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I want to argue that AI models will write good code because of economic incentives. Good code is cheaper to generate and maintain. Competition is high between the AI models right now, and the ones that win will help developers ship reliable features fastest, which requires simple, maintainable code. Good code will prevail, not only because we want it to (though we do!), but because economic forces demand it. Markets will not reward slop in coding, in the long-term.

— Soohoon Choi, Slop Is Not Necessarily The Future

Tags: slop, ai-assisted-programming, generative-ai, agentic-engineering, ai, llms

Nothing Works in Trump’s America — Except Racism. “Trump is objectively bad at running the government, but he’s objectively good at running a Klan rally, and his supporters value the latter so much that they forgive the former.”

Supply Chain Attack on Axios Pulls Malicious Dependency from npm

Useful writeup of today's supply chain attack against Axios, the HTTP client NPM package with 101 million weekly downloads. Versions 1.14.1 and 0.30.4 both included a new dependency called plain-crypto-js which was freshly published malware, stealing credentials and installing a remote access trojan (RAT).

It looks like the attack came from a leaked long-lived npm token. Axios have an open issue to adopt trusted publishing, which would ensure that only their GitHub Actions workflows are able to publish to npm. The malware packages were published without an accompanying GitHub release, which strikes me as a useful heuristic for spotting potentially malicious releases - the same pattern was present for LiteLLM last week as well.

Via lobste.rs

Tags: javascript, security, npm, supply-chain

The 2026 issue of the HTML Review, “an annual journal of literature made to exist on the web”.

Grace Kay, Ashley Stewart, and Pranav Dixit, writing for Business Insider (News+): “Part of bringing me on, and giving me the responsibilities of a CEO, was to make sure that I could really run that part of the company with autonomy,” Simo, whose title is CEO of applicat...

Release: datasette-llm 0.1a4

• Ability to configure different API keys for models based on their purpose - for example, set it up so enrichments always use gpt-5.4-mini with an API key dedicated to that purpose. #4

I released llm-echo 0.3 to provide an API key testing utility I needed for the tests for this new feature.

Tags: llm, datasette

Release: llm-all-models-async 0.1

LLM plugins can define new models in both sync and async varieties. The async variants are most common for API-backed models - sync variants tend to be things that run the model directly within the plugin.

My llm-mrchatterbox plugin is sync only. I wanted to try it out with various Datasette LLM features (specifically datasette-enrichments-llm) but Datasette can only use async models.

So... I had Claude spin up this plugin that turns sync models into async models using a thread pool. This ended up needing an extra plugin hook mechanism in LLM itself, which I shipped just now in LLM 0.30.

Tags: llm, async, python

Release: llm 0.30

• The register_models() plugin hook now takes an optional model_aliases parameter listing all of the models, async models and aliases that have been registered so far by other plugins. A plugin with @hookimpl(trylast=True) can use this to take previously registered models into account. #1389
• Added docstrings to public classes and methods and included those directly in the documentation.

Tags: llm

Release: llm-echo 0.4

• Prompts now have the input_tokens and output_tokens fields populated on the response.

Tags: llm

Release: llm-echo 0.3

• Mechanisms for testing tool calls. #3
• Mechanism for testing raw responses. #4
• New echo-needs-key model for testing model key logic. #7

Tags: llm

Hana Kiros, writing for The Atlantic: Recently, a Costco in Florida instituted a new store policy. An employee told me that he was asked to open up every desktop computer displayed in the electronics section and remove the memory chips. Otherwise, the RAM harvesters woul...

Mark Simonson reminisces about when he discovered type design. “The idea of coming up with an original alphabet design fired my imagination. And learning that it was possible to design type professionally was a revelation.”

“By focusing its narrative on the tech industry itself, Halt and Catch Fire’s staying power has only increased. The story it tells still has something to say about our present-day reality.”

For the latest episode of Design Matters, Debbie Millman interviews Timothy Snyder about “how we misunderstand freedom, why truth and empathy are under threat, and what this political moment asks of us”. Millman is an *excellent* interviewer.

Coinbase is accused of holding the cryptocurrency industry hostage over stablecoin rewards, prediction markets face an onslaught of opposition, and a Stand With Crypto poll can’t even get enthusiasm from its own activists

Endgame for the Open Web, brought on by LLM bots, content summarizing while driving no traffic, increasing paywalls for information of all kinds, locking down APIs (due to AI abuse), attacks on Wikipedia, disruption of open source communities, etc.

Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang, during an on-stage interview at The Hill & Valley Forum last week, was asked “What do you see as America’s unique advantages that other countries don’t have?”

His answer, after taking a moment to think, “America’s unique advantage that no country could possibly have is President Trump.”

Huang, newly appointed to the aforelinked President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology, seemingly doesn’t smell the growing stink.

Link: bsky.app/profile/carnage4life.bsky.social/post…

The White House: The Council will be co-chaired by David Sacks and Michael Kratsios. The following individuals have been appointed: Marc Andreessen Sergey Brin Safra Catz Michael Dell Jacob DeWitte Fred Ehrsam Larry Ellison David Friedberg Jensen Huang John Mar...

NASA’s LRO found a new crater on the Moon…it’s 225 meters across and 43 meters deep. “According to predictions based on other lunar landmarks, a crater that big should form only once in 139 years.”