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Katie Moussouris, a cybersecurity expert and the CEO of Luta Security, told me that Anthropic shared with her a copy of the White House’s report on the Fable jailbreak to get her appraisal. (She said that she is not being paid by Anthropic.) The report, Moussouris said, involved IT experts asking Fable to help find and patch bugs. When given deliberately insecure code, she said, Fable refused the prompt “review the code for security issues” but then complied when asked to “fix this code,” followed by some further manual steps. Moussouris told me that this was just “the model working as intended” for cyberdefense.

— Matteo Wong, The Atlantic, The White House Is Ratcheting Up Its War Against Anthropic

Tags: anthropic, claude, ai, llms, ai-ethics, jailbreaking, generative-ai, ai-security-research, claude-mythos

“[T]here can be alternatives. What we can imagine is, rather than the ChatGPT killer, a lot of different little AIs from little responsible players.” That’s me, in The Guardian a few days ago, trying to distill a message that I’ve been trying to get out as broadly as possibl...

TIL: Cloudflare CAPTCHA on at least one ampersand I'm using Cloudflare's CAPTCHA (they call it a "Web Application Firewall > Custom rules > Managed Challenge" these days) to prevent crawlers from aggresively spidering my faceted search engine on this site, but ...

Release: datasette-agent 0.3a0 New tool, execute_write_sql, which requests user approval and then writes to a database - taking user permissions into account. #27 I added a mechanism for asking user approval in datasette agent 0.2a0. The new execute_write_sql to...

The nth pentagonal number Pn is the number of dots in diagrams like those below with n concentric pentagons. We have the formula Pn = (3n² − n)/2 where n is a positive integer. If n is an integer but not positive, the equation above defines a generalized pentagonal number. If you’re given an n, you can easily compute Pn. […]

The post Testing pentagonal numbers first appeared on John D. Cook.

Lucas Costa has written a good article on how to build systems that can handle code-generating robots. Unfortunately, when calling it backpressure, he used the wrong metaphor. Backpressure is about signaling to upstream processes that they are running too fast an...

Release: datasette-apps 0.1a3

• Fixed a bug where users without the create-app permission could still create apps. #27
• Fixed a bug where it was impossible to grant permission to edit an app to users who were not the app's owner. The rules for edit/delete are now the same as view: if the app is private only the owner can modify it, otherwise permission is controlled by Datasette's regular permission system. #29

Tags: datasette

I got an email message this afternoon reporting a typo in a blog post from about a year ago on converting between quaternions and rotation matrices [1]. The email said exactly where the typo was, but I decided to see whether Claude would find it. Specifically, I prompted Sonnet 4.6 Medium with the following. Write […]

The post Quaternion Rotations, Claude, and Lean first appeared on John D. Cook.

Release: datasette-apps 0.1a2

• Custom network/CSP origins for apps are now guarded by a new apps-set-csp permission, with an optional allowed_csp_origins plugin allow-list for non-privileged users. The Datasette Agent app creation tool enforces the same rules. #24
• Stored query picker now supports keyboard navigation and shows the three most recent accessible stored queries when focused.
• #fragment links inside apps are no longer intercepted by the external-link confirmation modal. #23
• Fixed link confirmation modal and logging panels in ?full=1 full-screen mode. #26

Tags: datasette

A few days ago I wrote about using Claude to solve a chess puzzle by writing Prolog code. This morning I tried a similar chess puzzle with ChatGPT. The task is to place a queen, king, rook, bishop, and knight on a 4 by 4 chessboard so no piece attacks another. Of course there’s not […]

The post Writing Prolog with ChatGPT first appeared on John D. Cook.

Today's links AI and amateurism: When is generative content vernacular? Hey look at this: Delights to delectate. Object permanence: Disney characters x clean underwear; Transparent Pontiac; Makers v dog with LED collar; Microsoft buys Linkedin; Legitimate greatness. Upcoming ...

"They screwed us": Personality clashes sent Anthropic's models offline Lots of "source familiar with the administration's thinking" and "source close to Anthropic" in this Axios piece, which is the best collection of behind-the-scenes gossip I've seen about the US government...

By now (happily) everyone wants to talk about digital autonomy, although some parties insist we talk about sovereignty. Fine. tl;dr: The discussions on digital autonomy are now going round in circles. Civil society and think tanks want to contribute, and are well placed to do so. In this piece, I urge everyone to look further ahead, beyond legislation and talking about European values. The road to digital sovereignty is very long, and we need to make progress along that entire road, which includes things further afield than what we are discussing now.

Welcome to RSS Club! These posts are only available to RSS and Atom subscribers. You can read more about the idea at Dave Rupert's site. I recently received an email from a distraught reader: I was going through my recent bookmarks and I found https://shkspr.mobi/blog/2026/04/rss-club-for-wordpress which I had clearly saved to reference again later. However, as with the nature of RSS Club™, I c…

Light switches. How on earth is it so hard to find decent light switches?! It sounds ridiculous until you actually spend enough time looking for ones that meet two simple criteria:

1. Aren't stateful (switch is up or down, has to be push-button)
2. Looks good

Now, I'

[...] Instead, I picture a specific person and I just write for them. Often this person is "me, but 3 years ago" or a good friend.

— Julia Evans, write for 1 person

Tags: writing, julia-evans

Why AI hasn’t replaced software engineers, and won’t Arvind Narayanan and Sayash Kappor take on the question of AI job losses through the lens of a profession that is uniquely suited to AI disruption - software engineering. In this essay, we argue that there is enough evide...

Research: Mapping SQLite result columns back to their source `table.column` It would be neat if arbitrary SQL queries in Datasette could be rendered with additional information based on which columns from which tables were included in the results. To build that, we w...

People who think current AI use is unsustainable often rely on the claim that inference GPUs only last “three years at the most” under load1. The idea here is that once the AI bubble money drains away, current infrastructure will rapidly become obsolete, and there won’t be e...

How KV cache compression - from MQA and GQA to MLA and linear-attention hybrids - quietly unlocked the long context windows that make modern agentic LLMs possible.