Simon Willison's Weblog
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The Web Is More Than Enough, by Paul Ford
My comment on The Web Is More Than Enough, by Paul Ford — Hacker News. OK, this comment convinced me to give that a shot. Here's a thing I made in Three.js this morning - a Nudibranch themed Faberge Egg: https://static.simonwillison.net/static/2026/Hidden-Reef-Egg... (77KB) I just asked Claude…
Hide your slop PR descriptions behind
Most of the changes I make to my projects these days come in the form of PRs opened for me by Claude Code or Codex. The PR is my unit of work - I use them to bundle commits together, iterating on them until a feature is complete, document decisions and then merge the finished result. Today's coding…
parse_number() as a SQLite extension: C vs Rust
Research: parse_number() as a SQLite extension: C vs Rust I was out walking the dog when I got curious about how easy/difficult it would be to write a SQLite C extension that adds a parse_number() function for turning strings like -$1,234.56 or '12.5%' into numeric values that could be summed and…
datasette #3046: Don't serve link: rel=next HTTP headers to Firefox for HTML pages
I was looking at the Firefox network panel today when I noticed that requests to a Datasette table page were triggering an HTTP prefetch to the next page of rows in that table. This was happening because Datasette…
Terry Pratchett's Study
My comment on Terry Pratchett's Study — Hacker News. Terry Pratchett once wrote about the concept of "horizontal wealth". Vertical wealth is where you spend money on rich people stuff - yachts and suchlike. Horizontal wealth is where you spend more money on the things you liked before you got rich…
Quoting Nilay Patel
The products aren't good enough to sell people on the costs. You cannot tell people that you have to listen to the whine of a data center in their backyard for AI overviews and some of the most hilarious deep fake slop in history. It's not worth it. It just isn't worth it to anyone. And agents…
Quoting Paul Ford
The web browser is very, very, very powerful software for applications, and the cost of accessing that power is going down seemingly every day . — Paul Ford , The Web Is More Than Enough Tags: browsers , paul-ford , web-development
datasette-llm 0.1a10
Release: datasette-llm 0.1a10 Fixes a bug that affected my agent.datasette.io demo site, where the set of available LLM models was not correctly restricted to just those in the configuration. Tags: datasette , llm
datasette-apps 0.3a0
Release: datasette-apps 0.3a0 Datasette Apps adds support for hosting and editing custom HTML applications inside of Datasette. These can be created by hand, but it's easier to create them using LLMs via Datasette Agent . This release improves that integration: Apps can now be tagged in Datasette…
datasette-agent 0.5a0
Release: datasette-agent 0.5a0 This is a significant release of Datasette Agent . The most notable new feature is called the panel - it lets the agent chat open and then sit next to pages from Datasette, for example a table or query page. When combined with datasette-apps this means you can prompt…
llm 0.37.1
Release: llm 0.37.1 A bugfix release for LLM , with contributions from Steven Huang , Tao An , Arjan Mossel , and XQ . Tags: llm
AI is destroying my CS degree
My comment on AI is destroying my CS degree — Hacker News. I don't envy educators right now. AI clearly means you need to change how you teach and evaluate students. We are only a few years in though, and it's still extremely unclear what effective teaching with these tools looks like. The worst…
Qwen 3.8 27B on my laptop can interpret model weights, too
Yesterday's hot paper was Sparks of Weight-Space Programming: LLMs can natively read & write neural network weights by Rikiya Takehi, Jayden Teoh, Alex Zhang, and Omar Khattab. The paper found that frontier models, in particular GPT-6 Astra, can both interpret and modify the raw weights of a…
I discovered a sound that leaks your exact location (and it's everywhere) - YouTube
Genius piece of OSINT by Colsto, who demonstrates how you can take almost imperceptible background noise of planes from a video soundtrack, figure out their Doppler curves, then cross reference them against ADS-B…
October sponsors-only newsletter
I sent out the October edition of my sponsors-only monthly newsletter . If you are a sponsor (or start a sponsorship now) you can access it here . This month: The October inflection point for vibe game development The vulnerability apocalypse gets hot LLM releases API credits for $100+/month…
llm 0.37
Release: llm 0.37 There's a lot of stuff in this new release of my LLM CLI tool and Python library, representing around two months of accumulated features and fixes. I added gpt-6.1-sol and gpt-6.1-terra , plus a new llm openai endpoint add command to make it easier to configure additional models…
The U.S. Census Bureau and “Super Intelligence”
I was reminded today of AI Adoption Rate Trending Down for Large Companies , a chart produced by Apollo Global Management in September 2025, which appeared to show a slowdown in U.S. corporate AI adoption based on numbers collected by the U.S. Census Bureau. At the time I used that chart to…
If in doubt, delete the uv.lock file
I've been getting the occasional confusing Python dependency error since switching over to Python 3.15 and the rule I'm having to remember is: If in doubt, delete the uv.lock file Most of my projects are libraries which don't include a uv.lock file, since it's rude for a library dependency to lock…
Quoting Kyle Kingsbury
More broadly, the use of LLMs erodes trust in documentation, in software, and in the organizations which produce them. Perhaps engineers will begin to treat any new software project with suspicion—the signals we used to rely on as markers of a mature system are now easier to counterfeit. [...] In…
How We Took Over ChatGPT Accounts
Parameter Labs describe an exploit they found against ChatGPT's implementation of the artifacts pattern (OpenAI used to call this "Canvas" but it looks like the latest revision is called HTML previews ), where interactive custom HTML apps are displayed in a…
In the directory since 23 Sept 2026 · last checked 9 Nov 2026 · ATOM