FeedCity

"Instead of being quiescent, natural selection is everywhere."

Apple introduced the HomePod mini six years ago, in 2020.

I'm not one into smart speakers, but the feature that made me take a closer look was their ability to form stereo pairs, without any direct wired connection.

I know there are other speaker manufacturers with wireless speakers, but to my knowledge, Apple was just using AirPlay over WiFi... so how does it work?

Through the magic of buying two HomePods mini (pictured above), I found out. A video detailing the process is embedded below:

Today's links Lee Lai's "Cannon": A beautiful, subtle, long-lingering tale of duty, sex, and working for a shitty restaurant boss. Hey look at this: Delights to delectate. Object permanence: Ebay paying to run newspaper classifieds; Chuck Tingle v Sad Puppies; FBI v TOR; Dayc...

Which of your dependencies are wearing sunglasses

An ongoing data extortion attack targeting the widely-used education technology platform Canvas disrupted classes and coursework at school districts and universities across the United States today, after a cybercrime group defaced the service's login page with a ransom demand that threatened to leak data from 275 million students and faculty across nearly 9,000 educational institutions.

We lost Ted Turner, a patron saint of Tedium, just as an entrepreneur made an audacious Turner-style bet. What can we learn from that?

Incidents are boring. Most of what you actually do during an incident is wait: for some other team to investigate, or for a deploy to finish, or for the result of some change to become apparent, or for someone else who’s been paged to come online. It’s stressful, but there’s...

I really, really want local models to work. I want them to work in the very practical sense that I can open my coding agent, pick a local model, and get something that feels competitive enough that I do not immediately switch back to a hosted API after five minutes. There a...

Two tips on using zig fmt effectively. Read this if you are writing Zig, or if you are implementing a code formatter.

Wander Console 0.6.0 is now available. This is the sixth release of Wander, a small, decentralised, self-hosted web console that lets visitors to your website discover interesting websites and pages recommended by a community of independent website owners. To try ...

Cruise ships are bad for the world.

Oh boy yet more linux kernel vulns

Release: llm-gemini 0.31

• gemini-3.1-flash-lite is no longer a preview.

Here's my write-up of the Gemini 3.1 Flash-Lite Preview model back in March. I don't believe this new non-preview model has changed since then.

Tags: llm-release, gemini, llm, google, generative-ai, ai, llms

Tool: Big Words

I'm using my vibe coded macOS presentations tool to put together a talk, and I wanted to add a slide with some text on it. The tool only accepts URLs, so I put together a quick page that accepts query string arguments and turns them into a simple slide.

Here's an example: https://tools.simonwillison.net/big-words?text=simonwillison.net&gradient=1&size=9.5

Double click or double tap the page to access a form for modifying the different options.

Tags: vibe-coding, tools

Tool: GitHub Repo Stats

One of the things I always look for when evaluating a new GitHub repository is the number of commits it has... but that number isn't visible on GitHub's mobile site layout. I built this tool to fix that, using this prompt:

Given a GitHub repo URL or foo/bar repo ID show information about that repo absorbed via wither REST or graphql CORS fetch() including the number of commits in the repo and other useful stats

Example output for simonw/datasette and simonw/llm.

Tags: github

Behind the Scenes Hardening Firefox with Claude Mythos Preview Fascinating, in-depth details on how Mozilla used their access to the Claude Mythos preview to locate and then fix hundreds of vulnerabilities in Firefox: Suddenly, the bugs are very good Just a few months ago, ...

There weren't a lot of big new announcements from Anthropic at yesterday's Code w/ Claude event, but the biggest by far was the deal they've struck with SpaceX/xAI to use "all of the capacity of their Colossus data center". As I mentioned in my live blog of the keynote, that...

Mostly not very long

LibreNMS has been a faithful companion for years now. It quietly handles the monitoring of my servers, devices, and services without demanding much in return - exactly what you want from a tool whose job is to watch over everything else. It's a solid alternative to heavier ...