Podcasting was unstoppable—until it wasn’t. The bubble’s burst, and the battle for survival has begun. Are we watching the death of podcasting as we know it?Remember when podcasts were the hot new thing? Advertisers couldn't throw money at them fast enough.

I joked on Mastodon: If anyone endeavors to write a book about what went wrong with tech, I have a great suggestion for the title: “Enabled by Default” It seems there really are two hard problems in tech: Naming things Setting good defaults Keeping to scope Anyhow, a little while later I found this Hacker News comment (courtesy of Terence Eden) where one user declared: “I'm glad for an ...

sudoku-in-python-packaging Absurdly clever hack by konsti: solve a Sudoku puzzle entirely using the Python package resolver! First convert the puzzle into a requirements.in file representing the current state of the board: git clone https://github.com/konstin/sudoku-in-python-packaging cd sudoku-in-python-packaging echo '5,3,_,_,7,_,_,_,_ 6,_,_,1,9,5,_,_,...

I've often been building single-use apps with Claude Artifacts when I'm helping my children learn. For example here's one on visualizing fractions. [...] What's more surprising is that it is far easier to create an app on-demand than searching for an app in the app store that will do what I'm looking for. Searching for kids' learning apps is typically a nails-on-chalkboard painful experience be...

I'm a huge fan of Claude's Artifacts feature, which lets you prompt Claude to create an interactive Single Page App (using HTML, CSS and JavaScript) and then view the result directly in the Claude interface, iterating on it further with the bot and then, if you like, copying out the resulting code. I was digging around in my Claude activity export (I built a claude-to-sqlite tool to convert it ...

In this job we need to think a lot about the tools we choose and why, so I cataloged all the places where web components (for me) feel like “the right tool for the job”. Your list may be different and I’d love to read it. And because I don’t want this to be 100% propaganda, I’ll also cover some of the not-so-great parts of web components as well. The good parts Here’s an incomplete list of sit...

Dashboard: Tools I used Django SQL Dashboard to spin up a dashboard that shows all of the URLs to my tools.simonwillison.net site that I've shared on my blog so far. It uses this (Claude assisted) regular expression in a PostgreSQL SQL query: select distinct on (tool_url) unnest(regexp_matches( body, '(https://tools\.simonwillison\.net/[^<"\s)]+)', 'g' )) as t...

(And How to Change Direction)Centrism is broken. Here’s why ‘pissing your pants in the middle’ isn’t a political stance.At its best, centrism is meant to cut through the extremes, advocating for compromise, pragmatism, and measured progress. But centrism as a philosophy has

A tool that packages your code to easily share with LLM models.

Weekly summary of new Baseline items in BCD data

Knowledge Worker Forrest Brazeal: Last month, I performed a 30-minute show called "Knowledge Worker" for the incredible audience at Gene Kim's ETLS in Las Vegas. The show included 7 songs about the past, present, and future of "knowledge work" - or, more specifically, how it's affecting us, the humans between keyboard and chair. I poured everything I've been thinking and feeling about AI for t...

I really dislike the practice of replacing passwords with email “magic links”. Autofilling a password from my keychain happens instantly; getting a magic link from email can take minutes sometimes, and even in the fastest case, it’s nowhere near instantaneous. Replacing something very fast — password autofill — with something slower is just a terrible idea. — John Gruber Tags: passwo...

The 3 AI Use Cases: Gods, Interns, and Cogs Drew Breunig introduces an interesting new framework for categorizing use cases of modern AI: Gods refers to the autonomous, human replacement applications - I see that as AGI stuff that's still effectively science fiction. Interns are supervised copilots. This is how I get most of the value out of LLMs at the moment, delegating tasks to them that I ...

I’ve written a lot of JavaScript. I like JavaScript. And more importantly, I’ve built up a set of skills in understanding, optimizing, and debugging JavaScript that I’m reluctant to give up on. So maybe it’s natural that I get a worried pit in my stomach over the current mania to rewrite every Node.js tool in […]

Who called it “intellectual property problems around the acquisition of training data for Large Language Models” and not Grand Theft Autocomplete? — Jens Ohlig, on March 8th 2024 Tags: training-data, llms, ai, generative-ai

It feels like we’re at a bit of an inflection point for the Django community. [...] One of the places someone could have the most impact is by serving on the DSF Board. Like the community at large, the DSF is at a transition point: we’re outgrowing the “small nonprofit” status, and have the opportunity to really expand our ambition and reach. In all likelihood, the decisions the Board makes ove...

You can use text-wrap: balance; on icons Neat CSS experiment from Terence Eden: the new text-wrap: balance CSS property is intended to help make text like headlines display without ugly wrapped single orphan words, but Terence points out it can be used for icons too: This inspired me to investigate if the same technique could work for text based navigation elements. I used Claude to build this...

How to set up VS Code for a vanilla web project.

Examining the Devaluation of Software Engineer Titles and Its Impact on Tech Industry Integrity

mistral.rs is an LLM inference library written in Rust by Eric Buehler. Today I figured out how to use it to run the Llama 3.2 Vision and Phi-3.5 Vision models on my Mac. Despite the name, it's not just for the Mistral family of models - like how llama.cpp has grown beyond Llama, mistral.rs has grown beyond Mistral. I already have a Rust installation, so I checked out and compiled the library l...

Learn how to automatically improve your Astro site's performance using astro-capo

Play a 🫰(snap) when CSS snaps! const snap = new Audio('snap.mp3') scroller.onscrollsnapchange = () => snap.play() Demo · JS Snap API Note: you may need to click/tap before scrolling, for the browser to deem playing the audio as user activated.

I am, technically speaking, a child of the 80s…just barely. I grew up in the 90s and the console of my childhood was the PlayStation. I then jumped to the PlayStation 2 in the 2000s, skipped the PlayStation 3 generation because I was a PC gamer at the time and then came back to the PlayStation 4 (which was a godsend during the COVID era). I also got into mobile gaming with the Game Boy Color ea...

OpenAI promised this at DevDay a few weeks ago and now it's here: their Chat Completion API can now accept audio as input and return it as output. OpenAI still recommend their WebSocket-based Realtime API for audio tasks, but the Chat Completion API is a whole lot easier to write code against. Generating audio Audio input via a Bash script A web app for recording and prompting against au...

What other Turing tests do we need? Here’s the original (Wikipedia): Turing proposed that a human evaluator would judge natural language conversations between a human and a machine designed to generate human-like responses. … The conversation would be limited to a text-only channel … If the evaluator could not reliably tell the machine from the human, the machine would be said to have passed ...

This is the 60th edition of People and Blogs, the series where I ask interesting people to talk about themselves and their blogs. Today we have Steyn Viljoen and his blog, viljoen.space 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...

I'm of the opinion that you should never use mmap, because if you get an I/O error of some kind, the OS raises a signal, which SQLite is unable to catch, and so the process dies. When you are not using mmap, SQLite gets back an error code from an I/O error and is able to take remedial action, or at least compose an error message. — D. Richard Hipp Tags: d-richard-hipp, sqlite

September was incredibly busy across work and personal life. I am out of a routine and trying to find my way back to writing regularly (among creating in general) while also making sure I spend time doing things I enjoy. As soon as I publish this I'm off to decide what to bake and then go hang out and read and maybe make some soup. It's soup season. Life in England # We celebrated our anniversa...

When writing blog posts in Markdown files I often find myself needing to add HTML elements that aren’t accounted for in Markdown. Some common ones are <aside> elements, where I include content tangentially related to the post itself, or external references. Having to include HTML in Markdown is kind of a pain, because once you start writing HTML, you can’t then use Markdown inside it: eve...

Using static websites for tiny archives Alex Chan: Over the last year or so, I’ve been creating static websites to browse my local archives. I’ve done this for a variety of collections, including: paperwork I’ve scanned documents I’ve created screenshots I’ve taken web pages I’ve bookmarked video and audio files I’ve saved This is such a neat idea. These tiny little personal archive website...

We finished pulling seven cloud apps, including HEY, out of AWS and onto our own hardware last summer. But it took until the end of that year for all the long-term contract commitments to end, so 2024 has been the first clean year of savings, and we've been pleasantly surprised that they've been even better than originally estimated.For 2024, we've brought the cloud bill down fro...

New in NotebookLM: Customizing your Audio Overviews The most requested feature for Google's NotebookLM "audio overviews" (aka automatically generated podcast conversations) has been the ability to provide direction to those artificial podcast hosts - setting their expertise level or asking them to focus on specific topics. Today's update adds exactly that: Now you can provide instructions befo...

The other day I found myself needing to add up some numeric values that were scattered across twelve different emails. I didn't particularly feel like copying and pasting all of the numbers out one at a time, so I decided to try something different: could I record a screen capture while browsing around my Gmail account and then extract the numbers from that video using Google Gemini? This turne...

We say we value privacy. So why the fuck do we keep giving away our data? It’s more complicated than you think.As a journalist and tech fan, I’m relatively “passionate” about privacy; I attend conferences, I do the reading and I write blog

Gemini API Additional Terms of Service I've been trying to figure out what Google's policy is on using data submitted to their Google Gemini LLM for further training. It turns out it's clearly spelled out in their terms of service, but it differs for the paid v.s. free tiers. The paid APIs do not train on your inputs: When you're using Paid Services, Google doesn't use your prompts (including ...

files-to-prompt 0.4 New release of my files-to-prompt tool adding an option for filtering just for files with a specific extension. The following command will output Claude XML-style markup for all Python and Markdown files in the current directory, and copy that to the macOS clipboard ready to be pasted into an LLM: files-to-prompt . -e py -e md -c | pbcopy Tags: projects, python, llms

2025 DSF Board Nominations The Django Software Foundation board elections are coming up. There are four positions open, seven directors total. Terms last two years, and the deadline for submitting a nomination is October 25th (the date of the election has not yet been decided). Several community members have shared "DSF initiatives I'd like to see" documents to inspire people who may be conside...

Supercharge the One Person Framework with SQLite: Rails World 2024 Stephen Margheim shares an annotated transcript of the YouTube video of his recent talk at this year's Rails World conference in Toronto. The Rails community is leaning hard into SQLite right now. Stephen's talk is some of the most effective evangelism I've seen anywhere for SQLite as a production database for web applications, ...

[red-knot] type inference/checking test framework Ruff maintainer Carl Meyer recently landed an interesting new design for a testing framework. It's based on Markdown, and could be described as a form of "literate testing" - the testing equivalent of Donald Knuth's literate programming. A markdown test file is a suite of tests, each test can contain one or more Python files, with optionally sp...

So there I am, working on a bug exclusive to Safari (we’ve all been there). I can’t figure it out so I ask AI, “Hey, this piece of code is not working in Safari, what’s wrong?” The issue might be related to how Safari handles keyboard events, especially for certain keys… It gives me some advice: Ensure the listener is setup correctly Check for the meta key being pressed I’ve been staring at...

Un Ministral, des Ministraux Two new models from Mistral: Ministral 3B and Ministral 8B - joining Mixtral, Pixtral, Codestral and Mathstral as weird naming variants on the Mistral theme. These models set a new frontier in knowledge, commonsense, reasoning, function-calling, and efficiency in the sub-10B category, and can be used or tuned to a variety of uses, from orchestrating agentic workflo...

UI abstractions continue to evolve year over year. Let's talk about a couple of them, what they do, a little about why, and tease them a bit with silly names. Folks don't say skinless, boneless or lifeless. I'm teasing these strategies, but also, I think these labels may make more sense than how we talk about them now. I won't be covering components with heads,...

A common misconception about Transformers is to believe that they're a sequence-processing architecture. They're not. They're a set-processing architecture. Transformers are 100% order-agnostic (which was the big innovation compared to RNNs, back in late 2016 -- you compute the full matrix of pairwise token interactions instead of processing one token at a time). The way you add order awareness...

True to form, Heydon Pickering has written another blistering account of one of the most ubiquitous HTML elements, the <blockquote>. You’ve probably used a <blockquote> when writing HTML. I know I’ve used literally hundreds of them. What I didn’t know is that I’ve been using them wrong all these years. To pilfer a few choice quotes from said article: In HTML5, <blockquote> co...

Content Security Policy (CSP) acts like a shield against XSS attacks. These attacks are sneaky - they trick your browser into running malicious code by hiding it in content that seems trustworthy. CSP's job is to spot these tricks and shut them down, while also alerting you to any attempts it detects.

The XOXO 2024 Talks I missed attending the last XOXO in person, but I've been catching up on the videos of the talks over the past few days and they have been absolutely worth spending time with. This year was a single day with ten speakers. Andy Baio explains the intended formula: I usually explain that the conference is about, more than anything, the emotional experience of being an artist o...

The problem with passkeys is that they're essentially a halfway house to a password manager, but tied to a specific platform in ways that aren't obvious to a user at all, and liable to easily leave them unable to access of their accounts. [...] Chrome on Windows stores your passkeys in Windows Hello, so if you sign up for a service on Windows, and you then want to access it on iPhone, you're go...

How The Conversation’s article on Trump’s DJ session missed the mark and normalized a campaign fiasco.Donald Trump just ditched his own town hall questions for a surprise DJ set. Ridiculous? Definitely. But somehow, Matt Harris in The Conversation frames this surreal stunt as just another

PATH tips on wizard zines New Julia Evans comic, from which I learned that the which -a X command shows you all of the versions of that command that are available in the directories on your current PATH. This is so useful! I used it to explore my currently available Python versions: $ which -a python /opt/homebrew/Caskroom/miniconda/base/bin/python $ which -a python3 /opt/homebrew/Caskroom/...

Breaking down a right-wing hit job on Kamala Harris—amplified yet again by the New York Times.Well, here we are again, folks. It seems the New York Times has once more fallen into the trap of "publish first, question later" when it comes to Kamala Harris.

There's a meme floating around at the moment where you ask ChatGPT the following and it appears to offer deep insight into your personality: From all of our interactions what is one thing that you can tell me about myself that I may not know about myself Don't be fooled into thinking there's anything deep going on here. It's effectively acting like a horoscope, hooking into the poorly underst...

A look at how we test our products within the Shape Up framework.

When Evan You announced VoidZero, I'll admit - I got excited. And a little nervous.

How governments and politicians keep screwing up technology (and what it means for all of us)Tech and politics have, on many occasions, felt like a forced marriage—or more accurately, a complete fucking mess—rather than anything remotely harmonious.Sure, there are moments when the latest innovation

I beam with pride when I see companies like Shopify, GitHub, Gusto, Zendesk, Instacart, Procore, Doximity, Coinbase, and others claim billion-dollar valuations from work done with Rails. It's beyond satisfying to see this much value created with a web framework I've spent the last two decades evolving and maintaining. A beautiful prize from a life's work realized.But it's als...

In Penn & Teller’s Masterclass (no. 12 “Principles of Performing”) they explain how one of their favorite ways to design a magic trick is to come up with an idea and then act it out as if they already know how to do it. Here’s Penn: We still start with an idea for a trick, how we want the whole thing to go without knowing how we’re gonna do it…Some of our best tricks have come from [this w...

My Jina Reader tool I wanted to feed the Cloudflare Durable Objects SQLite documentation into Claude, but I was on my iPhone so copying and pasting was inconvenient. Jina offer a Reader API which can turn any URL into LLM-friendly Markdown and it turns out it supports CORS, so I got Claude to build me this tool (second iteration, third iteration, final source code). Paste in a URL to get the Ji...

Call me, maybe Remember the telephone? I grew up in the 1980s, and the phone was a pretty critical piece daily of tech. I used it to talk to my friends. I used it to find out if a book I wanted was available at the library (there was no online card catalog, because there was no “online”). I used it to call Infocom when I was stuck in the hardest game I’ve ever played. I used the phone a lot. La...

I was listening to a podcast episode the other day while I was driving and in there there was a thought that stuck with me: the idea that the web is moving from a creator economy to a curator economy. With a web flooded with AI generated slop and the platforms themselves encouraging it, the role of curators is gonna become more and more important. Who knows, maybe with a digital world filled wi...

Grant Negotiation and Authorization Protocol (GNAP) RFC 9635 was published a few days ago. GNAP is effectively OAuth 3 - it's a newly standardized design for a protocol for delegating authorization so an application can access data on your behalf. The most interesting difference between GNAP and OAuth 2 is that GNAP no longer requires clients to be registered in advance. With OAuth the client_i...

I Was A Teenage Foot Clan Ninja My name is Danny Pennington, I am 48 years old, and between 1988 in 1995 I was a ninja in the Foot Clan. I enjoyed this TMNT parody a lot. Tags: youtube

Are you obsessed with someone you’ve never met? The dark side of parasocial relationships, explained.You're scrolling through Instragram. You pause on a post from your favorite lifestyle guru. She's sharing her morning routine, complete with a perfectly framed latte and an inspirational quote.

Weekly summary of new Baseline items in BCD data

I love the js-framework-benchmark. It’s a true open-source success story – a shared benchmark, with contributions from various JavaScript framework authors, widely cited, and used to push the entire JavaScript ecosystem forward. It’s a rare marvel. That said, the benchmark is so good that it’s sometimes taken as the One True Measure of a web […]

In an earlier era, we'd all have been glued to the television to cheer SpaceX successfully catching Starship's returning booster rocket on the first try. I remember my father talking about seeing Apollo 11 make it to the moon. That was a lifelong memory for him. And I remember, as a six-year old boy, watching the fatal Challenger explosion on TV. That's been a lifelong memory for...

Dissecting and reworking a very nice demo by Paul Noble.

I'm solidly in favor of the Benevolent Dictator For Life (BDFL) model of open source stewardship. This is how projects from Linux to Python, from Laravel to Ruby, and yes, Rails, have kept their cohesion, decisiveness, and forward motion. It's a model with decades worth of achievements to its name. But it's not a mandate from heaven. It's not infallible.Now I am loathe to eve...

Erin Kissane, of the Fediversalist Papers, has announced the launch of her new studio, wreckage/salvage. Even though I am off of social media now, I am excited to see what she comes up with, so I’m subscribed to the RSS feed on the site. Personally, I’m pessimistic that it’s possible to have pro-social social media — at least in the sense of social media that is one big network of everybody lik...

These Magic: The Gathering cards are gorgeous. I got rid of my Magic cards years ago, but I am genuinely tempted to buy these just because I love Helvetica Blanc’s art so much. I mean just look at “Teferi’s Ageless Insight”! Comments, questions, suggestions? Email me at [email protected].

In a contest between specific suggestions and vague suggestions, the specific suggestion wins. This, according to Mike Monteiro, is how to make choices using The Strong Choice Doctrine. The way we do this in our house is that a strong choice wins. We call this The Strong Choice Doctrine™. For example: if I say that I want to watch a movie, and Erika says “Let’s watch Invasion of the Bee Girls”...

Opened an anchor bug a couple weeks ago. The most bizarre thing was happening with the auto flip feature of anchor positioning. See the Pen Hot text-emphasis by Adam Argyle (@argyleink) on CodePen. or so I thought… prob # When I had like > 1000px viewport, the anchored ...

We're often focused on big innovations and breakthrough moments. But what if the real key to long-term success lies in the small, everyday actions we often overlook?

How to implement the Open-Dyslexic font to enhance readability for users with dyslexia

I finally picked up a Teenage Engineering TP-7.I've been experimenting with dictating random ideas lately. And while the phone is typically more convenient, I wanted to have a separate recorder on my desk.The TP-7 is an absolutely charming piece of hardware. Reminds me of all the things I loved about some of those high precision portable Sony products from decades a...

1. How do you create an internet archive of all human knowledge? (NPR). Transcript of a 12 minute interview with Brewster Kahle, founder of the Internet Archive. The average life of a webpage before it’s either changed or deleted is a hundred days. Kahle realised, back in 1996, that our collective digital memory was going to be a problem. He did something about it. The Internet Archive curre...

This is the 59th edition of People and Blogs, the series where I ask interesting people to talk about themselves and their blogs. Today we have Chris O'Donnell and his blog, odonnellweb.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 subscrib...

School is back in session, sports are in full swing, we’re tossed and turned by the weekly routine. This past month has been a season of fixing and repair and I’m thankful everything went well and we’re (hopefully) through the hard parts. Fixing electrical problems Ramping up to Spooky Month, the lights in our house were acting up. We’ve always had the occasional power problem; lights dimming, ...

See ya in Nantes, France for DevFest! Watch out for my talk on Amazing CSS in 2024. 🩸🩸🩸 Slides 🩸🩸🩸

The truth behind Polymarket’s Trump odds: When betting becomes a game of perception.Prediction markets have always been intriguing, especially when big events like elections are on the line. They take the buzz of public opinion and turn it into odds, promising to predict outcomes better than pollsters