Nine years ago, I wrote an article titled A Business Case for Craft versus WordPress, in response to a client who wanted to understand why the agency I was working for chose Craft CMS over WordPress. At that time, we had been using Craft for about eight months, and I had completed seven Craft builds. […] The post A business case for Craft versus WordPress 2025 appeared first on Jeff Bridg...

I just played a silly web-based, LLM-run, text-adventure about trying not to get fired from X. Based on the stories of Musk dragging people into chats or receiving emails from them, demanding to know what they’re doing, and how it’s going to make a difference at X. If you can hold down the nausea, stroking Elon’s ego and bootlicking is easy-mode to victory. Though I didn&rsquo...

I recently bought a new motorbike and managed to drop my phone while riding it. Oh joy. I've been having a pretty tough time in work recently and, as a result, in my personal life too. So I decided to do something for myself - I bought myself a new motorbike. Not just any motorbike though, I decided to throw caution to the wind and bought myself a brand new BMW S1000 XR TE with pretty much ever...

When you use your phone to play this game, it really does look indistinguishable from being on your phone. Weird!

It seems to me that "vibe checks" for how smart a model feels are easily gameable by making it have a better personality. My guess is that it's most of the reason Sonnet 3.5.1 was so beloved. Its personality was made much more appealing, compared to e. g. OpenAI's corporate drones. [...] Deep Research was this for me, at first. Some of its summaries were just pleasant to read, they felt so info...

Building Websites With Lots of Little HTML Pages Jim Nielsen coins a confusing new acronym - LLMS for (L)ots of (L)ittle ht(M)l page(S). He's using this to describe his latest site refresh which makes extensive use of cross-document view transitions - a fabulous new progressive enhancement CSS technique that's supported in Chrome and Safari (and hopefully soon in Firefox). With cross-document ...

Weekly summary of new Baseline items in BCD data

POSSE stands for "Publish on your Own Site, Syndicate Elsewhere". It means a content is published on a site you own first, then you publish the same thing on social media, such as Bluesky, LinkedIn, or Mastodon. I started blogging in 2014 (you can still go and read the very first post!). It started as I believe how most people start their blogs: press publish, then nothing happens, 0 visitors f...

We curate ourselves into something safe. We smooth out our rough edges. We keep things palatable, we stay detached, we’re less invested, we’re dedicated to avoiding embarrassment at all costs.That’s the mantra. Be cool. Be aloof. Don’t try too hard. Don&

I've been using Claude Code for a couple of days, and it has been absolutely ruthless in chewing through legacy bugs in my gnarly old code base. It's like a wood chipper fueled by dollars. It can power through shockingly impressive tasks, using nothing but chat. [...] Claude Code's form factor is clunky as hell, it has no multimodal support, and it's hard to juggle with other tools. But it does...

wolf-h3-viewer.glitch.me Neat interactive visualization of Uber's H3 hexagonal geographical indexing mechanism. Here's the source code. Why does H3 use hexagons? Because Hexagons are the Bestagons: When hexagons come together, they form three-sided joints 120 degrees apart. This, for the least material, is the most mechanically stable arrangement. Only triangles, squares, and hexagons can ti...

And to the beach we went!

I presented two sessions at the NICAR 2025 data journalism conference this year. The first was this one based on my review of LLMs in 2024, extended by several months to cover everything that's happened in 2025 so far. The second was a workshop on Cutting-edge web scraping techniques, which I've written up separately. Here are the slides and detailed notes from my review of what's new in LLMs,...

Cutting-edge web scraping techniques at NICAR Here's the handout for a workshop I presented this morning at NICAR 2025 on web scraping, focusing on lesser know tips and tricks that became possible only with recent developments in LLMs. For workshops like this I like to work off an extremely detailed handout, so that people can move at their own pace or catch up later if they didn't get everythi...

Street Art Utopia “Darth Fisher sculpture by Frankey for Amsterdam Light Festival in Amsterdam, The Netherlands. Photos by Janus van den Eijnden.” Tech Stuff Claude Code overview The Agentic AI revolution is taking shape and apparently Claude Code is this week's top contender. I just tested

Politico: 5 Questions for Jack Clark I tend to ignore statements with this much future-facing hype, especially when they come from AI labs who are both raising money and trying to influence US technical policy. Anthropic's Jack Clark has an excellent long-running newsletter which causes me to take him more seriously than many other sources. Jack says: In 2025 myself and @AnthropicAI will be mo...

Apple Is Delaying the ‘More Personalized Siri’ Apple Intelligence Features Apple told John Gruber (and other Apple press) this about the new "personalized" Siri: It’s going to take us longer than we thought to deliver on these features and we anticipate rolling them out in the coming year. I have a hunch that this delay might relate to security. These new Apple Intelligence features involve S...

State-of-the-art text embedding via the Gemini API Gemini just released their new text embedding model, with the snappy name gemini-embedding-exp-03-07. It supports 8,000 input tokens - up from 3,000 - and outputs vectors that are a lot larger than their previous text-embedding-004 model - that one output size 768 vectors, the new model outputs 3072. Storing that many floating point numbers for...

In the spirit of: if you don’t ask, you don’t get… There are some people I’d like to meet! They are ”speculatively things I do professionally in the world”-related though not immediately work related. So here’s my wish list. Books! I have a couple ideas for nonfiction books. Accessible stuff, more airport book than coffee table or theory book; more “biz” than pop sci. It would be great to kick...

It’s a question I was thinking about the other day while I was wandering around with the dog. Most of the content of this site is pretty “standard”, in the grand scheme of things. I write about the things I find interesting, I share my thoughts on topics I find myself thinking about. I sometimes publish a rant if I’m frustrated by something and I post the occasional picture. As I said, pretty s...

Quite a few updates to share this week! The weather has been absolutely amazing these past few days. It's finally sunny and warm and nature is waking up! We've made some good progress on the project to insulate the garage. We finally have a pretty good game plan and we can close on some deals to make it happen. Another thing that's finally out of the way (I hope, let's wait another few days) i...

New in Chrome 134 on Android: the ability to place the Address Bar (aka “Omnibox”) at the bottom. To enable it, go to Chrome’s Settings, locate and tap “Address Bar”, and choose “Bottom”.

This is the 80th edition of People and Blogs, the series where I ask interesting people to talk about themselves and their blogs. Today we have James and his blog, jamesg.blog 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 RSS f...

For years, the internet has been shrinking. Not in size, not in data, but in ownership. A vast, decentralized network of personal blogs, forums, and independent communities has been corralled into a handful of paved prison yards controlled by a few massive corporations. Every post, every “friend,” every

The phase space of coffee is large enough that many people can wait for their orders without collision, and that means the barista doesn’t need to take names, and you don’t need to memorise your place in line. By which I mean: the gap between ordering and collecting is, say, 5 minutes, and so there might be 5 people waiting. And given the permutations of drink type, sizes, and quantity, it’s u...

Mistral OCR New closed-source specialist OCR model by Mistral - you can feed it images or a PDF and it produces Markdown with optional embedded images. It's available via their API, or it's "available to self-host on a selective basis" for people with stringent privacy requirements who are willing to talk to their sales team. I decided to try out their API, so I copied and pasted example code f...

Create the conditions where engineers want to excel and they'll surpass your expectations

The latest version of Chrome (134) comes with a new light-dismiss behavior for the dialog element, which enables a native click-outside feature. That's fantastic! Reading the announcement, I wondered how many ways there are to close a dialog element.The specification states that a user can send a close request to the user agent, indicating that the user wishes to close something currently being...

monolith Neat CLI tool built in Rust that can create a single packaged HTML file of a web page plus all of its dependencies. cargo install monolith # or brew install monolith https://simonwillison.net/ > simonwillison.html That command produced this 1.5MB single file result. All of the linked images, CSS and JavaScript assets have had their contents inlined into base64 URIs in their src= an...

I know I’m a bit late in posting this news, but I’ve been playing quite a bit of C&C via Steam (it’s on sale). The source code for many of the games that appear in the remastered collection are now available! Renegade Generals (+Zero Hour) Tiberian Dawn Remastered Collection Mission Editor Modding support This will be a great help to OpenRA, I’m sure. News about th...

I recently switched to LibreWolf as my default browser, and I also wanted links to open by default inside it, but there isn't an option in LibreWolf like in other browsers.Luckily, there's another way. At least I found a solution for macOS: Click the Apple menu  in the corner of your screen. Select System settings. Select Desktop & Dock. Scroll down a bit. Under Widgets you can select yo...

Will the future of software development run on vibes? I got a few quotes in this piece by Benj Edwards about vibe coding, the term Andrej Karpathy coined for when you prompt an LLM to write code, accept all changes and keep feeding it prompts and error messages and see what you can get it to build. Here's what I originally sent to Benj: I really enjoy vibe coding - it's a fun way to play with ...

Aider: Using uv as an installer Paul Gauthier has an innovative solution for the challenge of helping end users get a copy of his Aider CLI Python utility installed in an isolated virtual environment without first needing to teach them what an "isolated virtual environment" is. Provided you already have a Python install of version 3.8 or higher you can run this: pip install aider-install &&...

I posted something on Mastodon that uses Unicode math symbols to produce fake bold and fake italic text. I used YayText.com to generate it, but I am not linking it because you I don’t want you to use it. I embedded the post, but you can go to it directly…

I've already written about how the fact that the initial value of a custom property is a guaranteed-invalid value can lead to unexpected results. Today, I realized how that can be problematic when you use custom properties in shorthand properties.A quick recap When you set a valid value for a property followed by another declaration with an invalid value, the second declaration will be ignored....

CSS anchor positioning simplifies popovers and dropdowns, and also unlocks new creative possibilities. James joined Jason to teach and explore anchor positioning in live code.

A common pattern is to call an async function and return its result: const helloWorld = async () => { return await asyncHello("World"); } // Hello World Why the await? It would work exactly the same without it, so it's just taking up space. Yes, but: let's add a try..catch block around it: try { return await asyncHello("World"); }catch(e) { return "Whops"; } // Whops It works as expected: ...

The Graphing Calculator Story Utterly delightful story from Ron Avitzur in 2004 about the origins of the Graphing Calculator app that shipped with many versions of macOS. Ron's contract with Apple had ended but his badge kept working so he kept on letting himself in to work on the project. He even grew a small team: I asked my friend Greg Robbins to help me. His contract in another division at...

My current project: I've been dusting off the old hard drives with my ripped CD collection and loading them into an iPod. A 20-year-old piece of tech with its click wheel intact, no WiFi, and no algorithm feeding me recommendations I didn't ask for. The result:

Demo of ChatGPT Code Interpreter running in o3-mini-high OpenAI made GPT-4.5 available to Plus ($20/month) users today. I was a little disappointed with GPT-4.5 when I tried it through the API, but having access in the ChatGPT interface meant I could use it with existing tools such as Code Interpreter which made its strengths a whole lot more evident - that’s a transcript where I had it design ...

Career Update: Google DeepMind -> Anthropic Nicholas Carlini (previously) on joining Anthropic, driven partly by his frustration at friction he encountered publishing his research at Google DeepMind after their merge with Google Brain. His area of expertise is adversarial machine learning. The recent advances in machine learning and language modeling are going to be transformative [d] But i...

QwQ-32B: Embracing the Power of Reinforcement Learning New Apache 2 licensed reasoning model from Qwen: We are excited to introduce QwQ-32B, a model with 32 billion parameters that achieves performance comparable to DeepSeek-R1, which boasts 671 billion parameters (with 37 billion activated). This remarkable outcome underscores the effectiveness of RL when applied to robust foundation models p...

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Yesterday, Apple announced some new iPads. As the owner of a 2018 6th-generation iPad, I had been looking forward to this announcement since January, when I decided I wanted a new one but saw that the previous model was way too old and would probably be replaced in early spring. I pre-ordered mine yesterday as soon as I saw the announcement and will now anxiously wait for March 12. (One week to...

I don't run analytics tools on my blog or The Index.Why would I?I don’t write for numbers. I write for people.There are no ads, no sponsors, and no investors to placate with colorful graphs and charts.In my experience, most metrics measure the

Beware when manipulating the coordinates of the View Transition’s ::view-transition-group(*) pseudo. Depending on where you read those coordinates from, you might end up with layout jumps when writing them back. This post details the pitfalls and how to deal with them, unlocking more performant animations on the ::view-transition-group() pseudo along the way.

Yes, the Party of Free Speech and morals, indeed. Quoted for those who can’t see images1: All Federal Funding will STOP for any College, School, or University that allows illegal protests. Agitators will be imprisoned/or permanently sent back to the country from which they came. American students will be permanently expelled or, depending on on the crime, arr...

A Practical Guide to Implementing DeepSearch / DeepResearch I really like the definitions Han Xiao from Jina AI proposes for the terms DeepSearch and DeepResearch in this piece: DeepSearch runs through an iterative loop of searching, reading, and reasoning until it finds the optimal answer. [...] DeepResearch builds upon DeepSearch by adding a structured framework for generating long research...

Why I'm so excited for another Tony Hawk remaster

So hatte ich mir den Jahresstart nicht vorgestellt. Nach der schönen Zeit in Frankreich wollte ich eigentlich stoisch-regelmäßig durch den dunklen Januar traben und im Februar wieder die NRftW-Challenge mitmachen. Also so richtig motiviert den Winter abschliessen, Kilometer sammeln, frische Luft tanken, volles Brett einfach viel laufen. Das hat dann allerdings nicht so gut geklappt. […]

This blog is not being cross-posted anymore. Not to Mastodon, not to Bluesy, not to Micro.blog. The reason behind is that I never really found a good workflow on those things. So now it’s just a regular blog. If I want it to be shared, I can take the link and share myself. If you are interested, you can always follow the RSS feed. I am also not paying much attention to social media latel...

Last month, Robert Birming asked headers of his blog to keep an eye for interesting posts shared in February and to send him, as he is compiling a list of those. Fabruary was born. Go take a look if you are looking for something nice to read. Lots of nice posts being shared.

Posted this earlier on Mastodon, but it also belongs to the blog. I got this nice LEGO camera as a gift last week: So I created a custom camera on Hipstamatic to simulate a plastic camera and went on a photo walk Sunday: If you would like to comment, feel free to drop me an email

llm-ollama 0.9.0 This release of the llm-ollama plugin adds support for schemas, thanks to a PR by Adam Compton. Ollama provides very robust support for this pattern thanks to their structured outputs feature, which works across all of the models that they support by intercepting the logic that outputs the next token and restricting it to only tokens that would be valid in the context of the pr...

llm-mistral 0.11 I added schema support to this plugin which adds support for the Mistral API to LLM. Release notes: Support for LLM schemas. #19 -o prefix '{' option for forcing a response prefix. #18 Schemas now work with OpenAI, Anthropic, Gemini and Mistral hosted models, plus self-hosted models via Ollama and llm-ollama. Tags: projects, mistral, llm, plugins, llms, ai, generative-ai

Big Tech designed their platforms to keep you trapped.YouTube, X, Instagram, and TikTok aren't neutral spaces. They're businesses built on capturing your attention and data. Their algorithms, notification systems, and content policies all serve one purpose: keeping you engaged on their terms. And their terms

I believe that the price you have to pay for taking on a project is writing about it afterwards. On that basis, I feel compelled to write up my decidedly non-software project from this weekend: Squadron, an automaton. I've been obsessed with automata for decades, ever since I first encountered the Cabaret Mechanical Theater in Covent Garden in London (there from 1984-2003 - today it's a roaming...

So many links to share and not enough time

Apparently, there is a company named Mitsubishi with the exact three-diamond logo as the car company. Actually, there are a lot of companies named Mitsubishi in Japan. The one I’m talking about actually trades internationally as ‘Uni’. You know, the absolutely awesome Uni-ball pens? Yeah, they’ve made pencils for hundreds of years. As a matter of fact, they had quite a r...

The features of Python's help() function I've only ever used Python's help() feature by passing references to modules, classes functions and objects to it. Trey Hunner just taught me that it accepts strings too - help("**") tells you about the ** operator, help("if") describes the if statement and help("topics") reveals even more options, including things like help("SPECIALATTRIBUTES") to ...

While I have little love for either JavaScript or Oracle, I find it odd that Oracle somehow wound up with the JavaScript trademark. I am, however, completely unsurprised that they haven’t given it up, despite doing nominally nothing with it. I guess ECMAScript is probably the preferred name, despite it sounding like a boring design-by-committee language. Nothing about JavaScript (or Yavas...

Since Trump took office on Jan. 20 this year, he and his henchman have done many things that bewildered me. I assume that most of you are following the news, so you know what I’m talking about, but here are some things I found especially cruel and disgusting. Terminated diversity, equity, and inclusion programs across the federal government Granted clemency to everyone charged in connection wit...

Weekly summary of new Baseline items in BCD data

The choice of abstractions have a huge impact on productivity and whether working with a system feels frustrating or not. Imagine a system where you can track the position of a car fleet. What is the good level of abstraction here? You can say that since all you're tracking are cars, they can have licence plate numbers, registration numbers, and one person who is driving them. Is that a good ab...

TL;DR: anyone promising you that a total solution to digital accessibility is coming, and they are the ones bringing it, may be lying. Background In 2016 I wrote Be Wary of Accessibility Guarantees from Vendors. At the time I was cautioning readers about libraries and frameworks and SaaS and so…

25.9% of teenagers who spend four or more hours daily on screens experienced depression symptoms in the past two weeks. 27.1% reported anxiety symptoms.Higher durations of Internet use increases depression levels. Adolescents who spend more than three hours online daily are more likely to fall into the

After publishing this piece, I was contacted by Anthropic who told me that Sonnet 3.7 would not be considered a 10^26 FLOP model and cost a few tens of millions of dollars to train, though future models will be much bigger. — Ethan Mollick Tags: ethan-mollick, anthropic, claude, generative-ai, ai, llms

I was a guest on the most recent episode of the Accessibility + Gen AI Podcast, hosted by Eamon McErlean and Joe Devon. We had a really fun, wide-ranging conversation about a host of different topics. I've extracted a few choice quotes from the transcript. LLMs for drafting alt text I use LLMs for the first draft of my alt text (22:10): I actually use Large Language Models for most of my ...

Regarding the recent blog post, I think a simpler explanation is that hallucinating a non-existent library is a such an inhuman error it throws people. A human making such an error would be almost unforgivably careless. — Kellan Elliott-McCrea Tags: ai-assisted-programming, generative-ai, kellan-elliott-mccrea, ai, llms

18f.org New site by members of 18F, the team within the US government that were doing some of the most effective work at improving government efficiency. For over 11 years, 18F has been proudly serving you to make government technology work better. We are non-partisan civil servants. 18F has worked on hundreds of projects, all designed to make government technology not just efficient but effec...

A surprisingly common complaint I see from developers who have tried using LLMs for code is that they encountered a hallucination - usually the LLM inventing a method or even a full software library that doesn't exist - and it crashed their confidence in LLMs as a tool for writing code. How could anyone productively use these things if they invent methods that don't exist? Hallucinations in cod...

AGENT: I am prescribing vardenafil 5 mg for you.

I can now purchase $1.50 hot dogs and drinks to my heart’s content! No one can stop me! It was alright. I didn’t buy any hot dogs. We got the membership because of a car repair deal that comes with it. Dunno how useful it’ll be over say, BJ’s.

There is something perverse about every voice of record, every journalist with a profile, every writer with an audience abandoning ship for Substack. It's been a growing trend for the past few years, and it's getting worse. Substack has done an excellent job convincing intelligent people

Elise “periodic reminder that Barcelona has a supercomputer inside an old church and it's one of the most rad things you can see” Tech Stuff macOS Tips & Tricks It's going to take me forever to learn all of these shortcuts, or even just

llm-anthropic #24: Use new URL parameter to send attachments Anthropic released a neat quality of life improvement today. Alex Albert: We've added the ability to specify a public facing URL as the source for an image / document block in the Anthropic API Prior to this, any time you wanted to send an image to the Claude API you needed to base64-encode it and then include that data in the JSON....

strip-tags 0.6 It's been a while since I updated this tool, but in investigating a tricky mistake in my tutorial for LLM schemas I discovered a bug that I needed to fix. Those release notes in full: Fixed a bug where strip-tags -t meta still removed <meta> tags from the <head> because the entire <head> element was removed first. #32 Kept <meta> tags now default to keep...