what’s the point of vibe coding if at the end of the day i still gotta pay a dev to look at the code anyway. sure it feels kinda cool while i’m typing, like i’m in some flow state or whatever, but when stuff breaks it’s just dead weight. i cant vibe my way through debugging, i cant ship anything that actually matters, and then i’m back to square one pulling out my wallet for someone who actuall...

AWS in 2025: The Stuff You Think You Know That’s Now Wrong Absurdly useful roundup from Corey Quinn of AWS changes you may have missed that can materially affect your architectural decisions about how you use their services. A few that stood out to me: EC2 instances can now live-migrate between physical hosts, and can have their security groups, IAM roles and EBS volumes modified without a res...

David Ho on BlueSky: A pelican tried to eat my bike David Ho caught video footage of one of the pelicans in St James's Park expressing deep curiosity in his bicycle. I think it wants to ride it. Tags: pelican-riding-a-bicycle

Qwen-Image-Edit: Image Editing with Higher Quality and Efficiency As promised in their August 4th release of the Qwen image generation model, Qwen have now followed it up with a separate model, Qwen-Image-Edit, which can take an image and a prompt and return an edited version of that image. Ivan Fioravanti upgraded his macOS qwen-image-mps tool (previously) to run the new model via a new edit c...

Today I learned - via a proposal to remove mentions of XSLT from the HTML spec - that congress.gov uses XSLT to serve XML bills as XHTML - here's H. R. 3617 117th CONGRESS 1st Session for example. View source on that page and it starts like this: <?xml version="1.0"?> <?xml-stylesheet type="text/xsl" href="billres.xsl"?> <!DOCTYPE bill PUBLIC "-//US Congress//DTDs/bill.dtd//EN" "...

llama.cpp guide: running gpt-oss with llama.cpp Really useful official guide to running the OpenAI gpt-oss models using llama-server from llama.cpp - which provides an OpenAI-compatible localhost API and a neat web interface for interacting with the models. TLDR version for macOS to run the smaller gpt-oss-20b model: brew install llama.cpp llama-server -hf ggml-org/gpt-oss-20b-GGUF \ --ctx-si...

I refreshed the little thing that let’s you navigate consistently between my inconsistent subdomains (video recording). Here’s the tl;dr on the update: I had to remove some features on each site to make this feel right. Takeaway: adding stuff is easy, removing stuff is hard. The element is a web component and not even under source control (🤫). I serve it directly from my cdn. If I want to...

PyPI: Preventing Domain Resurrection Attacks Domain resurrection attacks are a nasty vulnerability in systems that use email verification to allow people to recover their accounts. If somebody lets their domain name expire an attacker might snap it up and use it to gain access to their accounts - which can turn into a package supply chain attack if they had an account on something like the Pyth...

r/ChatGPTPro: What is the most profitable thing you have done with ChatGPT? This Reddit thread - with 279 replies - offers a neat targeted insight into the kinds of things people are using ChatGPT for. Lots of variety here but two themes that stood out for me were ChatGPT for written negotiation - insurance claims, breaking rental leases - and ChatGPT for career and business advice. Tags:...

I want to test out how a digital garden might work for me.

Google Gemini URL Context New feature in the Gemini API: you can now enable a url_context tool which the models can use to request the contents of URLs as part of replying to a prompt. I released llm-gemini 0.25 with a new -o url_context 1 option adding support for this feature. You can try it out like this: llm install -U llm-gemini llm keys set gemini # If you need to set an API key llm -m ge...

SVG gives us many different primitives to work with, but by far the most powerful is the element. Unfortunately, it’s also the most inscrutable, with its compact Regex-style syntax. In this tutorial, we’ll demystify this infamous element and see some of the cool things we can do with it!

A Rails gem for sending push notifications to mobile platforms.

Jason Fried writes in his post “Knives and battleships”: Specific tools and familiar ingredients combined in different ratios, different molds, for different purposes. Like a baker working from the same tight set of pantry ingredients to make a hundred distinct recipes. You wouldn't turn to them and say "enough with the butter, flour, sugar, baking powder, and eggs already!" Gett...

If someone manages to create a content blocker for MacOS/iOS that prevents all the content that mentions either AI or vibe coding to reach my screen, I’d buy it in a heartbeat. I am so goddamn tired of reading about AI, GPT models, and people vibe-coding. I get it, it’s fun tech, but it’s exhausting. It’s the crypto/NFT craze on steroids. Thank you for keeping RS...

TIL: Running a gpt-oss eval suite against LM Studio on a Mac The other day I learned that OpenAI published a set of evals as part of their gpt-oss model release, described in their cookbook on Verifying gpt-oss implementations. I decided to try and run that eval suite on my own MacBook Pro, against gpt-oss-20b running inside of LM Studio. TLDR: once I had the model running inside LM Studio with...

Most of what we're building out at this point is the inference [...] We're profitable on inference. If we didn't pay for training, we'd be a very profitable company. — Sam Altman, during a "wide-ranging dinner with a small group of reporters in San Francisco" Tags: openai, sam-altman, ai

Maintainers of Last Resort Filippo Valsorda founded Geomys last year as an "organization of professional open source maintainers", providing maintenance and support for critical packages in the Go language ecosystem backed by clients in retainer relationships. This is an inspiring and optimistic shape for financially sustaining key open source projects, and it appears be working really well. M...

GPT-5 has a hidden system prompt It looks like GPT-5 when accessed via the OpenAI API may have its own hidden system prompt, independent from the system prompt you can specify in an API call. At the very least it's getting sent the current date. I tried this just now: llm -m gpt-5 'current date' That returned "2025-08-15", confirming that the date has been fed to the model as part of a hidden ...

Independent AI researcher Johann Rehberger (previously) has had an absurdly busy August. Under the heading The Month of AI Bugs he has been publishing one report per day across an array of different tools, all of which are vulnerable to various classic prompt injection problems. This is a fantastic and horrifying demonstration of how widespread and dangerous these vulnerabilities still are, alm...

Meta’s AI rules have let bots hold ‘sensual’ chats with kids, offer false medical info This is grim. Reuters got hold of a leaked copy Meta's internal "GenAI: Content Risk Standards" document: Running to more than 200 pages, the document defines what Meta staff and contractors should treat as acceptable chatbot behaviors when building and training the company’s generative AI products. Read th...

Conrad Irwin has an article on the Zed blog “Why LLMs Can't Really Build Software”. He says it boils down to: the distinguishing factor of effective engineers is their ability to build and maintain clear mental models We do this by: Building a mental model of what you want to do Building a mental model of what the code does Reducing the difference between the two It’s kind of an interes...

Artificial Analysis published a new benchmark the other day, this time focusing on how an individual model - OpenAI’s gpt-oss-120b - performs across different hosted providers. The results showed some surprising differences. Here's the one with the greatest variance, a run of the 2025 AIME (American Invitational Mathematics Examination) averaging 32 runs against each model, using gpt-oss-120b w...

I gave all my Apple wealth away because wealth and power are not what I live for. I have a lot of fun and happiness. I funded a lot of important museums and arts groups in San Jose, the city of my birth, and they named a street after me for being good. I now speak publicly and have risen to the top. I have no idea how much I have but after speaking for 20 years it might be $10M plus a couple of...

This is the 103rd edition of People and Blogs, the series where I ask interesting people to talk about themselves and their blogs. Today we have Loren Stephens and his blog, ldstephens.net To follow this series subscribe to the newsletter. A new interview will land in your inbox every Friday. Not a fan of newsletters? No problem! You can read the interviews here on the blog or you can subscribe...

NERD HARDER! is the answer every time a politician gets a technological idée-fixe about how to solve a social problem by creating a technology that can't exist. It's the answer that EU politicians who backed the catastrophic proposal to require copyright filters for all user-generated content came up with, when faced with objections that these filters would block billions of legitimate acts of ...

I’ve been popping up in a few places lately. Here’s a round-up: a talk, an academic paper, and a blog post. Rethink AI, WIRED x Kendryl I spoke about AI agents as part of a Wired event called Rethink AI with Azeem Azhar and others (as previously mentioned). Here’s the Rethink AI homepage where you can find all the vids. It’s sponsored content (thanks Kendryl) but that’s no bad thing, it means ...

Introducing Gemma 3 270M: The compact model for hyper-efficient AI New from Google: Gemma 3 270M, a compact, 270-million parameter model designed from the ground up for task-specific fine-tuning with strong instruction-following and text structuring capabilities already trained in. This model is tiny. The version I tried was the LM Studio GGUF one, a 241MB download. It works! You can say "hi"...

Jan Miksovsky lays out his idea for website creation as content transformation. He starts by talking about tools that hide what’s happening “under the hood”: A framework’s marketing usually pretends it is unnecessary for you to understand how its core transformation works — but without that knowledge, you can’t achieve the beautiful range of results you see in the framework’s sample site galle...

pyx: a Python-native package registry, now in Beta Since its first release, the single biggest question around the uv Python environment management tool has been around Astral's business model: Astral are a VC-backed company and at some point they need to start making real revenue. Back in September Astral founder Charlie Marsh said the following: I don't want to charge people money to use our...

Screaming in the Cloud: AI’s Security Crisis: Why Your Assistant Might Betray You I recorded this podcast conversation with Corey Quinn a few weeks ago: On this episode of Screaming in the Cloud, Corey Quinn talks with Simon Willison, founder of Datasette and creator of LLM CLI about AI’s realities versus the hype. They dive into Simon’s “lethal trifecta” of AI security risks, his prediction o...

How Does A Blind Model See The Earth? Fun, creative new micro-eval. Split the world into a sampled collection of latitude longitude points and for each one ask a model: If this location is over land, say 'Land'. If this location is over water, say 'Water'. Do not say anything else. Author henry goes a step further: for models that expose logprobs they use the relative probability scores of La...

simonw/codespaces-llm GitHub Codespaces provides full development environments in your browser, and is free to use with anyone with a GitHub account. Each environment has a full Linux container and a browser-based UI using VS Code. I found out today that GitHub Codespaces come with a GITHUB_TOKEN environment variable... and that token works as an API key for accessing LLMs in the GitHub Models ...

Happy 30-month anniversary to Container Queries – shipping in every browser since February of 2023. It was supposed to be impossible, but here we are! Check out our CSS Tips & Tricks for quick videos that explain one CSS concept or useful pattern. Subscribe to Channel » What We Cover: 30-months (2.5 years) is a useful, but somewhat arbitrary date defined by the Baseline project....

Claude Sonnet 4 now supports 1M tokens of context Gemini and OpenAI both have million token models, so it's good to see Anthropic catching up. This is 5x the previous 200,000 context length limit of the various Claude Sonnet models. Anthropic have previously made 1 million tokens available to select customers. From the Claude 3 announcement in March 2024: The Claude 3 family of models will ini...

I took the Camp Snap out for a test run on Sunday

I think there's been a lot of decisions over time that proved pretty consequential, but we made them very quickly as we have to. [...] [On pricing] I had this kind of panic attack because we really needed to launch subscriptions because at the time we were taking the product down all the time. [...] So what I did do is ship a Google Form to Discord with the four questions you're supposed to ask...

Are you positioning a popover with CSS anchor positioning and position-area? Make sure to override the default margins on the popover. Check out our CSS Tips & Tricks for quick videos that explain one CSS concept or useful pattern. Subscribe to Channel » What We Cover: In my CodePen example, I use margin: unset, but you can also use margin: initial or give it an actual value. Ot...

I shipped LLM 0.27 today (followed by a 0.27.1 with minor bug fixes), adding support for the new GPT-5 family of models from OpenAI plus a flurry of improvements to the tool calling features introduced in LLM 0.26. Here are the annotated release notes. GPT-5 New models: gpt-5, gpt-5-mini and gpt-5-nano. #1229 I would have liked to get these out sooner, but LLM had accumulated quite a lot o...

Reddit will block the Internet Archive Well this sucks. Jay Peters for the Verge: Reddit says that it has caught AI companies scraping its data from the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine, so it’s going to start blocking the Internet Archive from indexing the vast majority of Reddit. The Wayback Machine will no longer be able to crawl post detail pages, comments, or profiles; instead, it will ...

If you've been experimenting with OpenAI's Codex CLI and have been frustrated that it's not possible to select text and copy it to the clipboard, at least when running in the Mac terminal (I genuinely didn't know it was possible to build a terminal app that disabled copy and paste) you should know that they fixed that in this issue last week. The new 0.20.0 version from three days ago also comp...

I'm selling some new stickers after a shitposting session

qwen-image-mps Ivan Fioravanti built this Python CLI script for running the Qwen/Qwen-Image image generation model on an Apple silicon Mac, optionally using the Qwen-Image-Lightning LoRA to dramatically speed up generation. Ivan has tested it this on 512GB and 128GB machines and it ran really fast - 42 seconds on his M3 Ultra. I've run it on my 64GB M2 MacBook Pro - after quitting almost everyt...

AI for data engineers with Simon Willison I recorded an episode last week with Claire Giordano for the Talking Postgres podcast. The topic was "AI for data engineers" but we ended up covering an enjoyable range of different topics. How I got started programming with a Commodore 64 - the tape drive for which inspired the name Datasette Selfish motivations for TILs (force me to write up my notes...

I’ve been reading listening to Poor Charlie’s Almanack which is a compilation of talks by Charlie Munger, legendary vice-chairman at Berkshire Hathaway. One thing Charlie talks about is what he calls “sit on your ass investing” which is the opposite of day trading. Rather than being in the market every day (chasing trends, reacting to fluctuations, and trying to time transactions) Charlie advoc...

Alright, Falkenstein. A small town in the Vogtland district. How did I end up here? I keep a list of towns to visit on weekends, and I periodically pick a random one from this list when the mood strikes. At some point, Falkenstein made its way onto the list: one of my prod servers is located there, so I thought it would be nice to pay my comrade a visit when I had the chance. The internet also ...

It’s Sunday the 10th, the first full week of August is about to end, which means it’s time to check in on my totally arbitrary hiking challenge. As a reminder, the goal is to log at least 4810 meters of total ascent while hiking up the mountains, with two extra stretch goals set at 6961 and 8848 meters. After 10 days (including a few rainy ones), I am sitting at 1804 meters (and also 42.8km w...

A show post describing a prototype in Deno+TypeScript for generating RSS 2.0 feeds from a FlatLake generated JSON API.

Pens, lots of music, and my new sticker

Opensearch Description Document is a specification for describing how a site search can integrate into your web browser. In 2025 it is still supported by Firefox, Safari and Chrome. It lets you integrate your site search into your browsers URL box (a.k.a. omnibox) as a first class search citizen. It is a means for us to take back search. In this article I use a simple case study of integrating ...

This is the 102nd edition of People and Blogs, the series where I ask interesting people to talk about themselves and their blogs. Today we have Alexandra and her blog, xandra.cc To follow this series subscribe to the newsletter. A new interview will land in your inbox every Friday. Not a fan of newsletters? No problem! You can read the interviews here on the blog or you can subscribe to the RS...

Contrary to what many people seem to be doing, especially in the digital world, I don’t often change the tools and services I use. When I find something that works, I’m happy to stick around for the long run. Well, at least unless something major happens that forces me to reconsider my choices. And I can’t really tell you why I find that approach appealing to me. Maybe because it spares me from...

There’s a new stretch keyword that we can use for CSS height and width properties. But how is that different from 100%? And how is that different from 100vh when we want a full-height layout? Check out our CSS Tips & Tricks for quick videos that explain one CSS concept or useful pattern. Subscribe to Channel » Links: CodePen demo Layout Workshop Smashing Workshop

I was listening to a podcast interview with the Jackson Browne (American singer/songwriter, political activist, and inductee into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame) and the interviewer asks him how he approaches writing songs with social commentaries and critiques — something along the lines of: “How do you get from the New York Times headline on a social subject to the emotional heart of a song t...

Perplexity proving yet again they don't care about the rules

Today provides one of the most beautiful, delicate feelings that I know and wait for, and first I have to provide some backstory. I love cricket. In particular, Test cricket. A match lasts 5 days. So there’s room for back-and-forths, intense 20 minute periods of play forcing one team into sure defeat, then slow steady day-long grinds back into it against all belief – if they have the character...

I’ve written previously about reloading a document using only HTML but that got me thinking: What are all the values you can put in an anchor tag’s href attribute? Well, I looked around. I found some things I already knew about, e.g. Link protocols like mailto:, tel:, sms: and javascript: which deal with specific ways of handling links. Protocol-relative links, e.g. href="//" Text fr...

1. Lightning maps: Next time there’s a lightning storm, open that page or grab an app. It’s a live view of lightning strikes, globally. The map focuses on where you are. What’s neat: when a dot flashes for a new strike, a circle expands around it. This circle grows at the speed of sound; if you watch the map and a circle moves over where you’re standing, you’ll simultaneously hear the thunder....

This is the 101st edition of People and Blogs, the series where I ask interesting people to talk about themselves and their blogs. Today we have Emma Goto and her blog, emgoto.com To follow this series subscribe to the newsletter. A new interview will land in your inbox every Friday. Not a fan of newsletters? No problem! You can read the interviews here on the blog or you can subscribe to the R...

How is your summer season going, folks? Recently I have been busy at work, but as part of that, I made huge progress in learning Go. Writing Go code is a pure joy, and I really regret that I have never dedicated myself to it before. It seems to be a perfect weapon for a web developer. It is a great language for servers and microservices, but it is also incredible for a bunch of other lower-leve...

Nostalgia is a hell of a drug

After the experiments of June and July, I say it’s time to switch gears, do something a little bit different and take my ass away from the screen and up the mountains. As part of my year-long plan to get back into proper shape, I decided to take hiking seriously again and what better way to kickstart this than a fun challenge to myself during the month of August. Back in 2022, I set myself the ...

Highlighters, stickers, and lots of links

A selection of observations after completing the main career

GangsA brilliant exposition on the problem with gang databases in the US I have no love for police, but I respect the work they do. However, there are lots of problems with the way they do their work that could be improved. Ideally, there needs to be more public oversight over these “public servants”. Especially since they seem unaccountable for their actions, even when they&...

A short review of the Nuby RapidCool

With four weeks of July behind me, this second month-long summer experiment has come to an end. A lot less interesting than June’s experiment, but still worth doing. The data from this final week is a bit all over the place for a variety of reasons, but let me dump some numbers before going into details. Monday : 1:45 (1:34) Tuesday : 1:13 (0:56) Wednesday : 3:26 (3:16) Thursday : 4:09 (3...

Some lessons I’ve learned from experience. 1. Install Stuff Indiscriminately From npm Become totally dependent on others, that’s why they call them “dependencies” after all! Lean in to it. Once your dependencies break — and they will, time breaks all things — then you can spend lots of time and energy (which was your goal from the beginning) ripping out those dependencies and replacing them wit...

Es läuft nicht immer alles wie geplant und das ist ab und zu auch ganz gut so. Einfach so, routiniert einen Ultra laufen, das wäre schön und ist toll, aber genauso gehört es dazu, sich ab und zu mal durchzubeissen wenn etwas nicht so klappt wie man möchte. Der diesjährige 6-Stunden-Lauf um den Förderturm in […]

The other day, I finished reading 4 3 2 1 by Paul Auster. It was a Christmas gift from my dad, who apparently picked it without even knowing what the book was about. It sat there, in my bedroom, for more than 6 months because it’s a 950-page novel, and I was convinced that I was not going to make it till the end. In addition to that, I was also convinced that, given the momentum I built during ...

A CLI tool that checks packages for security issues and social engineering attacks before they hit your project

In this post I go over the process of building a TypeScript module called `commonMarkDoc.ts` along with a simple command line CommonMark processor called `cmarkprocess`. CommonMark pre-processor features are - support `@include-code-block` for including code samples as code blocks - support `@include-text-block` for include plain text into a CommonMark document - transform Hashtags into ...

An overview of how letting my thermal printer loose on the internet went

This is the 100th edition of People and Blogs, the series where I ask interesting people to talk about themselves and their blogs. Today we have Marisabel Munoz and her blog, marisabel.nl. Earlier today I wrote a blog post to both celebrate and reflect on this milestone. Go give it a read once you're done reading the interview with the lovely Marisabel. To follow this series subscribe to the ne...

I’m a big fan of the podcast Hardcore History by Dan Carlin. Like, if you want six episodes on the fall of the Roman Republic, and each episode is 5 hours long, Carlin has you covered. I went digging for anything about Carlin’s creative process, and this jumped out at me, from an interview with Tim Ferriss. Oh you should also know that Carlin’s voice and intonation is pretty… distinctive. Dan...

While everyone debates models and features, Google owns the distribution channels that make AI stick

In true nerd fashion. I don’t use a spreadsheet (anymore) to manage the various licenses that I buy for software. CSV files are fine for shorter lists, but become problematic when dealing with more, especially trying to properly format the document. So, I started looking for alternatives. There are a couple of purpose built programs, generally for enterprises, that claim to manage your so...

I am convinced that it makes total sense to spend a certain amount of your (spare) time on this planet tinkering around and exploring stuff that seems totally useless or silly compared to what you normally do. And without having a real explanation for why it happened, I’ve been starting to get interested in software synthesizers lately. I can barely play proper melodies on my Arturia MiniLab – ...

Installing an unsigned executable on Windows can also pose security risks, as Windows has built-in mechanisms to protect users from potentially harmful software. Here's a general guide on how to do it: 1. **Download the Executable**: Download the unsigned executable file you want to install from a trusted source. 2. **Locate the File**: Use File Explorer to locate the downloaded file, which i...