Sign up

Simon Willison's Weblog Supports Webmention
Text

Quoting Andrew Quinn

One could say in the first quarter-century of my life, that while I was always fascinated by programming, I could never overcome the guilt of not really knowing whether the tool I am building right now isn’t already superceded by some much better implementation someone else ...

Andrew Nesbitt Valid
Text • Andrew Nesbitt

Madame Semver Will See You Now

The cards do not lie.

seangoedecke.com RSS feed
Text

The left-wing case for AI

In Many anti-AI arguments are conservative arguments I argued that left-wing anti-AI sentiment1 is partly a backlash to two unrelated events around the rise of ChatGPT: the crypto mania of 2022 and the pro-Donald-Trump push many big tech CEOs made in 2024. If the timing had ...

Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow
Text • Cory Doctorow

Pluralistic: Trump's fruitless search for a goreable ox (09 May 2026)

Today's links Trump's fruitless search for a goreable ox: You can keep billionaires happy, or you can fight the cost of living crisis, but not both. Hey look at this: Delights to delectate. Object permanence: Typewriter bust; Phrack's new issue; Panama Papers whistleblower sp...

Construction Physics
Text • Brian Potter

Reading List 05/09/2026

Reading List 05/09/2026

Trapped buildings, in-home data centers, cardboard military drones, Brightline’s potential bankruptcy, and more.

Andrew Nesbitt Valid
Text • Andrew Nesbitt

The Mismeasure of Open Source

The streetlight effect in project-health scoring

Simon Willison's Weblog Supports Webmention
Text

Quoting Luke Curley

WebRTC is designed to degrade and drop my prompt during poor network conditions. wtf my dude WebRTC aggressively drops audio packets to keep latency low. If you’ve ever heard distorted audio on a conference call, that’s WebRTC baybee. The idea is that conference calls depen...

seangoedecke.com RSS feed
Text

AI makes weak engineers less harmful

Like other kinds of puzzle-solving, software engineering ability is strongly heavy-tailed. The strongest engineers produce way more useful output than the average, and the weakest engineers often are actively net-negative: instead of moving projects along, they create proble...

Susam Pal
Text

I Will Not Add Query Strings to Your URLs

Last evening, a short blog post appeared in my feed reader that felt as if it spoke directly to me. It is Chris Morgan's excellent post I've banned query strings. Contents Wisdom on the Web Wander on the Web Misfeature Broken URLs Qualms Conclusion W...

Bert Hubert's writings Valid
Text

George Orwell's review of Russel's Power: A New Social Analysis

I had previously learned a lot from this book review by George Orwell, which is actually a lot more than a book review.
Recently I had cause to look it up again and found it had vanished from the searchable internet. With some sleuthing I have recovered a copy of the review from the internet archive.
Orwell’s review was first published in The Adelphi in January 1939. The review can also be found in its original (scanned) form, also on the internet archive.

Simon Willison's Weblog Supports Webmention
Text

Using Claude Code: The Unreasonable Effectiveness of HTML

Using Claude Code: The Unreasonable Effectiveness of HTML Thought-provoking piece by Thariq Shihipar (on the Claude Code team at Anthropic) advocating for HTML over Markdown as an output format to request from Claude. The article is crammed with interesting examples (collect...

Dwarkesh Podcast
Audio • Dwarkesh Patel

David Reich – Why the Bronze Age was an inflection point in human evolution

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

Jeff Geerling
Text • Jeff Geerling

HomePod mini feels like magic, but it's just good timing

HomePod mini stereo pair demonstration with iPhone

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:

Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow
Text • Cory Doctorow

Pluralistic: Lee Lai's "Cannon" (08 May 2026)

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...

Andrew Nesbitt Valid
Text • Andrew Nesbitt

Weekend at Bernie’s

Which of your dependencies are wearing sunglasses

Krebs on Security
Text • BrianKrebs

Canvas Breach Disrupts Schools & Colleges Nationwide

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.

Tedium: The Dull Side of the Internet. Updates instantly via WebSub
Text • Ernie Smith

The Bold Ones Win

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?

seangoedecke.com RSS feed
Text

Notes on incidents

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...

Armin Ronacher's Thoughts and Writings
Text • Armin Ronacher

Pushing Local Models With Focus And Polish

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...

matklad
Text • Alex Kladov

Steering Zig Fmt

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