Search: “simon-willison”

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 h

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, star

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

The most interesting thing about Anthropic's 65B Series H announcement is this line (emphasis mine): Since our Series G in February, adoption has continued to grow across global enterprise customers,

Release: datasette 1.0a31 Another significant alpha release, with two new headline features. Datasette now offers users with the necessary permissions the ability to both execute write queries against

Anthropic shipped Claude Opus 4.8 today. My favourite thing about it is this note in the release announcement: Users will find Opus 4.8 to be a modest but tangible improvement on its predecessor. Ther

Release: llm-anthropic 0.25.1 New model: Claude Opus 4.8 (claude-opus-4.8). New -o fast 1 option for fast mode, for organizations with that feature enabled on their account. Default max_tokens for eac

Tool: markdown-svg-renderer A slightly customized Markdown rendering tool with special treatment for fenced code SVG blocks - it both renders the image and provides a tab for switching to the code vie

Anthropic are strongly rumored to be about to have their first profitable quarter. Stories are circulating of companies surprised at how expensive their LLM bills are becoming from usage by their staf

PICARD: Data, shields up DATA: Brilliant! Shields can reduce damage we sustain. Not immunity. Not hubris. Just prudence. It's not precaution—it's strategy. [camera shakes] WORF: HULL BREACHES ON NINE

sqlite AGENTS.md SQLite gained an AGENTS.md file five days ago - but it's not intended for their own development, it's presumably aimed at people who are pointing agents at the SQLite codebase. It inc

Microsoft Copilot Cowork Exfiltrates Files The biggest challenge in designing agentic systems continues to be preventing them from enabling attackers to exfiltrate data. In this case Microsoft Copilot

I cannot believe I'm saying this, but getting the literal Pope to canonize your product's specific technical limitations as a spiritual treatise is the single greatest act of vendor lobbying I have ev

A lot of the emails I get from founders are now written in a hard-hitting journalistic style. I know they're written by AI, because no founder ever wrote this way before. And once you realize somethin

The pressure Daniel Stenberg on the unprecedented level of pressure the curl team are facing right now thanks to the deluge of (credible) AI-assisted security issues being reported. The rate of incomi

California Brown Pelican, Snowy Egret, California Sea Lion, Harbor Seal, in San Mateo County, CA, USWe took our new folding kayak out in the harbor and saw sea lions and harbor seals chilling on the d

Dropped this morning by the Vatican: Magnifica Humanitas of His Holiness Pope Leo XIV on Safeguarding the Human Person in the Time of Artificial Intelligence. This is a very interesting document. It's

Release: datasette 1.0a30 The big new feature in this alpha is a new customizable 'Jump to...' menu, described in detail in The extensible 'Jump to' menu in Datasette 1.0a30 on the Datasette blog. You

Release: datasette-agent 0.1a4 Taking advantage of the new makeJumpSections() JavaScript plugin hook added in Datasette 1.0a30, datasette-agent now presents this 'Start a new agent chat' interface as

Release: datasette-fixtures 0.1a0 One of the smaller features in Datasette 1.0a30 is this: New documented datasette.fixtures.populate_fixture_database(conn) helper for creating the fixture database ta

Tool: Mad House — Usborne Creepy Computer Games Via Hacker News I learned that UK publisher Usborne published free PDFs of their 1980s Computer Books, some of which I remember working through on my Co

The most frustrating failure mode right now is that people submit issues that are not in their own voice. They contain an observed problem somewhere, but it has been thrown into a clanker and the clan

On the <dl> I learned a few new-to-me things about the <dl> element from this article by Ben Meyer: A <dt> can be followed by multiple <dd> You can optionally group the <dt> and <dd> elements in a <di

FTC to Require Cox Media Group, Two Other Firms to Pay Nearly $1 Million to Settle Charges They Deceived Customers About “Active Listening” AI-Powered Marketing Service Back in 2024 Cox Media Group we

The memory shortage is causing a repricing of consumer electronics David Oks provides the clearest explanation I've seen yet of why consumer products that use memory are likely to get significantly mo

We just announced the first release of Datasette Agent, a new extensible AI assistant for Datasette. I've been working on my LLM Python library for just over three years now, and Datasette Agent repre

Release: datasette-agent 0.1a3 'View SQL query' buttons for both visible tables and collapsed SQL result tool calls. Don't display empty reasoning chunks Improved handling of truncated responses - tab

datasette-agent-charts adds charts to Datasette Agent, powered by Observable Plot. The plugin extends Datasette Agent, which provides a conversational interface for asking questions about data in Data

Release: datasette-agent-charts 0.1a1 More color! Bar and waffle charts without a color column are shaded by magnitude with a sequential color scheme; color columns holding text values use the observa

It's hard to find much to write about Google I/O this year because I have a policy of not writing about anything that I can't try out myself, and a lot of the big announcements are 'coming soon'. I ac

How fast is 10 tokens per second really? Neat little HTML app by Mike Veerman (source code here) which simulates LLM token output speeds from 5/second to 800/second. Useful if you see a model advertis

We have the ability to use compute resources to support our proprietary AI applications (such as Grok 5, which is currently being trained at COLOSSUS II), while also providing access to select compute

datasette-llm is a plugin that integrates LLM functionality into Datasette for language model operations. Version 0.1a8 represents an alpha release of this plugin that extends Datasette's capabilities

datasette-llm-accountant is a plugin that handles allowances and estimated pricing features for Datasette LLM usage. It works with datasette-llm and datasette-llm-limits to let users configure spendin

Today at Google I/O, Google released Gemini 3.5 Flash. This one skipped the -preview modifier and went straight to general availability, and Google appear to be using it for a whole lot of their key p

llm-gemini 0.32 is an alpha release of Simon Willison's LLM Python library and CLI tool that provides access to Google's Gemini models , continuing work on major architectural changes to support newer

I don't have current information about this specific entry, so I'll describe what it likely covers based on the available details. This entry documents the release or update of llm-gemini version 0.32

I put together these annotated slides from my five minute lightning talk at PyCon US 2026, using the latest iteration of my annotated presentation tool. # I presented this lightning talk at PyCon US 2

Glaucous-winged Gull, Brown Pelican, Snowy Egret, Canada Goose, in Los Angeles River, CA, USI'm heading home from PyCon US today so I went on a last morning walk to try and spot a pelican. I saw one!

GDS weighs in on the NHS's decision to retreat from Open Source Terence Eden continues his coverage of the NHS' poorly considered decision to close down access to their open source repositories in res

[...] in the last 10 years I’ve learned to really love and respect CSS as a technology. So I decided years ago that I wanted to react to “CSS is hard” by getting better at CSS and taking it seriously

In preparation for a lightning talk I'm giving at PyCon US this afternoon I decided to figure out how many names OpenClaw has actually had since that first commit back in November. Thanks to this firs

Release: datasette-llm-limits 0.1a0 This plugin works in conjunction with datasette-llm and datasette-llm-accountant to let you configure a per-user (or global) spending limit for LLM usage inside of

Release: inaturalist-clumper 0.1 Part of the infrastructure I use for publishing my iNaturalist sightings on my blog. I've been running this in production for a few weeks now, inspiring some iteration

Release: datasette-ip-rate-limit 0.1a0 The datasette.io site was being hammered by poorly-behaved crawlers, so I had Codex (GPT-5.5 xhigh) build a configurable rate limiting plugin to block IPs that w

This Mitchell Hashimoto quote about Bun migrating from Zig to Rust reminded me of a similar conversation I had at a conference last week. I was talking to someone who worked for a medium sized technol