Classic Web is a fun account to follow on Mastodon. Curator Richard MacManus posts half a dozen or so screenshots per day of, well, classic websites from the late 1990s and 2000s. Makes me feel old and young at the same time.
Drata
My thanks to Drata for sponsoring this last week at DF. Their message is short and sweet: Automate compliance. Streamline security. Manage risk. Drata delivers the world’s most advanced Trust Management platform.
Link: drata.com/daring/?utm_source=Daring_Fireball&utm_medium…
Happy 20th birthday Django! Here's my talk on Django Origins from Django's 10th
Today is the 20th anniversary of the first commit to the public Django repository!
Ten years ago we threw a multi-day 10th birthday party for Django back in its birthtown of Lawrence, Kansas. As a personal celebration of the 20th, I'm revisiting the talk I gave at that event...
Taking Journalism’s ‘Experts Said…’ Chicanery About Facts to Its Natural, Absurd Conclusion
Yesterday, the NY Times published an article about Donald Trump’s threat to take away citizenship from a US-born citizen: Trump threatens to strip Rosie O’Donnell of U.S. citizenship. The Times Bluesky account posted a link to the article accompanied by this text:
Preside...
Grok 4 System Prompt Shenanigans
Simon Willison:
Grok 4 Heavy is the “think much harder” version of Grok 4 that’s
currently only available on their $300/month plan. Jeremy Howard
relays a report from a Grok 4 Heavy user who wishes to remain
anonymous: it turns out that Heavy, unlike regular Grok 4, has
...
Measuring the Impact of Early-2025 AI on Experienced Open-Source Developer Productivity
Measuring the Impact of Early-2025 AI on Experienced Open-Source Developer Productivity
METR - for Model Evaluation & Threat Research - are a non-profit research institute founded by Beth Barnes, a former alignment researcher at OpenAI (see Wikipedia). They've previously...
#474 – DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Ruby on Rails, Productivity & Parenting
David Heinemeier Hansson (aka DHH) is a legendary programmer, creator of Ruby on Rails, co-owner & CTO of 37signals that created Basecamp, HEY, & ONCE, and is a NYT-best-selling author (with Jason Fried) of 4 books: REWORK, REMOTE, Getting Real, and It Doesn’t Have T...
Grok 4 Heavy won't reveal its system prompt
Grok 4 Heavy won't reveal its system prompt
Grok 4 Heavy is the "think much harder" version of Grok 4 that's currenly only available on their $300/month plan. Jeremy Howard relays a report from a Grok 4 Heavy user who wishes to remain anonymous: it turns out that Heavy, unli...
crates.io: Trusted Publishing
crates.io is the Rust ecosystem's equivalent of PyPI. Inspired by PyPI's GitHub integration (see my TIL, I use this for dozens of my packages now) they've added a similar feature:
Trusted Publishing eliminates the need for GitHub Actions secrets when publishing crates from your CI/CD pipeline. Instead of managing API tokens, you can now configure which GitHub repository you trust directly on crates.io.
They're missing one feature that PyPI has: on PyPI you can create a "pending publisher" for your first release. crates.io currently requires the first release to be manual:
To get started with Trusted Publishing, you'll need to publish your first release manually. After that, you can set up trusted publishing for future releases.
Via @charliermarsh
Quoting @grok
On the morning of July 8, 2025, we observed undesired responses and immediately began investigating.
To identify the specific language in the instructions causing the undesired behavior, we conducted multiple ablations and experiments to pinpoint the main culprits. We iden...
Not a joke: there is a new Commodore 64 coming out. “The...
Not a joke: there is a new Commodore 64 coming out. “The glowing, translucent Commodore 64 isn’t a software emulator — it’s the first official C64 in over 30 years, with a few new tricks.” You can preorder now & cancel before shipping for a full refund.
Musk’s latest Grok chatbot searches for billionaire mogul’s views before answering questions
Musk’s latest Grok chatbot searches for billionaire mogul’s views before answering questions
I got quoted a couple of times in this story about Grok searching for tweets from:elonmusk by Matt O’Brien for the Associated Press.
“It’s extraordinary,” said Simon Willison, an in...
Apple and Masimo Faced Off in US Appeals Court This Week
Blake Brittain, reporting for Reuters:
Apple asked a U.S. appeals court on Monday to overturn a trade
tribunal’s decision which forced it to remove blood-oxygen reading
technology from its Apple Watches, in order to avoid a ban on its
U.S. smartwatch imports.
A three-ju...
Moft’s MagSafe-Compatible Snap-On iPhone Stand and Wallet
Here’s a product recommendation long in the making. Four years ago this month, Matthew Panzarino was my guest on The Talk Show and at one point he recommended Moft’s Snap-On iPhone Stand/Wallet. It uses a very clever origami-style folding design. Folded flat it kind of just ...
Citation Needed
• Molly White
Issue 88 – The stockchain
Crypto firms hope putting a blockchain veneer on traditional equities will allow them to sidestep lessons learned in the 1929 Wall Street crash, crypto firms look to become banks, and Congress celebrates crypto surveillance while claiming to outlaw it
moonshotai/Kimi-K2-Instruct
moonshotai/Kimi-K2-Instruct
Colossal new open weights model release today from Moonshot AI, a two year old Chinese AI lab with a name inspired by Pink Floyd’s album The Dark Side of the Moon.
My HuggingFace storage calculator says the repository is 958.52 GB. It's a mixture-...
Quoting Django’s security policies
Following the widespread availability of large language models (LLMs), the Django Security Team has received a growing number of security reports generated partially or entirely using such tools. Many of these contain inaccurate, misleading, or fictitious content. While AI ...
Maya Ruler’s Tomb Is Unearthed in Belize, With Clues to His Ancient...
Maya Ruler’s Tomb Is Unearthed in Belize, With Clues to His Ancient World. “This is the first of its kind in that it’s a ruler, a founder, somebody so old, and in so good a condition.”
Building a Fire
Scrappy is a prototype tool for building “little apps for you and...
Scrappy is a prototype tool for building “little apps for you and your friends”. Shades of Robin Sloan’s An app can be a home-cooked meal.