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Jim Nielsen’s Blog Valid
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Collective Speed Is Not the Summation of Individual Speed

blog.jim-nielsen.com/2026/collective-speed-isnt-the-sum-of individual-speed/

I’ve been thinking about speed which is why Chris Coyier caught my attention in his latest piece discussing how AI might be 10✕ing the speed with which we code, but it’s not making our software 10✕ better: Faster individuals don’t make a fast company My mind immediately we...

Miguel Grinberg's Blog
Text • Miguel Grinberg

How Bitwarden Encrypts and Decrypts Secrets

As part of my efforts in reducing my dependency on Big Tech, I have been researching how to self-host my password manager. One solution that looks very promising is Vaultwarden, an open source clone of the Bitwarden cloud server. An interesting aspect of this server is that ...

lcamtuf’s thing
Text • lcamtuf

A breakthrough in C/C++ dependency management

A breakthrough in C/C++ dependency management

Bringing a well-known programming language into the 21st century.

lcamtuf’s thing
Text • lcamtuf

A breakthrough in C/C++ dependency management

A breakthrough in C/C++ dependency management

Bringing a well-known programming language into the 21st century.

Simon Willison's Weblog Supports Webmention
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WHY ARE YOU LIKE THIS

@scottjla on Twitter in reply to my pelican riding a bicycle benchmark:

I feel like we need to stack these tests now

AI generated image. A pelican is riding a bicycle along a dirt track, chased by a police car. The pelican looks panicked, likely because there is an astronaut (with prehensile toes for some reason) riding the pelican clinging on to where its ears should be. The astronaut is being ridden by a horse, with an equally wild expression. A slice of pizza and a can and a cowboy hat are falling next to them. A road sign in the background reads WHY ARE YOU LIKE THIS.

I checked to confirm that the model (ChatGPT Images 2.0) added the "WHY ARE YOU LIKE THIS" sign of its own accord and it did - the prompt Scott used was:

Create an image of a horse riding an astronaut, where the astronaut is riding a pelican that is riding a bicycle. It looks very chaotic but they all just manage to balance on top of each other

Tags: text-to-image, pelican-riding-a-bicycle, ai, generative-ai, slop, chatgpt

Construction Physics
Text • Brian Potter

Reading List 04/25/26

Reading List 04/25/26

Transformer steel manufacturing, textile engineering, bringing power plants online quickly, infrasound, and more.

Works on My Machine
Text • Scott Werner

Artifacts Are Alive (And Photographs are Dead)

Artifacts Are Alive (And Photographs are Dead)

There is a photograph of a coral reef on the wall of my dentist’s office.

Simon Willison's Weblog Supports Webmention
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Quoting Romain Huet

Since GPT-5.4, we’ve unified Codex and the main model into a single system, so there’s no separate coding line anymore.

GPT-5.5 takes this further, with strong gains in agentic coding, computer use, and any task on a computer.

Romain Huet, confirming OpenAI won't release a GPT-5.5-Codex model

Tags: generative-ai, gpt, openai, ai, llms

Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow
Text • Cory Doctorow

Pluralistic: Ada Palmer's "Inventing the Renaissance" (25 Apr 2026)

Today's links Ada Palmer's "Inventing the Renaissance": A tour-de-force, a magnum opus, a work of utter brilliance. Hey look at this: Delights to delectate. Object permanence: Gloating about the dot-bomb; RIAA sues PC-less family; John Deere v infosec; Foxconn v Wisconsin; Co...

Simon Willison's Weblog Supports Webmention
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GPT-5.5 prompting guide

GPT-5.5 prompting guide Now that GPT-5.5 is available in the API, OpenAI have released a wealth of useful tips on how best to prompt the new model. Here's a neat trick they recommend for applications that might spend considerable time thinking before returning a user-visible...

Simon Willison's Weblog Supports Webmention
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llm 0.31

Release: llm 0.31

  • New GPT-5.5 OpenAI model: llm -m gpt-5.5. #1418
  • New option to set the text verbosity level for GPT-5+ OpenAI models: -o verbosity low. Values are low, medium, high.
  • New option for setting the image detail level used for image attachments to OpenAI models: -o image_detail low - values are low, high and auto, and GPT-5.4 and 5.5 also accept original.
  • Models listed in extra-openai-models.yaml are now also registered as asynchronous. #1395

Tags: gpt, openai, llm

Simon Willison's Weblog Supports Webmention
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The people do not yearn for automation

The people do not yearn for automation This written and video essay by Nilay Patel explores why AI is unpopular with the general public even as usage numbers for ChatGPT continue to skyrocket. It’s a superb piece of commentary, and something I expect I’ll be thinking about f...

Simon Willison's Weblog Supports Webmention
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Millisecond Converter

Tool: Millisecond Converter

LLM reports prompt durations in milliseconds and I got fed up of having to think about how to convert those to seconds and minutes.

Tags: tools

Simon Willison's Weblog Supports Webmention
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llm-openai-via-codex 0.1a0

Release: llm-openai-via-codex 0.1a0

Hijacks your Codex CLI credentials to make API calls with LLM, as described in my post about GPT-5.5.

Tags: openai, llm, codex-cli

Dwarkesh Podcast
Text • Dwarkesh Patel

Blog prize for the big questions about AI

Blog prize for the big questions about AI

The not-so-secret point of this whole contest is so that I can hire a researcher

Jeff Geerling
Text • Jeff Geerling

New 10 GbE USB adapters are cooler, smaller, cheaper

For years, the best way to get 10 gigabit networking on laptops was to buy an expensive, large, and hot 10 GbE Thunderbolt adapter. With new RTL8159-based 10G USB 3.2 adapters coming onto the market, the bulky adapters might be a thing of the past. Just look at the size of the thing in comparison to my Thunderbolt adapters:

10 Gbps Ethernet adapters for Thunderbolt and USB

2.5G and even 5G USB adapters have been out for a while, but sometimes you need more bandwidth.

Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow
Text • Cory Doctorow

Pluralistic: A free, open visual identity for enshittification (24 Apr 2026)

Today's links A free, open visual identity for enshittification: No mere poop emoji! Hey look at this: Delights to delectate. Object permanence: RIAA v little girl; Portal turret Easter egg; Atari v indie games; Chabon's Phantom Tollbooth intro; The 0.1%; Well-labeled inns; "...

Simon Willison's Weblog Supports Webmention
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DeepSeek V4 - almost on the frontier, a fraction of the price

Chinese AI lab DeepSeek's last model release was V3.2 (and V3.2 Speciale) last December. They just dropped the first of their hotly anticipated V4 series in the shape of two preview models, DeepSeek-V4-Pro and DeepSeek-V4-Flash. Both models are 1 million token context Mixtur...

Simon Willison's Weblog Supports Webmention
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It's a big one

This week's edition of my email newsletter (aka content from this blog delivered to your inbox) features 4 pelicans riding bicycles, 1 possum on an e-scooter, up to 5 raccoons with ham radios hiding in crowds, 5 blog posts, 8 links, 3 quotes and a new chapter of my Agentic Engineering Patterns guide.

Tags: newsletter

Simon Willison's Weblog Supports Webmention
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russellromney/honker

russellromney/honker "Postgres NOTIFY/LISTEN semantics" for SQLite, implemented as a Rust SQLite extension and various language bindings to help make use of it. The design of this looks very solid. It lets you write Python code for queues that looks like this: import honker ...