FeedCity

Today's links The worst possible antitrust outcome: Hope you like enshittification. Hey look at this: Delights to delectate. Object permanence: Amazon drivers hang phones from trees; DVD Jon v Windows DRM; Chevron's dirty tricks. Upcoming appearances: Where to find me. Recent...

It was probably going to happen sooner or later, but Microsoft has officially released the source code for 6502 BASIC. The specific revision is very Commodore-centric: it's the 1977 "8K" BASIC variant "1.1," which Commodore users know better as BASIC V2.0, the same BASIC use...

gov.uscourts.dcd.223205.1436.0_1.pdf Here's the 230 page PDF ruling on the 2023 United States v. Google LLC federal antitrust case - the case that could have resulted in Google selling off Chrome and cutting most of Mozilla's funding. I made it through the first dozen pages ...

Making XML human-readable without XSLT

In response to the recent discourse about XSLT support in browsers, Jake Archibald shares a new-to-me alternative trick for making an XML document readable in a browser: adding the following element near the top of the XML:

<script
  xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml"
  src="script.js" defer="" />

That script.js will then be executed by the browser, and can swap out the XML with HTML by creating new elements using the correct namespace:

const htmlEl = document.createElementNS(
  'http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml',
  'html',
);
document.documentElement.replaceWith(htmlEl);
// Now populate the new DOM

Tags: browsers, javascript, rss, xml, xslt, jake-archibald

Today's links All (antitrust) politics are local: From data-centers to Ticketmaster. Hey look at this: Delights to delectate. Object permanence: Pokerbot back-channels; Little Robot; How To Destroy Surveillance Capitalism. Upcoming appearances: Where to find me. Recent appear...

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

On the beauty and artistry of code

Programming with proofs.

A sequel to my previous posts on finite-state transducers for aperiodic tilings: if you have a tiling you can’t build a transducer for, here’s an algorithm to turn it into one you can.

At this summer's HOPE conference, Joshua Aaron spoke about ICEBlock, his iPhone app that allows users to anonymously report ICE sightings within a 5 mile radius, and to get notifications when others report ICE sightings near them. You can see the full talk, and the lively/infuriating Q&

The recent mass-theft of authentication tokens from Salesloft, whose AI chatbot is used by a broad swath of corporate America to convert customer interaction into Salesforce leads, has left many companies racing to invalidate the stolen credentials before hackers can exploit them. Now Google warns the breach goes far beyond access to Salesforce data, noting the hackers responsible also stole valid authentication tokens for hundreds of online services that customers can integrate with Salesloft, including Slack, Google Workspace, Amazon S3, Microsoft Azure, and OpenAI.

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

Today's links Darth Android: Pray I don't alter it further. Hey look at this: Delights to delectate. Object permanence: We don't know why you don't want to have public sex; Hard Wired; Koko Be Good. Upcoming appearances: Where to find me. Recent appearances: Where I've been. ...

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...

Updates to the Bear license

How to give AI coding assistants complete visibility into APIs and third-party libraries using static analysis instead of basic text search.

This series is a place to collect interesting things I’ve seen, read, or heard, along with some brief thoughts (often incomplete and/or inconclusive) that they provoked. Garden History – Maggie Appleton I’m so happy I stumbled upon this article. I am always grateful for ...

Tigris makes data globally available, durable, and low-latency using a hybrid replication approach that pushes metadata but pulls data on-demand. This talk explains their approach to simplifying global data replication.

Quantum Software and the microkernel UNIX