Sign up

Jim Nielsen’s Blog Valid
Text

Nobody Believes It, Everybody Does It

Speaking of things we know individually, but let slide collectively, here’s Jeremy Keith talking about how we all used Flash: Remember when almost every website had a Flash intro? Everyone knew they were annoying and uneccessary, but everyone else was doing it. And here’s ...

Marcus on AI
Text • Gary Marcus

Red Alert: OpenAI is poised to cross an AI safety redline.

Red Alert: OpenAI is poised to cross an AI safety redline.

Making models harder to monitor is not what we need

The Old New Thing
Text • Raymond Chen

Microspeak: Funded / unfunded

People are our most valuable asset.

The post Microspeak: Funded / unfunded appeared first on The Old New Thing.

Troy Hunt Supports Webmention
Text • Troy Hunt

Weekly Update 519: Breaches & Data Integrity

Weekly Update 519: Breaches & Data Integrity

It does feel like I've bitten off too much and am now chewing like crazy this week. The 3D printing talk with Elle in Oslo, the "normal" NDC infosec talk, the cyber-broken talk with Scott in Copenhagen and then those ratbag hackers keep dumping more

Evan Hahn (dot com) Valid
Text

Notes from August 2026

Since last month, I released some new stuff at work, clicked a bunch of links, and wrote a little bit. Things I did this August At Ghost, we added analytics for automated email sequences. This helps publishers see how their sequences are doing. This simple feature turned o...

Simon Willison's Weblog Supports Webmention
Text

Claude Fable 5.1 made me a really nice animated pelican

Today is Claude Fable (and Mythos) 5.1 day. Anthropic say that Fable 5.1 "sets a new standard for coding, knowledge work, and long-running problem-solving tasks". Their announcement spends a notable amount of time on scientific research, boasting of a 52.6% score on the bran...

Krebs on Security Valid
Text • BrianKrebs

FBI Probes Service Selling 153M+ Drivers Licenses

A new identity theft service launched on the dark web this week is selling digital scans of more than 153 million drivers licenses from people in the United States and Canada. Based on interviews with individuals whose licenses are available for purchase on this service, it appears to be siphoning images collected by a widely-used identity verification company based in Louisiana. KrebsOnSecurity also has learned that the New Orleans field office of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) today launched an official inquiry into the source of the images.

Simon Willison's Weblog Supports Webmention
Text

Codex bundles LibreOffice

I was poking around in my ~/.cache/ folder using OmniDiskSweeper when I spotted something interesting. The OpenAI Codex desktop app (since rebranded to just ChatGPT) has 1.7GB of stuff in there in a folder called codex-primary-runtime, including a full Python installation, a full Node.js installation, and native binaries for Poppler, git, and the LibreOffice open source office suite (which forked from OpenOffice.org in 2010):

Screenshot of a macOS disk usage app window in column view, titled "/Users/simon/.cache - 442.1 GB". First column: 356.8 GB huggingface, 82.5 GB uv, 1.7 GB codex-runtimes (selected), 609.0 MB datasette-sqlite, 298.8 MB rod. Second column: 1.7 GB codex-primary-runtime (selected). Third column: 1.7 GB dependencies (selected), 6.3 MB plugins, 4.1 kB runtime.json. Fourth column: 771.0 MB native (selected), 446.4 MB node, 440.6 MB python, 28.7 kB bin. Fifth column: 429.7 MB libreoffice-headless (selected), 187.9 MB poppler, 148.1 MB git, 4.7 MB libheif, 679.9 kB jxrlib.

The ~/.cache/codex-runtimes/codex-primary-runtime/plugins/openai-primary-runtime/plugins/documents folder includes skills which tell Codex how to find and use those binaries.

Tags: codex, generative-ai, openai, ai, llms, openoffice, open-source

Entropic Thoughts Supports Webmention
Text • kqr

Claude comment detection

Here’s a comment I read in the code I was working on. Walk the entire collection to locate flagged clusters. Skip it altogether when the cached, dirty-tracked flag count says there are none (the usual case): nothing needs marking, so the walk is pure waste. When...

Computer Things Supports Webmention
Text

New Post: A Crash Course in Predicate Logic

Logic for Programmers has now been out for a month! To celebrate, I'm releasing the entire second chapter, "A Crash Course in Logic", for free on my blog. Read it here!

Simon Willison's Weblog Supports Webmention
Text

Quoting Tarn Adams

They took the letters from me! I have to talk about dwarf behavior now. I can't even talk about dwarf AI. It doesn't exist. It's dwarf behavior, and they misbehave sometimes

— Tarn Adams, co-creator of Dwarf Fortress

Tags: ai, game-design

Dwarkesh Podcast
Audio • Dwarkesh Patel

Ajeya Cotra – Inside the OpenAI agent swarm that hacked Hugging Face

"This might be the clearest warning shot we ever get."

Simon Willison's Weblog Supports Webmention
Text

Python 3.15.0 candidate 2 is here!

Python 3.15.0 candidate 2 is here! Hugo van Kemenade (release manager for Python 3.14 and 3.15) announces the final release candidate for Python 3.15, scheduled for release in October: Entering the release candidate phase, only reviewed code changes which are clear bug fixe...

Simon Willison's Weblog Supports Webmention Valid
Text

Quoting Andrew Digby

325 #kakapo! The chicks from this year's record breeding season are now juveniles and so have been added to the population. In 1995 there were just 51 kākāpō left. Recovery of critically endangered species is possible with sustained effort.

— Andrew Digby, providing the best news of the year

Tags: kakapo

Terence Eden’s Blog Valid
Text • @edent

Book Review: ActivityPub by Evan Prodromou ★★★★⯪

As part of my grant from NLnet to improve my Fediverse bot project, I'm spending time making sure I understand all the fundamentals of ActivityPub. The problem with Internet standards is they're scattered all over the place. Abandoned forums, half-maintained wikis, mailing lists with obscure rules, and monolithic blocks of text. Sometimes you just want one book which collates all the info and…

The Silicon Underground
Text • Dave Farquhar

Commodore 64 released September 1, 1982

Commodore 64 released September 1, 1982
Commodore 64 released September 1, 1982

On September 1, 1982, the Commodore 64 launched. Its name referred to the amount of memory it had on board: 64 kilobytes. And it was the first computer with 64K of memory to sell for under $600. When the Commodore

The post Commodore 64 released September 1, 1982 appeared first on The Silicon Underground.

Andrew Nesbitt Valid
Text • Andrew Nesbitt

Git Submodules as a Package Manager

.gitmodules is a manifest and the gitlink is a lockfile entry.

lcamtuf’s thing Valid
Text • lcamtuf

Fluorescent lamps (don’t) have ears

Fluorescent lamps (don’t) have ears

Welcome to this week’s edition of the Journal of Negative Results

The Old New Thing
Text • Raymond Chen

AWE does not require PAE, though PAE makes it much more useful

All dressed up with nowhere to go.

The post AWE does not require PAE, though PAE makes it much more useful appeared first on The Old New Thing.

Simon Willison's Weblog Supports Webmention Valid
Text

Introducing wrapture

Introducing wrapture New from Graham Dumpleton (of wrapt, mod_wsgi, and New Relic's Python agent fame), who describes Wrapture as taking the monkeypatching ideas from wrapt and extending them to apply to testing and tracing at the same time. Wrapture (full documentation here...