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In tribute to Ozzy Osbourne, a choir of 7000+ people sang Black Sabbath’s Paranoid. Lovely.

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For her newest film, director Chloé Zhao (Nomadland) has adapted Maggie O’Farrell’s 2020 novel Hamnet; both book and movie are about William Shakespeare and his wife in the aftermath of the death of their 11-year-old son, Hamnet. Paul Mescal stars as William Shakespeare an...

Scientists Have Found the First Branch on the Tree of Life. “The sister to all other animals, the first to branch off, and the most genetically isolated animal is … drumroll please … the comb jelly!”

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Alexander Chee: How Can I Write At A Time Like This? “We are being hit with what I would call advanced resilience targeting, an attack on our ability to be in community, to be healthy, to make a living, to know our rights, to have a government.”

We Already Know a Way to Save a Bunch of Lives. (Giving wounded people blood earlier, in ambulances, increases their chance of survival. But insurance won’t pay for it so we don’t do it in the US. 🤬)

I didn’t know this about eels: No one has ever seen an eel reproduce naturally. Not in the wild, not in captivity, not even once. And yet, eels are everywhere. In rivers, in lakes, in oceans, slippery, ancient, and inexplicably present. For centuries, the world’s greate...

Rich Pixels

Neat Python library by Darren Burns adding pixel image support to the Rich terminal library, using tricks to render an image using full or half-height colored blocks.

Here's the key trick - it renders Unicode ▄ (U+2584, "lower half block") characters after setting a foreground and background color for the two pixels it needs to display.

I got GPT-5 to vibe code up a show_image.py terminal command which resizes the provided image to fit the width and height of the current terminal and displays it using Rich Pixels. That script is here, you can run it with uv like this:

uv run http://tools.simonwillison.net/python/show_image.py \
  image.jpg

Here's what I got when I ran it against my V&A East Storehouse photo from this post:

Tags: ascii-art, cli, python, ai, generative-ai, llms, uv, vibe-coding, gpt-5, rich

A backpacker on the Inca Trail encounters a fellow hiker who is inexplicably carrying two bags. This essay was written by Maggie Downs and edited by Aube Rey Lescure, and originally appeared in Off Assignment. 

Plus: Off Assignment is offering a travel writing course, called Rethinking Travel Writing. It begins September 6, and you can use code ATLAS20 for 20% off: https://www.offassignment.com/rethinking-travel-writing

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We celebrate movie no. 400 on The Rewatchables by revisiting Ridley Scott’s 2007 crime thriller, ‘American Gangster,’ starring Denzel Washington, Russell Crowe, Josh Brolin, and Chiwetel Ejiofor.

Producers: Craig Horlbeck, Ronak Nair, and Chia Hao Tat

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William Foege, William Roper, David Satcher, Jeffrey Koplan, Richard Besser, Tom Frieden, Anne Schuchat, Rochelle P. Walensky, and Mandy K. Cohen — all of them former directors of the CDC, under every president from Jimmy Carter to Trump — in a co-bylined op-ed for the NYT: ...

Bernie Sanders, in a NYT op-ed: Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the secretary of health and human services, is endangering the health of the American people now and into the future. He must resign. Mr. Kennedy and the rest of the Trump administration tell us, over and over, that...

I just sent out my August 2025 sponsors-only newsletter summarizing the past month in LLMs and my other work. Topics included GPT-5, gpt-oss, image editing models (Qwen-Image-Edit and Gemini Nano Banana), other significant model releases and the tools I'm using at the moment.

If you'd like a preview of the newsletter, here's the July 2025 edition I sent out a month ago.

New sponsors get access to the full archive. If you start sponsoring for $10/month or more right now you'll get instant access to the August edition in my simonw-private/monthly GitHub repository.

If you've already read all 85 posts I wrote in August the newsletter acts mainly as a recap, but I've had positive feedback from people who prefer to get the monthly edited highlights over reading the firehose that is my blog!

Tags: newsletter

For your holiday listening enjoyment: Special guest Andru Edwards joins the show. Topics include Google’s Pixel 10 event and the Pixel 10 family of devices, AI’s effect on computational photography, foldable phones, and some speculation on Apple’s September 9 “Awe Dropping” event.

Sponsored by:

• Squarespace: Save 10% off your first purchase of a website or domain using code talkshow.
• Sentry: A real-time error monitoring and tracing platform. Get 3 months and 150,000 errors free.
• Notion: The best AI tool for work, with your notes, docs, and projects in one space.

Link: daringfireball.net/thetalkshow/2025/08/31/ep-430

Introducing gpt-realtime Released a few days ago (August 28th), gpt-realtime is OpenAI's new "most advanced speech-to-speech model". It looks like this is a replacement for the older gpt-4o-realtime-preview model that was released last October. This is a slightly confusing r...

Cloudflare Radar: AI Insights Cloudflare launched this dashboard back in February, incorporating traffic analysis from Cloudflare's network along with insights from their popular 1.1.1.1 DNS service. I found this chart particularly interesting, showing which documented AI cr...

The story of a woman who, in her 70s, inspired some of the biggest labor uprisings in American history.

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One more for my weekend spate of developer posts, but from the opposite of the LLM-assisted cutting edge: this wonderful collection of classic-era Mac programming books, carefully scanned as PDFs. These evoke nostalgia both for the classic Mac era and for the entire notion of “programming books”. (Via Michael Tsai and Rui Carmo.)

Link: vintageapple.org/macprogramming/index_year.html

Sosumi.ai: Ever notice Claude struggling to write Swift code? It might not be their fault! Apple Developer docs are locked behind JavaScript, making them invisible to most LLMs. If they try to fetch it, all they see is “This page requires JavaScript. Please turn on Java...

My thanks to Impending for sponsoring last week at DF to promote their new app, Walk the World. You surely know some of Impending’s other apps, like the innovative checklist/task app Clear. Walk the World turns your steps — your real-world activity — into a new kind of virtu...