Simon Willison
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Simon Willison community 1mo ago
Soft-deprecating re.match()
Soft-deprecating re.match() Python has a concept of soft deprecation , where APIs are marked as "should no longer be used to write new code" without any promise/threat to remove them in the future. Python 3.15 release manager Hugo van Kemenade describes how in the upcoming 3.15…
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Don't sleep on wrapture
Graham Dumpleton's new monkey patching package wrapture is shaping up to be an indispensable tool for Python developers. I'm not sure why I've seen so little buzz about it! Graham has been posting new tutorials for it almost daily since the initial release on August 31st. Here's…
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Datasette 1.0a39 and 0.65.4 security releases
Datasette 1.0a39 and 0.65.4 security releases Today we're releasing two new security patch versions of Datasette: 1.0a39 and 0.65.4 - one for the current alpha series and one for the stable 0.65.x family. These are security fixes which you should apply if you are running a…
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github-to-sqlite 2.9.1
Release: github-to-sqlite 2.9.1 Fix for compatibility with sqlite-utils 4.x . #85 Tags: github , sqlite
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datasette 1.0a39
Release: datasette 1.0a39 See Datasette 1.0a39 and 0.65.4 security releases on the Datasette blog. Tags: security , datasette
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Any Nix package, live in your browser
Any Nix package, live in your browser Farid Zakaria calls this his " magnum opus of Nix work", and I can see why. trynix.dev provides a qemu-wasm powered x86_64 Linux virtual machine running entirely in your browser through WebAssembly. That VM can then be booted with any Nix…
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Quoting Calif Research
Today, we're releasing a demo of WeWorm, the first zero-click worm to spread through WeChat calls across iOS and Android. [...] The victim does not need to answer the call, or interact with their phone at all. Even if they do answer, they hear nothing, and the exploit still…
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.blend URL Viewer
Tool: .blend URL Viewer I'm continuing to have a lot of fun with GPT-6 Astra and Blender (see my TIL ). As a big fan of the Imperial Fabergé Easter eggs , I've always thought it would be fun to make some new ones that celebrate popular culture. Yesterday I decided to try out the…
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Quoting Terence Tao
I wrote recently about how the collection of good, fruitful open problems is now being mined in a non-renewable fashion, leading to the potential scenario of these problems becoming scarce. [...] We have now seen that even the rumor of someone working on a problem can trigger a…
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Introducing ChatGPT Images 2.5
Introducing ChatGPT Images 2.5 OpenAI's image generation models are apparently used "more than 3 billion images across ChatGPT Images and the GPT‑Image models in the API". This latest release improves their instruction-following ability across multiple turns, responds faster,…
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llm 0.35
Release: llm 0.35 New OpenAI model: gpt-6-astra for GPT-6 Astra . Tags: openai , llm , gpt-6-astra
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Creepy crawlies
Creepy crawlies Konstantin Ryabitsev discusses how bad the "background radiation" of abusive crawlers has become from the perspective of git.kernel.org , the official Git repository for the Linux kernel: TL;DR: we spend more CPU cycles rendering commits for scrapers than we…
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Quoting Jakub Pachocki
The strongest argument I see for continuing to train much smarter models quickly is the need to build defensive systems against the dangers posed by other AI. [...] We will need powerful, aligned AI for defense; to secure infrastructure, to protect against rogue agents in real…
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Video compressor
Tool: Video compressor I recorded a short demo video of my Equal Earth animation on my phone and wanted to publish an optimized version of that video (using FFMPEG) on my blog, so I had Claude Fable 5.1 in Claude Code for web build me this tool using the WebAssembly build of…
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Mercator ↔ Equal Earth
Tool: Mercator ↔ Equal Earth I got curious about the Equal Earth map projection that was recently voted on at the UN so I had GPT-6 Astra (medium) in ChatGPT Work build me this animated transition between Mercator and Equal Earth using D3. Tags: geospatial , d3 , vibe-coding ,…
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Research acceleration: The view inside OpenAI
Research acceleration: The view inside OpenAI Apparently today is RSI day at OpenAI, for Recursive Self-Improvement - I think it's their new AGI. Both this piece and the new essay An Alien Mind (by Chief Scientist Jakub Pachocki) talk about it, and this one doesn't even bother…
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The purpose of DNS is to spread scams
The purpose of DNS is to spread scams Terence Eden shares some daunting statistics in support of his take that "the Domain Name System's purpose seems to be a vector for criminals to run scams on people at a terrifyingly high rate". On this Interisle report ( via Andrew Campling…
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There's No Limit to How Bad Code Can Get
My comment on There's No Limit to How Bad Code Can Get — Lobste.rs. [In reply to a comment about burning it down to start from scratch when technical debt becomes overwhelming] In my experience it's so rare for that to work. You announce the old thing is irrecoverably…
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Quoting Zach Kehs
If you continue to add floors and rooms to a building forever, it will collapse. Software faces no such constraint. The code can always get worse. There can always be a new layer of indirection or a reduction in performance. — Zach Kehs , There's No Limit to How Bad Code…
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Introducing GPT-6 Astra for developers
Introducing GPT-6 Astra for developers Blink and you'll miss it, but there's a familiar creature at 1m59s : Across the board, Astra has more attention to detail, better understanding of the user's prompt, and can build more sophisticated outputs. In particular, it excels at…
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Using Blender with coding agents on macOS
TIL: Using Blender with coding agents on macOS I've been having fun with Blender in ChatGPT Codex on my Mac recently. Getting it to work with coding agents is really easy: install the full Mac application from blender.org and run a prompt like this: Use the already install…
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August newsletter is out
The August edition of my sponsors-only monthly newsletter is out. If you are a sponsor (or if you start a sponsorship now) you can access it here . This month: We got more details on OpenAl's accidental cyberattacks One-shotting Raccoon Heist games with Fable 5 and Sol 5.6…
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GPT‑6 Astra
GPT‑6 Astra GPT-6 Astra is "rolling out today to a limited set of organizations and over the coming days will become available to all ChatGPT Plus, Pro, Business, and Enterprise users, as well as through the OpenAI API and AWS" - I've not tried it yet myself, so I don't have a…
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llm-openrouter 0.7.1
Release: llm-openrouter 0.7.1 Performance fix for loading OpenRouter models. Thanks, waveplate . #59 Tags: llm , openrouter
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llm 0.34
Release: llm 0.34 One new feature: llm logs --usage Markdown output now includes the response duration in milliseconds and as a human-readable duration. llm logs --short includes a new duration_ms field. #1653 Plus several contributed bug fixes, and a significant performance…
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llm-anthropic 0.28
Release: llm-anthropic 0.28 Claude Fable 5.1 , reasoning traces are now displayed by default for models that support them, plus a new llm_anthropic.ClaudeRefusal exception for when Claude throws a refusal. Tags: llm , anthropic , claude , claude-mythos-fable
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Quoting Rick Brewster
Direct2D has always been the biggest hurdle for Paint.NET on WINE, and it's clear that it will never be completed enough for Paint.NET's use. And I can't just "disable" the use of Direct2D. So, instead, Paint.NET now has an internal, from-scratch, clean-room reverse-engineered…
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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…
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GeoJSON Map Viewer
Tool: GeoJSON Map Viewer I was helping Natalie gather some maps of local political boundaries (for the Granada Community Services District and the Midcoast Community Council ) and found a need to display some GeoJSON files on a map and export that as a PNG. I asked GPT-5.6-Sol…
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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
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datasette-mcp 0.2
Release: datasette-mcp 0.2 "rows" from execute_sql is now an array of objects. Previously it was an array of arrays. This should help weaker models avoid losing track of which positional array element maps to which column. #1 Now depends on mcp>=2.1.1 . This is the first…
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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 fixes are…
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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 )…
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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…
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Understanding ChatGPT Work
OpenAI announced ChatGPT Work on July 9th, and have been furiously iterating on it ever since. It is an extraordinarily confusing and very powerful product. Here's what I've figured out about it so far. ChatGPT Work is actually two products The more interesting version of…
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Introducing Hy4 Preview
Introducing Hy4 Preview New open weight text input (no vision) LLM from Chinese company Tencent today: 770B total parameters, 49B active parameters, 1M token context window, 1.56TB on Hugging Face . This is a big size increase from their previous Hy3 in July, which was 295B, 21B…
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Breaking Claude Code Opus 5 Auto Mode
Breaking Claude Code Opus 5 Auto Mode Anthropic are putting a great deal of faith in Claude Code's auto mode for protecting their coding agent users against prompt injection attacks. They recently made that the default and have made bold claims about its effectiveness. Johann…
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Qwen3.8-Flash-Next
Qwen3.8-Flash-Next Another open weights model from Qwen. This one is "a multimodal MoE model that also serves as an early preview of the architecture used in Qwen4". It's pretty big: 125B tokens, but only 6B active which means it gets a significant performance boost. I've been…
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Quoting Paul Dix
The fact that AI wrote 1M LOC and then refined it over the course of the next couple of months to produce a reliable piece of software that is currently running on millions of developer machines is absolutely mind blowing. And you can say, “well it’s not that impressive because…
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EVE Online: The Move to Python 3 Begins!
EVE Online: The Move to Python 3 Begins! EVE Online has been one of the most interesting case studies in Python at scale for over twenty years now. They've been running on Stackless Python since their launch in 2003, and their last major upgrade was 16 years ago, to Stackless…
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