"They screwed us": Personality clashes sent Anthropic's models offline Lots of "source familiar with the administration's thinking" and "source close to Anthropic" in this Axios piece, which is the best collection of behind-the-scenes gossip I've seen about the US government...

[...] Instead, I picture a specific person and I just write for them. Often this person is "me, but 3 years ago" or a good friend.

— Julia Evans, write for 1 person

Tags: writing, julia-evans

Why AI hasn’t replaced software engineers, and won’t Arvind Narayanan and Sayash Kappor take on the question of AI job losses through the lens of a profession that is uniquely suited to AI disruption - software engineering. In this essay, we argue that there is enough evide...

Research: Mapping SQLite result columns back to their source `table.column` It would be neat if arbitrary SQL queries in Datasette could be rendered with additional information based on which columns from which tables were included in the results. To build that, we w...

The Pyodide 314.0 release announcement (via Hacker News) includes news I've been looking forward to for a long time: You can now publish Python packages built for Pyodide (or any Python runtime compatible with the PyEmscripten platform defined in PEP 783) directly to PyPI a...

Release: luau-wasm 0.1a0

See Publishing WASM wheels to PyPI for use with Pyodide for details.

Tags: lua, webassembly, pyodide

Statement on the US government directive to suspend access to Fable 5 and Mythos 5 Well this is nuts: The US government, citing national security authorities, has issued an export control directive to suspend all access to Fable 5 and Mythos 5 by any foreign national, wheth...

OpenAI WebRTC Audio Session, now with document context

I built the first version of this tool in December 2024 to try out the then-new OpenAI WebRTC API for interacting with their realtime audio models.

Last month OpenAI introduced a brand new model to that API called GPT‑Realtime‑2, which they promoted as "our first voice model with GPT‑5‑class reasoning" - with a Sep 30, 2024 knowledge cut-off.

I've been waiting for that model to show up in the ChatGPT iPhone app but it still hasn't, so I revisited my old playground.

You can now pick the better model, and you can also paste in a big chunk of document context so you can have as audio conversation in your browser about whatever information you think would be useful to explore in a conversational way.

Tags: audio, tools, ai, openai, generative-ai, llms, multi-modal-output, webrtc

Jenny owns a crematorium. John’s propane company gives her a $20 billion investment in return for 5 percent of her operation. Jenny throws $10 billion into the incinerator, then pays John $10 billion to buy propane to burn that money to ashes. John reports that his AI investments have generated $10 billion in revenue this quarter and that he owns 5 percent of a $100 billion business. A reporter from Forbes is assigned to profile John and Jenny, and over the course of his research, he becomes embroiled in a passionate but confusing three-way love affair with them, which eventually turns into a polyamorous common-law marriage. His profile is glowing, but light on financial details.

— Andrew Singleton, AI Economics for Dummies

Tags: ai

After two days of experience with Claude Fable 5 I think the best way to describe it is relentlessly proactive. It knows a whole lot of tricks and it will deploy pretty much any of them to get to its goal. I'll illustrate this with an example. I was hacking on Datasette Agen...

Release: datasette 1.0a33

This alpha is a significant step on the road to a stable 1.0, finally extending the ?_extra= pattern I introduced in Datasette 1.0a3 to cover queries and rows in addition to tables. That pattern is also now documented!

I wrote a whole lot more about the new release on the Datasette project blog: Datasette 1.0a33 with JSON extras in the API.

Because API explorer tools are almost free to build now I had Claude Fable 5 in Claude Code (for the plan) and GPT-5.5 xhigh in Codex Desktop (for the implementation) build me this custom extras API explorer to help demonstrate the feature:

Tags: projects, datasette, annotated-release-notes, ai-assisted-programming

Release: asyncinject 0.7

I built this utility library to support an asyncio dependency injection pattern a few years ago. I was using it with Datasette and Claude Fable 5 spotted some bugs in the dependency which it then fixed for me. It's a very proactive model!

Tags: async, projects, python, claude-mythos

Anthropic Walks Back Policy That Could Have ‘Sabotaged’ AI Researchers Using Claude

Big scoop for Maxwell Zeff at Wired:

“We’re changing Fable 5’s safeguards for frontier LLM development to make them visible.” Anthropic said in a statement to WIRED. “We made the wrong tradeoff and we apologize for not getting the balance right.”

There's been a huge outcry about Anthropic's policy, tucked away in their system card, that Claude Fable/Mythos would identify "requests targeting frontier LLM development" and "limit effectiveness" without notifying the user.

It's very good news that they're dropping this.

Tags: ai, generative-ai, llms, anthropic, claude, ai-ethics, claude-mythos

Release: datasette-agent 0.2a0 Highlights from the release notes: Tools can now ask the user questions mid-execution. Tools that declare a context parameter receive a ToolContext object, and await context.ask_user(...) can ask a yes/no, multiple-choice (options=[.....

DiffusionGemma

Last May Google briefly released an experimental Gemini Diffusion model. I tried the preview at the time and recorded it running at 857 tokens/second. It was an exciting model, but Google made no further announcements about it.

That research has returned in the best possible way: as a new open weight (Apache 2 licensed) Gemma model, google/diffusiongemma-26B-A4B-it.

NVIDIA are currently hosting the model for free on their NIM cloud API. I used that API to generate this pelican, which took 4.4s (according to time uv run generate.py) to return 2,409 tokens - so at least 500 tokens/second.

Via Hacker News

Tags: google, ai, generative-ai, llms, nvidia, pelican-riding-a-bicycle, gemma, llm-release, llm-performance

Easy solution to slow down recursive AI self improvement: The lab with the top-ranked model must agree THEY must not use it for working on frontier AI But everyone else should have access to it. By definition, this means the frontier doesn't advance. It also has the criti...

If Claude Fable stops helping you, you'll never know Jonathon Ready highlights one of the more eyebrow-raising details from the 319 page system card for Fable 5 and Mythos 5. Here's a longer excerpt, highlights mine: In light of the ability of recent models to accelerate th...

Release: llm 0.32a3

Almost entirely written by the new Claude Fable 5, see my write-up for more details.

Tags: projects, ai, generative-ai, llms, llm, claude-mythos

I didn't have early access to today's Claude Fable 5 release, but I've spent the past ~5.5 hours putting it through its paces. My initial impressions are that this is something of a beast. It's slow, expensive and has been quite happily churning through everything I've throw...

TIL: Setting a custom price for a model in AgentsView

I've been really enjoying AgentsView by Wes McKinney as a tool for exploring my token usage across different coding agents running on my laptop.

Claude Fable 5 came out today and wasn't yet included in the pricing database AgentsView uses. I used Fable to reverse-engineer AgentsView and figured out this recipe for setting custom prices.

Here's my Claude Fable 5 usage for today so far, plotted by AgentsView as a treemap across my different local projects:

Tags: ai, generative-ai, llms, llm-pricing

I feel a lot of things changing as working software increasingly comes out on a tap. The Jevon's paradox kicks in and I feel my own demand for software growing substantially. You can ask for anything - explainers, visualizers, dashboards, bespoke single-use apps (e.g. a full wandb that is hyper-specific just for your project), you can 10X your test suite, auto-optimize code, run giant research projects with custom HTML for the results, anything! "Free your mind" (Matrix ref).

— Andrej Karpathy, on Claude Fable 5

Tags: andrej-karpathy, jevons-paradox, anthropic, generative-ai, ai, llms

Given how badly burned anyone who took Apple's 2024 WWDC Apple Intelligence announcements at face value was, I'm holding to a strict "I'll believe it when I see it" policy for everything they announced today. The new Siri AI features do at least look feasible with today's t...

Release: datasette-agent-edit 0.1a0 I'm planning several plugins for Datasette Agent which can make edits to existing pieces of text - things like collaborative Markdown editing, updating large SQL queries, and editing SVG files. Agentic editing of text is a little t...

Release: micropython-wasm 0.1a2

I added a CLI to micropython-wasm (issue #7), inspired by the first draft of the blog entry when I realized it would be a great way to illustrate the Try it yourself section.

Tags: python, sandboxing, webassembly, micropython

I've been experimenting with different approaches to running code in a sandbox for several years now, but my latest attempt feels like it might finally have all of the characteristics I've been looking for. I've released it as an alpha package called micropython-wasm, and I'...

OpenAI Help: Lockdown Mode OpenAI first teased this in February, but now it's live and "rolling out to eligible personal accounts, including Free, Go, Plus, and Pro, and self-serve ChatGPT Business accounts": Lockdown Mode is designed to help prevent the final stage of data...

We will no longer accept public pull requests. [...]

A substantial patch used to imply substantial effort, and that effort was a reasonable proxy for good faith. That assumption no longer holds. [...]

Whether code was typed by hand is beside the point. What matters is who is responsible for it once it enters the browser. Ladybird is becoming a browser for real users. The people introducing changes to it must be the people who decide those changes belong in the project, and who will answer for the consequences.

— Andreas Kling, Changing How We Develop Ladybird

Tags: ladybird, ai-ethics, open-source, generative-ai, ai, andreas-kling, llms

AI enthusiasts are in a race against time, AI skeptics are in a race against entropy Charity Majors neatly captures the dynamic between AI enthusiasts and AI skeptics, both of whom are trying to build great software, often in the same teams: The enthusiasts are not wrong. W...

After this story was published Google's spokesperson reached out and asked us to publish a slightly different version of that statement. The new statement no longer stated that "it's critical that we maintain humans in the loop."

— Emanuel Maiberg, 404 Media, Google Employees Internally Share Memes About How Its AI Sucks

Tags: ai-ethics, journalism, ai, google

Uber Caps Usage of AI Tools Like Claude Code to Manage Costs I wrote the other day about Uber blowing its 2026 AI budget in four months, and how that wasn't particularly surprising given they would have set that budget in 2025, before anyone could have predicted how popular ...