FeedCity

The next metaphor after free-as-in-puppy

Today's links Bubbles are REALLY evil: Bernie Ebbers got what was coming to him. Hey look at this: Delights to delectate. Object permanence: Mozilla v DHS wiretaps; Judge v FCC's internet wiretaps; Foxconn workers must promise not to kill themselves; "Shannon's Law"; How to p...

Dwarkesh Patel1 recently posted an award for the best answers to four key questions about AI. It’s partly a challenge and partly a job interview, since some of the winners will get offered a role as a “research collaborator”. I don’t want the job, but I do want to write down...

Since about three years past time immemorial, the RSS feed for this site has been very anaemic. It had article titles and dates, and that was it. Many readers have requested that I include the full article in the feed, or at least a preview, but I’ve always put it off because it has sounded difficult to accomplish technically.

The way the RSS feed for this site is generated is in two steps:

1. First a little loop in Emacs Lisp runs through the first few items of a sorted and filtered list of files belonging to this project. This loop constructs an org-element syntax tree for the RSS feed, and renders it out to a temporary file as an Org mode file.
2. Then the regular Org exporting framework takes over and exports that file as an RSS file using the ox-rss backend.

(Continue reading the full article on the web.)

This is the seventh chapter of my SQLAlchemy 2 in Practice book. If you'd like to support my work, I encourage you to buy this book, either directly from my store or on Amazon. Thank you!

Starting with release 1.4, SQLAlchemy includes support for asynchronous programming with the asyncio package, for both the Core and ORM modules. This is an exciting improvement that brings the power of SQLAlchemy to modern applications such as those written with the FastAPI web framework.

I'm at Anthropic's Code w/ Claude event in 2026, and I'll be live blogging the keynote and a few other notes throughout the day.

Tags: ai, generative-ai, llms, anthropic, claude, live-blog

I recently talked with Joseph Ruscio about AI coding tools for Heavybit's High Leverage podcast: Ep. #9, The AI Coding Paradigm Shift with Simon Willison. Here are some of my highlights, including my disturbing realization that vibe coding and agentic engineering have starte...

Today's links In praise of vultures: They screw you because they can. Hey look at this: Delights to delectate. Object permanence: Linus v MSFT; Argentina v MSFT; Danny Hillis on theme parks v games; Smartfilter v Distributed Boing Boing; Rental laptops filled with spyware; To...

The riskiest projects in open source, scored a decade early

It's a fascinating display of leverage: the ShinyHunters folks, with very limited resources and experience (their demographic will be teenagers to their early 20s), consistently gaining access to the data of massive brands. Not through technical ingenuity alone (although I'm sure there's a portion

Release: datasette-referrer-policy 0.1

The OpenStreetMap tiles on the Datasette global-power-plants demo weren't displaying correctly. This turned out to be caused by two bugs.

The first is that the CAPTCHA I added to that site a few weeks ago was triggering for the .json fetch requests used by the map plugin, and since those weren't HTML the user was not being asked to solve them. Here's the fix.

The second was that OpenStreetMap quite reasonably block tile requests from sites that use a Referrer-Policy: no-referrer header.

Datasette does this by default, and I didn't want to change that default on people without warning - so I had Codex + GPT-5.5 build me a new plugin to help set that header to another value.

Tags: openstreetmap, http, datasette

Open weights models keep frontier labs honest on price. If they disappear, we end up with a handful of oligopolists extracting consumer surplus.

Our AI started a cafe in Stockholm Andon Labs previously started an AI-run retail store in San Francisco. Now they're running a similar experiment in Stockholm, Sweden, only this time it's a cafe. These experiments are interesting, and often throw out amusing anecdotes: Dur...

“Alice laughed. ‘There’s no use trying,’ she said. ‘One can’t believe impossible things.’ I daresay you haven’t had much practice,’ said the Queen. ‘When I was your age, I always did it for half-an-hour a day. Why, sometimes I’ve believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast. – Through the looking-glass, Lewis Carrol To stay sane, we have to accept that our climate is going completely haywire, but that it is ok to mostly ignore that since saving ourselves is apparently not cost-effective.

Release: datasette-llm 0.1a7

• Mechanism for configuring default options for specific models.

Part of Datasette's evolving support mechanism for plugins that use LLMs. It's now possible to configure a model with default options, e.g. to say all enrichment operations should use a specific model with temperature set to 0.5.

Tags: llm, datasette

Release: llm-echo 0.5a0

• New -o thinking 1 option to help test against LLM 0.32a0 and higher.

This plugin provides a fake model called "echo" for LLM which doesn't run an LLM at all - it's useful for writing automated tests. You can now do this:

uvx --with llm==0.32a1 --with llm-echo==0.5a0 llm -m echo hi -o thinking 1

This will fake a reasoning block to standard error before returning JSON echoing the prompt.

Tags: llm

Today's links The three armies fighting for the post-American world: Hippies, investors and hawks. Hey look at this: Delights to delectate. Object permanence: NK dictator's son v Tokyo Disneyland; Mainstream press and Bushies v Colbert; Taliban v Pakistan's first McDonald's; ...

The non-CVE half of package manager security

So it’s well known that Y Combinator owns some stake in OpenAI. But how big is that stake? This seems like devilishly difficult information to obtain. I asked around and a little birdie who knows several OpenAI investors came back with an answer: Y Combinator owns about 0.6 percent of OpenAI. At OpenAI’s current $852 billion valuation, that’s worth over $5 billion.

— John Gruber, Y Combinator’s Stake in OpenAI

Tags: openai, y-combinator, ai, john-gruber