Search: “simon-willison”

This year's PyCon US is coming up next month from May 13th to May 19th, with the core conference talks from Friday 15th to Sunday 17th and tutorial and sprint days either side. It's in Long Beach, Cal

A https://claude.ai/ feature I really like is you can tell it to 'clone x/y from GitHub' and it can then answer questions about a repo, or use snippets of code from that repo to help build new artifac

Tool: datasette.io news preview The datasette.io website has a news section built from this news.yaml file in the underlying GitHub repository. The YAML format looks like this: - date: 2026-04-15 body

This post compares the performance of Qwen 3.6-35B-A3B and Claude Opus 4.7 models on a creative task of generating SVG code for a flamingo riding a unicycle, likely demonstrating differences in their

Release: llm-anthropic 0.25 New model: claude-opus-4.7, which supports thinking_effort: xhigh. #66 New thinking_display and thinking_adaptive boolean options. thinking_display summarized output is cur

Simon Willison discusses results from a 'flamingo on a unicycle' test on his blog, likely comparing AI model performance including Qwen. The post appears to reference previously undisclosed or unconve

For anyone who has been (inadvisably) taking my pelican riding a bicycle benchmark seriously as a robust way to test models, here are pelicans from this morning's two big model releases - Qwen3.6-35B-

Release: datasette 1.0a27 Two major changes in this new Datasette alpha. I covered the first of those in detail yesterday - Datasette no longer uses Django-style CSRF form tokens, instead using modern

Release: datasette-export-database 0.3a1 This plugin was using the ds_csrftoken cookie as part of a custom signed URL, which needed upgrading now that Datasette 1.0a27 no longer sets that cookie. Tags

Release: datasette-ports 0.3 A small update for my tool for helping me figure out what all of the Datasette instances on my laptop are up to. Show working directory derived from each PID Show the full

Gemini 3.1 Flash TTS Google released Gemini 3.1 Flash TTS today, a new text-to-speech model that can be directed using prompts. It's presented via the standard Gemini API using gemini-3.1-flash-tts-pr

I ran the same prompt for a London Estuary accent, a Newcastle accent and an Exeter, Devon accent - all three audio files are now embedded in my blog post https://simonwillison.net/2026/Apr/15/gemini-

I'm certain this isn't the message they intended to present, but this comes across to me as a company saying 'we no longer trust in our own ability to keep your data secure' Open source is dead. That’

@pumfleet @calcom Did you see this piece by @dbreunig? He argues that the cost of locking down software through LLM analysis makes open source MORE valuable now: https://www.dbreunig.com/2026/04/14/cy

The real goldmine isn’t that Apple gets a cut of every App Store transaction. It’s that Apple’s platforms have the best apps, and users who are drawn to the best apps are thus drawn to the iPhone, Mac

I think we will see some people employed (though perhaps not explicitly) as meat shields: people who are accountable for ML systems under their supervision. The accountability may be purely internal,

Google's Gemini 3.1 Flash TTS (text-to-speech) model includes a notably elaborate or extensive example prompt, which Simon Willison highlighted as noteworthy. The post likely comments on the complexit

Zig 0.16.0 release notes: 'Juicy Main' Zig has really good release notes - comprehensive, detailed, and with relevant usage examples for each of the new features. Of particular note in the newly relea

Cybersecurity Looks Like Proof of Work Now The UK's AI Safety Institute recently published Our evaluation of Claude Mythos Preview’s cyber capabilities, their own independent analysis of Claude Mythos

datasette PR #2689: Replace token-based CSRF with Sec-Fetch-Site header protection Datasette has long protected against CSRF attacks using CSRF tokens, implemented using my asgi-csrf Python library. T

Research: Exploring the new `servo` crate In Servo is now available on crates.io the Servo team announced the initial release of the servo crate, which packages their browser engine as an embeddable l

The problem is that LLMs inherently lack the virtue of laziness. Work costs nothing to an LLM. LLMs do not feel a need to optimize for their own (or anyone's) future time, and will happily dump more a

The TL;DR is that Google engineering appears to have the same AI adoption footprint as John Deere, the tractor company. Most of the industry has the same internal adoption curve: 20% agentic power use

Thanks to a tip from Rahim Nathwani, here's a uv run recipe for transcribing an audio file on macOS using the 10.28 GB Gemma 4 E2B model with MLX and mlx-vlm: uv run --python 3.13 --with mlx_vlm --wit

SQLite 3.53.0 SQLite 3.52.0 was withdrawn so this is a pretty big release with a whole lot of accumulated user-facing and internal improvements. Some that stood out to me: ALTER TABLE can now add and

Tool: SQLite Query Result Formatter Demo See my notes on SQLite 3.53.0. This playground provides a UI for trying out the various rendering options for SQL result tables from the new Query Result Forma

I think it's non-obvious to many people that the OpenAI voice mode runs on a much older, much weaker model - it feels like the AI that you can talk to should be the smartest AI but it really isn't. If

Finally some good news from @simonw: The Kākāpō parrots of New Zealand are having a fantastic breeding season. Media 'Using coding agents well is taking every inch of my 25 years of experience as a so

I think it's non-obvious to many people that the OpenAI voice mode runs on a much older, much weaker model - it feels like the AI that you can talk to should be the smartest AI but it really isn't Jud

ChatGPT's voice mode, when directly queried about its knowledge cutoff date, reports April 2024, indicating it is powered by a GPT-4o era model rather than a more recent one. GPT-4o initially had ...

On April 10, 2026, Simon Willison posted a short note sharing a podcast clip from his ~1 hour 40 minute conversation with Lenny Rachitsky, highlighting a segment about kākāpō parrots. The kākāpō (*...

Release: asgi-gzip 0.3 I ran into trouble deploying a new feature using SSE to a production Datasette instance, and it turned out that instance was using datasette-gzip which uses asgi-gzip which was

Tool: GitHub Repo Size GitHub doesn't tell you the repo size in the UI, but it's available in the CORS-friendly API. Paste a repo into this tool to see the size, for example for simonw/datasette (8.1M

I care because understanding which index helps me understand things like what I need to submit content for crawling to, what search agents I should allow in robots.txt, how frequently I can expect the

Meta announced Muse Spark today, their first model release since Llama 4 almost exactly a year ago. It's hosted, not open weights, and the API is currently 'a private API preview to select users', but

Pelicans for Meta's new Muse Spark models - plus I did a bit of a deep dive into the Code Interpreter and fascinating 'container.visual_grounding' tools in their http://meta.ai chat UI https://simonwi

I have a feeling that everyone likes using AI tools to try doing someone else’s profession. They’re much less keen when someone else uses it for their profession. — Giles Turnbull, AI and the human vo

The feature I most want from AI labs right now is documentation on which underlying search engines they use when their chat tools run a search OpenAI and Anthropic and Meta AI all have search and I ha

754B parameters, 1.51TB on Hugging Face Introducing GLM-5.1: The Next Level of Open Source - Top-Tier Performance: #1 in open source and #3 globally across SWE-Bench Pro, Terminal-Bench, and NL2Repo.

Anthropic didn't release their latest model, Claude Mythos (system card PDF), today. They have instead made it available to a very restricted set of preview partners under their newly announced Projec

GLM-5.1: Towards Long-Horizon Tasks Chinese AI lab Z.ai's latest model is a giant 754B parameter 1.51TB (on Hugging Face) MIT-licensed monster - the same size as their previous GLM-5 release, and shar

Simon Willison tested Z.ai's GLM-5.1 using his standard 'pelican on a bicycle' SVG benchmark, and the model stood out by spontaneously generating a full HTML page with both the SVG and a separate ...

Wrote up some thoughts on Anthropic's Project Glassing, where their latest Opus-beating model is available to partnered security research organizations only Given recent alarm bells raised by credible