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We have been having extensive discussions around open source strategy. We will discuss it more at our next board meeting, but one thing we’d like to do soon is to create a language model with the approximate capability of GPT-3 that can run locally on consumer hardware and release that. We’d like to do it soon, before Stability or someone else does. In general, we think this helps discourage others from releasing similarly-powerful models, and makes it harder for new efforts to get funded.
— Sam Altman, Email to OpenAI's board, October 1, 2022 - exposed in Musk v. Altman (2026)
Tags: ai-ethics, sam-altman, generative-ai, openai, ai, llms
Tool: SQLite Query Explainer
Julia Evan's, in Learning a few things about running SQLite:
Maybe one day I’ll learn to read a query plan.
Big same.... which inspired me to have Fable build this interactive explain tool, which runs SQLite in Python in Pyodide in Web Assembly in the browser and adds a layer of explanation to the results of both EXPLAIN and EXPLAIN QUERY PLAN.
Approach with caution, since I don't know enough about SQLite query plans to verify the results myself, but it seems cromulent enough to me.
Tags: sql, sqlite, tools, julia-evans, pyodide, claude-mythos-fable
The oldest commit in that repo is from 21 years ago, and that was the initial import of Quixote 2.4 from Subversion into Git.
Tags: computer-history, python, web-frameworks
Tool: LLM cliché highlighter
I got frustrated reading yet another article that was crammed with the clichés of LLM-generated writing - "no fluff, no filler, no jargon" type stuff - so I had Fable 5 vibe code up this app for highlighting ten common patterns that show up in that sort of writing.
Tags: tools, ai, generative-ai, llms
Is there something I can actually help you with today?
— Kimi K3, after refusing to leak its system prompt
Tags: kimi, ai-personality, generative-ai, ai, llms
Suggestion for hyperscalers feeling pressure over data center water use:
Buy up a few exclusive country clubs, convert the golf courses into public parks, pay for guides and binoculars to get the previous members into birdwatching - help them embrace a more sustainable hobby!
Google used 10.9 billion gallons in 2025, so about 30 million gallons per day.
The Coachella Valley has 120 golf courses each using ~800 acre-feet per year, which is ~750,000 gallons per day.
So Google buying up 40 of those courses (1/3) should do the trick.
Tags: ai-energy-usage, ai
Tool: Mermaid to ASCII art (mermaid-ascii)
After building the Mermaid to ASCII tool based on Grok Build's Rust code I learned that there's an older, more fully-featured Go library called AlexanderGrooff/mermaid-ascii that implements a similar pattern, so I had Claude Fable 5 compile that one to WebAssembly as well so I could compare the two.
This one includes support for colors!
Tags: go, tools, webassembly, mermaid
On file deletions. We’ve investigated a handful of reports where GPT-5.6 unexpectedly deleted files.
What we have found is that this most commonly occurs when:
- Full access mode is enabled and codex is run without sandboxing protections, including without auto review being enabled
- The model attempts to override the $HOME env var to define a temporary directory.
- The model makes an honest mistake and mistakenly deletes $HOME instead.
— Thibault Sottiaux, describing a pretty gnarly Codex bug
Tags: codex, coding-agents, generative-ai, ai, llms
I realize that some people really dislike AI, but this is an area where I'm willing to absolutely put my foot down as the top-level maintainer.
Linux is not one of those anti-AI projects, and if somebody has issues with that, they can do the open-source thing and fork it.
Or just walk away.
AI is a tool, just like other tools we use. And it's clearly a useful one.
It may not have been that "clearly" even just a year ago, but it's no longer in question today.
There are other questions around AI (like what the economy of it will actually look like in the end), but "is it useful" is no longer one of those questions. Anybody who doubts that clearly hasn't actually used it.
— Linus Torvalds, Linux Media Mailing List
Tags: open-source, linus-torvalds, linux, generative-ai, ai, llms
Tool: Mermaid to Unicode box art (grok-mermaid)
While exploring the codebase for the newly open-sourced Grok CLI coding agent I came across xai-grok-markdown/src/mermaid.rs, a "self-contained terminal renderer for Mermaid diagrams" written in Rust.
I figured it would be fun to try that out in a browser via WebAssembly. Here's the prompt I ran in Claude Code for web (Fable 5), and this is what the resulting tool looks like:
![Screenshot of a Mermaid diagram editor showing source code and rendered flowchart. The code reads: graph TD Start[Request received] --> Auth{Authenticated?} Auth -->|yes| Rate{Rate limit OK?} Auth -->|no| R401[401 Unauthorized] Rate -->|yes| H(Handle request) Rate -->|no| R429[429 Too Many Requests] H -.-> Log[Audit log] H ==> Resp[200 OK]. Below the code are controls labeled Max width: Fit output panel, Copy as text, and Copy link to this diagram. The rendered flowchart on a dark background flows top-down: Request received leads to Authenticated?, which branches yes to Rate limit OK? and no to 401 Unauthorized. Rate limit OK? branches yes to Handle request and no to 429 Too Many Requests. Handle request connects with a dotted arrow to Audit log and a thick arrow to 200 OK.](https://static.simonwillison.net/static/2026/grok-mermaid-wasm.png)
Dependabot now waits until a new release has been available on its registry for at least three days before opening a version update pull request. This cooldown is now the default and requires no configuration.
— GitHub Changeling, embracing dependency cooldowns
Tags: dependency-cooldowns, packaging, security, github
Release: datasette 1.0a37
A minor release. Performance and documentation improvements to the permissions system, plus I reverted a cosmetic API change which caused almost every existing plugin test suite to break.
Tags: datasette
TIL: Using uvx in GitHub Actions in a cache-friendly way
I finally found a cache-friendly recipe for using uvx tool-name in GitHub Actions workflows that I like.
The trick is setting a UV_EXCLUDE_NEWER: "2026-07-12" environment variable at the start of the workflow and then using that as part of the GitHub Actions cache key. This means any uvx tool-name commands will resolve to the most recent version as-of that date, and you can bust the cache and upgrade the tools by bumping the date in the future.
My goal here is to use Python tools in GitHub Actions without every run of the workflow hitting PyPI to download a fresh copy of the tool and its dependencies.
Tags: packaging, pypi, python, github-actions, uv
datasette code-frequency chart on GitHub
Out of curiosity I decided to see if I could find a useful illustration of the impact of coding agents and Opus 4.5 class models on my own output. The best I've found so far is this GitHub chart of frequency of code changes to my Datasette open source project:
The big spike in activity at the end aligns with Opus 4.8, GPT-5.5, Fable 5 and GPT-5.6 Sol.
Tags: github, ai, datasette, generative-ai, llms, ai-assisted-programming, coding-agents
