Simon Willison
334 articles archived · Visit source ↗ · RSS
-
Simon Willison community 2mo ago
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,…
29 -
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…
22 -
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…
37 -
-
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…
9 -
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…
12 -
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…
38 -
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…
21 -
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…
17 -
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…
21 -
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…
36 -
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…
33 -
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…
12 -
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.
11 -
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…
16 -
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…
22 -
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…
16 -
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…
18 -
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…
38 -
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…
36 -
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…
20 -
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…
4 -
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…
29 -
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…
17 -
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…
7 -
-
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
26 -
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
21 -
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…
24 -
-
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…
38 -
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:…
5 -
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…
26 -
-
-
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 :…
12 -
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…
37 -
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…
30