Howdy y’all, I hope your October was not as hectic as mine. Mine was ridiculous! It’s been a super hardworking year overall, and I’m looking forward to a trip with my family at the end of the year. We are going to spend December in Sri Lanka, so if you have any tips and recommendations, ping me on Mastodon, Bluesky, LinkedIn or in the comments section below. I found some time ...

A look at Inktober 2025, what I did, what I learnt, dinosaurs.

This week on the People and Blogs series we have an interview with Frank Chimero, whose blog can be found at frankchimero.com. Tired of RSS? Read this in your browser or sign up for the newsletter. The People and Blogs series is supported by Mike Walsh and the other 123 members of my "One a Month" club. If you enjoy P&B, consider becoming one for as little as 1 dollar a ...

If there is one thing that I’ve learned in my roughly 30 years of working with design tools, it is that they come and go and that you should always stay curious and be open and ready to learn something new. As a teenager, I made my first clip-arty design attempts in CorelDRAW. Right after finishing high school, I dabbled in QuarkXPress during an internship at BBDO. As a student, I fell in love ...

Brad asked me to fill in for Myke this week

1. When you sit with friends at a wobbly table, Simply rotate till it becomes stable. No need to find a wedge for one of its four feet. Math will ensure nothing spills while you eat. The Wobbly Table Theorem (Department of Mathematics, Harvard University). 2. David Ogilvy changed advertising in 1951. Shirts sold. Job done. He used a surprise black eyepatch in the magazine spot: “story appeal” ...

Samples and photos of the neon Pilot Juice space smash set

To really understand a concept, you have to "invent" it yourself in some capacity. Understanding doesn't come from passive content consumption. It is always self-built. It is an active, high-agency, self-directed process of creating and debugging your own mental models. — François Chollet Tags: francois-chollet, teaching

Introducing SWE-1.5: Our Fast Agent Model Here's the second fast coding model released by a coding agent IDE in the same day - the first was Composer-1 by Cursor. This time it's Windsurf releasing SWE-1.5: Today we’re releasing SWE-1.5, the latest in our family of models optimized for software engineering. It is a frontier-size model with hundreds of billions of parameters that achieves near-S...

MiniMax M2 & Agent: Ingenious in Simplicity MiniMax M2 was released on Monday 27th October by MiniMax, a Chinese AI lab founded in December 2021. It's a very promising model. Their self-reported benchmark scores show it as comparable to Claude Sonnet 4, and Artificial Analysis are ranking it as the best currently available open weight model according to their intelligence score: MiniMax’s ...

Just in time for this year’s Berlin edition, Beyond Tellerrand has launched a beautiful new site for its 15-plus years of events. A real web treasure both visually and structurally, it succeeds as both a marketing site and a deep archive of hundreds of inspiring talks from creative speakers in design, tech, and beyond. I’m honored to have done a few projects with Beyond Tellerrand but sad...

Back in September I needed a console tool that would take one of my high-entropy master passwords (the ones I keep in my head) plus some context, and deterministically generate a password from that. Same inputs, same output, every time. The use case: I have several critical things that need strong passwords (disk encryption, PGP keys, SSH keys, cryptocurrency wallet passphrases, Proxmox backups...

Composer: Building a fast frontier model with RL Cursor released Cursor 2.0 today, with a refreshed UI focused on agentic coding (and running agents in parallel) and a new model that's unique to Cursor called Composer 1. As far as I can tell there's no way to call the model directly via an API, so I fired up "Ask" mode in Cursor's chat side panel and asked it to "Generate an SVG of a pelic...

Humans love stories. Maybe that is because for thousands of years, stories were the way information was preserved and passed on to others, to the next generations. Maybe because they create community and collective culture. Maybe because they capture our imagination and speak to our fears and our dreams. Maybe that’s why you will find a lot of stories in the writing on this site. My reply to Je...

I'm at GitHub Universe this week (thanks to a free ticket from Microsoft). Yesterday I picked up my conference badge... which incorporates a full Raspberry Pi Raspberry Pi Pico microcontroller with a battery, color screen, WiFi and bluetooth. GitHub Universe has a tradition of hackable conference badges - the badge last year had an eInk display. This year's is a huge upgrade though - a color sc...

A random thought that came to me today: even if it seems like my actions back in Russia didn’t lead to any visible result (the war is still going on), that’s only how it appears. Every time I protested and people saw it (in person, online), it connected them through me.If someone couldn’t directly and openly express their disagreement with what was happening, they had an alternative: share a po...

The “linear()” timing function is a game-changer; it allows us to model physics-based motion right in vanilla CSS! That said, there are some limitations and quirks to be aware of. I’ve been experimenting with this API for a while now, and in this post, I’ll share all of the tips and tricks I’ve learned for using it effectively. ✨

Merz has a simple solution to every problem: deport migrants. It’s rather remarkable watching a chancellor whose rhetoric echoes Goebbels. The man literally said: “But we naturally still have this problem in the cityscape, and that’s why the Federal Minister of the Interior is now enabling and carrying out deportations on a very large scale.” In the context of migration, cityscape naturally ref...

I have to confess that I am not reading that many books these days. Most of the time, I resort to listening to them in audio form. But every once in a while, a book comes along that is just too interesting not to at least give it a try. Reading Kai Brach’s excellent newsletter Dense Discovery, I came across such a (new) book by Joanna Walsh: Amateurs!: How We Built Internet Culture and Why it M...

Claude doesn't make me much faster on the work that I am an expert on. Maybe 15-20% depending on the day. It's the work that I don't know how to do and would have to research. Or the grunge work I don't even want to do. On this it is hard to even put a number on. Many of the projects I do with Claude day to day I just wouldn't have done at all pre-Claude. Infinity% improvement in productivity o...

The PSF has withdrawn a $1.5 million proposal to US government grant program The Python Software Foundation was recently "recommended for funding" (NSF terminology) for a $1.5m grant from the US government National Science Foundation to help improve the security of the Python software ecosystem, after an grant application process lead by Seth Larson and Loren Crary. The PSF's annual budget is l...

It seems like a cliché for a drug dealer to be working his stash out of a Burger King bathroom, but I hadn’t personally encountered it before. Or if I had, the operation was more subtle than this guy’s. Not that he needed to be subtle. The place was mostly deserted, as often seems to be the case for legacy fast-food joints in the 21st century, at least in the suburbs. When did people stop dinin...

Everardo Gout, 2021, ★½ Maybe the best thing you can say for The Forever Purge, which was originally slated for release in July of 2020, is that it cleverly predicts January 6th, at least until you remember that the loudest man on the planet had a global captive audience that year, not limited to his devoted cult of wackos, and anyone with half a brain cell could read the tea leaves. ...

Stop waiting weeks for crawlers. Learn how to notify Bing, DuckDuckGo, ChatGPT, and Perplexity instantly when you publish new content using the free IndexNow protocol

GenAI Image Editing Showdown Useful collection of examples by Shaun Pedicini who tested Seedream 4, Gemini 2.5 Flash, Qwen-Image-Edit, FLUX.1 Kontext [dev], FLUX.1 Kontext [max], OmniGen2, and OpenAI gpt-image-1 across 12 image editing prompts. The tasks are very neatly selected, for example: Remove all the brown pieces of candy from the glass bowl Qwen-Image-Edit (a model that can be self-ho...

In 1977, NASA launched two spaceships carrying two golden records into the void of interstellar space. The Voyager Golden Records contained instructions for playing its contents, finding Earth in the cosmos (oh my …), as well as images, a variety of natural sounds, musical selections from different cultures and eras, and spoken greetings in 55 languages. We didn’t know if anyone would ever hear...

I was watching Alex Petros’ talk and he has a slide in there titled “Incantations that make HTML work correctly”. This got me thinking about the basic snippets of HTML I’ve learned to always include in order for my website to work as I expect in the browser — like “Hey I just made a .html file on disk and am going to open it in the browser. What should be in there?” This is what comes to mind: ...

Sora might have a 'pervert' problem on its hands Katie Notopoulos turned on the Sora 2 option where anyone can make a video featuring her cameo, and then: I found a stranger had made a video where I appeared pregnant. A quick look at the user's profile, and I saw that this person's entire Sora profile was made up of this genre — video after video of women with big, pregnant bellies. ...

Ego is one of those words that’s difficult to parse. I find language to be an imperfect tool in the quest to describe the inner workings of the mind, because in there, things tend to be fuzzy, while words are often sharp, pointing to distinct concepts that are seldom found in someone’s brain. «I don’t have an ego», some claim. How that is even possible remains a mystery. I suspect it all comes ...

My gut feeling tells me that not that many people have yet heard of or used the linear() easing function, one of the most exciting newer additions to CSS. Looking at the stats in the State of CSS survey, this is somewhat confirmed: only about 30 percent of respondents have used it and another 30 percent have never even heard of it. But what’s also interesting is the ratio of people who report t...

Added to the music library:Headhunter/CarouselBig Bite, 2025Charlotte Song / Hand to the EmberBig Bite, 2025TouchTortoise, 2025 Tagged: October 2025 Reply via email

Someone on Hacker News asked for tips on setting up a codebase to be more productive with AI coding tools. Here's my reply: Good automated tests which the coding agent can run. I love pytest for this - one of my projects has 1500 tests and Claude Code is really good at selectively executing just tests relevant to the change it is making, and then running the whole suite at the end. Give them t...

If you have an AGENTS.md file, you can source it in your CLAUDE.md using @AGENTS.md to maintain a single source of truth. — Claude Docs, with the official answer to standardizing on AGENTS.md Tags: coding-agents, anthropic, claude, claude-code, generative-ai, ai, llms

Gerard McMurray, 2018, ★½ Like the other films in the franchise, The First Purge’s clear polemical ambitions are paved over by commercial ones. But this one’s blaxploitation revival is a bigger missed opportunity, because it might have really had something to say. At the top, a montage of TV news talking heads gives us a cursory history of the rise of the New Founding Fathers of Ameri...

Visual Features Across Modalities: SVG and ASCII Art Reveal Cross-Modal Understanding New model interpretability research from Anthropic, this time focused on SVG and ASCII art generation. We found that the same feature that activates over the eyes in an ASCII face also activates for eyes across diverse text-based modalities, including SVG code and prose in various languages. This is not limit...

Async params, Turbopack by default, and the cleanup of experimental features

claude_code_docs_map.md Something I'm enjoying about Claude Code is that any time you ask it questions about itself it runs tool calls like these: In this case I'd asked it about its "hooks" feature. The claude_code_docs_map.md file is a neat Markdown index of all of their other documentation - the same pattern advocated by llms.txt. Claude Code can then fetch further documentation to help it ...

Chris Coyier wrote about it. Now it’s my turn. Last week I’m flying home. My flight gets delayed in air, then lands late so I miss my connecting flight… [Skip over all the stuff about airline customer support, getting rebooked, etc.] It’s ~10pm and I’m stranded overnight. I need a last-minute hotel room. I figure I’ll try HotelTonight because that’s their shtick, right? “Incredible last-minute ...

Gotta print some zines. Off to FedEx I go. The self-service printer/copier takes credit cards. I’m prompted to pre-authorize a payment amount. Look at the sticker on the machine with the printing rates. Recall my document’s page count and how many copies I want. Do the math in my head. Select an amount from the preset options. Pop my thumb drive into the machine. It won’t read. No problem, I ha...

I’m on my hols. Some recommendations. Watch The Ballad of Wallis Island. Charming, poignant comedy about a washed-up folk musician and loss. By Tim Key and Tom Basden. Now I knew Basden can write - the first episode of Party is the tightest wittiest 25 minutes of ensemble radio you’ll hear - and I love everything Tim Key does as a comedian. But Key really is the revelation. Who knew he could ...

A lot of people say AI will make us all "managers" or "editors"...but I think this is a dangerously incomplete view! Personally, I'm trying to code like a surgeon. A surgeon isn't a manager, they do the actual work! But their skills and time are highly leveraged with a support team that handles prep, secondary tasks, admin. The surgeon focuses on the important stuff they are uniquely good at. [...

This week on the People and Blogs series we have an interview with Romina Malta, whose blog can be found at romi.link. Tired of RSS? Read this in your browser or sign up for the newsletter. The People and Blogs series is supported by Sixian Lim and the other 123 members of my "One a Month" club. If you enjoy P&B, consider becoming one for as little as 1 dollar a month. ...

When everything looks the same, being different becomes valuable again

Two years ago, I wrote an article about the dialog element. I tested where focus goes when you open a modal dialog via the showModal() method. I tried different combinations of elements and attributes to see what happens because back in 2023, the behaviour was very inconsistent.In one of my tests, I put the tabindex attribute on the dialog element. That's why Joy contacted me earlier this week,...

OpenAI released their new “browser” and Simon Willison has the deets on its security, going point-by-point through the statement from OpenAI’s Chief Information Security Officer. His post is great if you want to dive on the details. Here’s my high-level takeaway: Everything OpenAI says they are doing to mitigate the security concerns of an LLM paired with a browser sounds reasonable in theory. ...

I have a handful of magazines, books, and stuff here all from independent people from the internet and it's just...cool

Code orange today. Super windy and rainy around here. Staying home today.

OpenAI no longer has to preserve all of its ChatGPT data, with some exceptions This is a relief: Federal judge Ona T. Wang filed a new order on October 9 that frees OpenAI of an obligation to "preserve and segregate all output log data that would otherwise be deleted on a going forward basis." I wrote about this in June. OpenAI were compelled by a court order to preserve all output, even from...

For resiliency, the DNS Enactor operates redundantly and fully independently in three different Availability Zones (AZs). [...] When the second Enactor (applying the newest plan) completed its endpoint updates, it then invoked the plan clean-up process, which identifies plans that are significantly older than the one it just applied and deletes them. At the same time that this clean-up process ...

This afternoon I was manually converting a terminal session into a shared HTML file for the umpteenth time when I decided to reduce the friction by building a custom tool for it - and on the spur of the moment I fired up Descript to record the process. The result is this new 11 minute YouTube video showing my workflow for vibe-coding simple tools from start to finish. The initial problem The ...

James DeMonaco, 2016, ★★ I’m not having a good month, and these Purge movies are not helping. But will I stop watching them? Apparently I will not. There’s a MacGuffin this time, an anti-Purge senator (Elizabeth Mitchell) whose presidential bid aims to upend the barbaric status quo, which of course makes her a target. After narrowly escaping an assassination attempt, she flees her hom...

Now that cross-document view transitions are gradually making their way into modern browsers, now seems like the perfect time to explore them, if you haven’t already. They are, in fact, surprisingly straightforward to implement. And just like we’ve seen with modern images, view transitions can be slapped onto existing projects as a progressive enhancement. That my website is now called a “mult...

My biggest complaint about the launch of the ChatGPT Atlas browser the other day was the lack of details on how OpenAI are addressing prompt injection attacks. The launch post mostly punted that question to the System Card for their "ChatGPT agent" browser automation feature from July. Since this was my single biggest question about Atlas I was disappointed not to see it addressed more directly...

Intercity arriving at Den Haag HS station

Recent photos, I had them posted on Glass, but forgot to also save in the blog. There’s one more, but since I really liked it, I’m saving for an individual post. :)

There’s a new type of CSS scroll-state query coming: scrolled

I gave a talk last night at Claude Code Anonymous in San Francisco, the unofficial meetup for coding agent enthusiasts. I decided to talk about a dichotomy I've been struggling with recently. On the one hand I'm getting enormous value from running coding agents with as few restrictions as possible. On the other hand I'm deeply concerned by the risks that accompany that freedom. Below is a copy...

Yesterday, OpenAI announced Atlas, its AI browser. To the surprise of literally nobody, it’s Chromium with AI slapped on top. Perplexity also has a browser: it’s called Comet, and it also is Chromium with AI slapped on top. Then we have DIA, which is, you guessed it, Chromium with AI slapped on top. I think Opera also has one of those Chromium browsers with AI slapped on top. I code sites for a...

SLOCCount in WebAssembly This project/side-quest got a little bit out of hand. I remembered an old tool called SLOCCount which could count lines of code and produce an estimate for how much they would cost to develop. I thought it would be fun to play around with it again, especially given how cheap it is to generate code using LLMs these days. Here's the homepage for SLOCCount by David A. Whe...

James DeMonaco, 2014, ★★ I couldn’t find any indication that Jello Biafra was offered a cameo in The Purge: Anarchy, which seems like an injustice given that it’s essentially a film adaptation of Dead Kennedys’ “Kill the Poor,” albeit an adaptation whose 104-minute runtime is markedly less incisive than what the DK song manages to say in a mere 180 seconds. Still, Anarchy is an unqual...

Vim is a superb tool for repeating changes, and there is even a whole chapter in the user manual about repeating commands. Before we discuss macros, you should master the . dot command first. It repeats the previous change, and no matter how trivial that sounds, this is the command I use a zillion times a day. Your browser doesn't support HTML video. Here is a link to the video instead. I...

Claude Code stores full logs of your sessions as newline-delimited JSON in ~/.claude/projects/encoded-directory/*.jsonl on your machine. I currently have 379MB of these! Here's an example jsonl file which I extracted from my Deepseek-OCR on NVIDIA Spark project. I have a little vibe-coded tool for converting those into Markdown which produces results like this. Unfortunately Claude Code has a n...

I’m launching Skillcraft Mentorship—personalized 1-on-1 guidance from experienced developers to help you level up faster.

Unseeable prompt injections in screenshots: more vulnerabilities in Comet and other AI browsers The Brave security team wrote about prompt injection against browser agents a few months ago (here are my notes on that). Here's their follow-up: What we’ve found confirms our initial concerns: indirect prompt injection is not an isolated issue, but a systemic challenge facing the entire category of...

I built something that I needed into DevTools: debugging support for CSS @starting-style rules.

Introducing ChatGPT Atlas Last year OpenAI hired Chrome engineer Darin Fisher, which sparked speculation they might have their own browser in the pipeline. Today it arrived. ChatGPT Atlas is a Mac-only web browser with a variety of ChatGPT-enabled features. You can bring up a chat panel next to a web page, which will automatically be populated with the context of that page. The "browser memorie...

Five years ago, I wrote about AVIF: A New Image Format (back then). Since then, I’ve implemented WebP and AVIF support on numerous client sites for considerable performance improvements – but my own site was still serving JPEG, PNG, and GIF images only. So it was time to fix that. Here’s how I added modern image format support to my Craft CMS site. Modern Image Formats Rock 🚀 But first, a litt...

Found on Kev’s blog and originally started by Dave, here are my answers to this fun blog challenge: Do you floss your teeth? Sometimes. I’d say maybe a few times a week? I’m terrible at being consistent, and that includes flossing regularly. Tea, coffee, or water? Coffee in the morning, tea (sometimes) later in the day, not enough water the rest of the time. Did I mention I’m terrible at being...

It’s the early nineties. Legendary comic book artist Frank Miller had just broken away from the major publishers, after creating titles like Daredevil: Born Again, Ronin, and The Dark Knight Returns. He was now working with the then-young Dark Horse Comics, when he decided to take his baby there – a comic he had planned to do for years: a crime story in black and white. Sin City. So, Frank got ...

Since getting a modem at the start of the month, and hooking up to the Internet, I’ve spent about an hour every evening actually online (which I guess is costing me about £1 a night), and much of the days and early evenings fiddling about with things. It’s so complicated. All the hype never mentioned that. I guess journalists just have it all set up for them so they don’t have to worry too much...

Prompt injection might be unsolvable in today’s LLMs. LLMs process token sequences, but no mechanism exists to mark token privileges. Every solution proposed introduces new injection vectors: Delimiter? Attackers include delimiters. Instruction hierarchy? Attackers claim priority. Separate models? Double the attack surface. Security requires boundaries, but LLMs dissolve boundaries. [...] Poiso...

Anthropic launched Claude Code for web this morning. It's an asynchronous coding agent - their answer to OpenAI's Codex Cloud and Google's Jules, and has a very similar shape. I had preview access over the weekend and I've already seen some very promising results from it. It's available online at claude.ai/code and shows up as a tab in the Claude iPhone app as well: As far as I can tell it's t...

I mean, seriously. Of course, this sounds like I’m dismissing Carlo Cipolla, who argued we systematically underestimate the number of stupid people around us, or Dietrich Bonhoeffer, who observed that stupidity is a sociological phenomenon rather than an intellectual defect, arising when external power discourages independent thought. But actually, I agree with both, and my position complements...

DeepSeek released a new model yesterday: DeepSeek-OCR, a 6.6GB model fine-tuned specifically for OCR. They released it as model weights that run using PyTorch and CUDA. I got it running on the NVIDIA Spark by having Claude Code effectively brute force the challenge of getting it working on that particular hardware. This small project (40 minutes this morning, most of which was Claude Code churn...

Quick PSA for those of you out there who are interested in subscribing to either my From the Summit 2.0, the newsletter version of People and Blogs, or simply prefer to get these blog posts delivered via email: all those newsletters require double opt-in. What that means is that once you have signed up, you should get a second email asking you to click a link to confirm your email address. Some...

With AI tooling, a developer with 1 year of experience can match the output of someone with 10 years. The playing field has never been more level.

I’ve been thinking about a note from Alex Russell where he says: any time you're running JS on the main thread, you're at risk of being left behind by progress. The zen of web development is to spend a little time in your own code, and instead to glue the big C++/Rust subsystems together, then get out of the bloody way. In his thread on Bluesky, Alex continues: How do we do this? Usi...

Today, incidentally, is the fête du prénom René — in other words, my name day. It’s actually the feast day of René Goupil, a surgeon born in France who later emigrated to New France (that is, Canada). He lived among the Huron people for two years, performing two jobs: working as a surgeon and as a catechist. In 1642, René Goupil was returning to Huron territory, accompanying the missionary Isaa...

Natalia León, May Kindred-Boothby, Farnoosh Abedi-Negah Fardiar, Jan Saska, Calleen Koh, and 3 more I was once again unable to make it to the animation festival in Ottawa this year, and the Philadelphia Film Festival once again filled some of that gap with a well-curated program of shorts. I’m feeling pretty raw lately about a variety of big things both personal and global, and several of the...