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Today's links Molly Crabapple's 'Here Where We Live Is Our Country': An essential book for this moment and for the moments that led to it. Hey look at this: Delights to delectate. Object permanence: Home chemistry sets in danger; Every pirate wants to be an admiral; Painful c...

Today, I loaded the 1,000th data breach into Have I Been Pwned. Reflecting on that milestone number, I pondered how to mark the occasion in writing, and what immediately came to mind was a very simple question: why is it still needed? Especially considering the emergence of privacy regulations

I just sent out the May edition of my sponsors-only monthly newsletter. If you are a sponsor (or if you start a sponsorship now) you can access it here.

This month:

• Al got expensive, and Anthropic had a really good month
• The model releases were a little disappointing
• Conferences and podcasts
• I launched Datasette Agent and made a lot of progress on Datasette
• What I'm using, May 2026 edition
• Miscellaneous extras

Here's a copy of the April newsletter as a preview of what you'll get. Pay $10/month to stay a month ahead of the free copy!

Tags: newsletter

I'm finding it quite fascinating to watch the current spate of ShinyHunters breaches and dumps. There's the obvious criminality of it all, but then there's also the response from organisations (or lack thereof, as it relates to disclosure to victims), the appearance and disappearance

The underappreciated gem of /proc//mem

Rockets, calculators, and personal computers at MITS

Where are all the AI-generated projects? This is a common question from AI skeptics: if LLMs are so good at writing code, where is the tsunami of new AI-generated apps, services and games? I personally don’t find this to be much of a paradox. Writing code is only one of the ...

Short post today. New ZJIT contributor dak2 submitted a PR to fix an overflow bug in fixnum division in ZJIT. We did the division fine, but lied about the type of the result in the case of dividing FIXNUM_MIN by -1. You can see how this is special-cased in CRuby: static inl...

Release: datasette 1.0a32

A minor bugfix release. Fixes a bug with INSERT ... RETURNING queries via the new /db/-/execute-write endpoint and a bunch of base_url issues which showed up when I was experimenting with Service Workers yesterday.

Tags: datasette, annotated-release-notes

The solution might be cancelling my AI subscription I find this post by David Wilson very relatable. David lists 16+ projects he's spun up with AI tooling, and concludes: I didn't mean to build most of these things. Usually the Claude session started with something like "wr...

Anthropic defines “run-rate revenue” in two parts. Use the last 28 days of sales ⁠from customers charged on a consumption basis and multiply it by 13. Then, multiply the monthly subscription take by 12, ​and add the two together.

— Karen Kwok for Reuters Breakingviews, citing "a person familiar with the matter"

Tags: anthropic, ai

In 1982, as we mentioned at length with our history of the DEC Professional, Digital Equipment Corporation attempted to keep their PDP-11 minicomputer market-relevant by turning the venerable architecture into a largely incompatible desktop microcomputer. But that wasn't the...

Google made everyone mad again, so another wave of people just learned about &udm=14. Maybe we should all take the hint.

There are only two ways to use LLMs in a computer program: as part of a pipeline, or as an agent. In other words, either you express the control flow of the program in code, or you give a LLM tools and allow it to manage the control flow itself1. Here’s how you might structu...

We spent today in some of the forests up in lutruwita/Tasmania’s Central Highlands that are being logged, or are about to be. It was a Bob Brown Foundation Threatened Forest Open Day. It was sobering and a bit sad. Also fascinating, and the forest is beautiful.

It rained pretty much all day. The marquee was up in the middle of the forest and we stood under it while a few people talked. They went through what’s happening to these forests and what’s scheduled to be cut. I got a lot out of it.

How we contain Claude across products A complaint I often have about sandboxing products is that they are rarely thoroughly documented, and in the absence of detailed documentation it's hard to know how much I can trust them. Anthropic just published a fantastic overview of ...

Research: Running Python ASGI apps in the browser via Pyodide + a service worker Datasette Lite is my version of Datasette that runs entirely in the browser using Pyodide in WebAssembly. When I first built it four years ago I used Web Workers and code that intercepts...

I Am Retiring from Tech to Live Offline I've seen a lot of posts on forums from people threatening to quit their careers over AI. This is not one of those: Chad Whitacre is taking concrete steps, starting with this typewritten, scanned letter I'm retiring from tech. Well, "...