a script
TIL: Using LLM in the shebang line of a script Kim_Bruning on Hacker News : But seriously, you can put a shebang on an english text file now (if you're sufficiently brave) [...] This inspired me to look at patterns for doing exactly that with LLM . Here's the simplest, which…
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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 New York Times Editors’ Note
This article was updated after The Times learned that a remark attributed to Pierre Poilievre, the Conservative leader, was in fact an A.I.-generated summary of his views about Canadian politics that A.I. rendered as a quotation. The reporter should have checked the accuracy of…
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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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