LLM SVG Generation Benchmark Here's a delightful project by Tom Gally, inspired by my pelican SVG benchmark. He asked Claude to help create more prompts of the form Generate an SVG of [A] [doing] [B] and then ran 30 creative prompts against 9 frontier models - prompts like "an octopus operating a pipe organ" or "a starfish driving a bulldozer". Here are some for "butterfly inspecting a steam en...

If the person is unnecessarily rude, mean, or insulting to Claude, Claude doesn't need to apologize and can insist on kindness and dignity from the person it’s talking with. Even if someone is frustrated or unhappy, Claude is deserving of respectful engagement. — Claude Opus 4.5 system prompt, also added to the Sonnet 4.5 and Haiku 4.5 prompts on November 19th 2025 Tags: system-promp...

Anthropic released Claude Opus 4.5 this morning, which they call "best model in the world for coding, agents, and computer use". This is their attempt to retake the crown for best coding model after significant challenges from OpenAI's GPT-5.1-Codex-Max and Google's Gemini 3, both released within the past week! The core characteristics of Opus 4.5 are a 200,000 token context (same as Sonnet), 6...

sqlite-utils 3.39 I got a report of a bug in sqlite-utils concerning plugin installation - if you installed the package using uv tool install further attempts to install plugins with sqlite-utils install X would fail, because uv doesn't bundle pip by default. I had the same bug with Datasette a while ago, turns out I forgot to apply the fix to sqlite-utils. Since I was pushing a new dot-release...

I released a new alpha version of sqlite-utils last night - the 128th release of that package since I started building it back in 2018. sqlite-utils is two things in one package: a Python library for conveniently creating and manipulating SQLite databases and a CLI tool for working with them in the terminal. Almost every feature provided by the package is available via both of those surfaces. T...

This form dynamically changes the labels for the Surname and Forename field based on the value of the Gender field. Wut? Because a Male Surname is totally distinct and nothing like a Female Surname, I guess?!?

I’ve deleted my u/coignard account on Reddit and stopped using Spotify. Regarding Reddit: I found myself today reading comments under a post discussing a rather contentious topic, and suddenly thought: “what am I doing here?” Indeed: what am I doing there? It seems to me that Reddit has long since become just another internet cesspit. In the Russian-speaking segment, an analogous cesspit exists...

There’s something unique about visiting WW memorials. I don’t even know how to explain it. It’s a strange mix of awe, sorrow, gratefulness, and many other feelings all bunched together. Thank you for keeping RSS alive. You're awesome. Email me :: Sign my guestbook :: Support for 1$/month :: See my generous supporters :: Subscribe to Pe...

The Philadelphia Animation Ensemble, Jennifer Levonian, Alex Salvitti, Greta Motter, Jack Gray, and 86 more My unexcused absence from social media kept me from finding out about the first-ever Philly Animation Festival until just a few days before it started, but luckily that was enough time for me to get a festival pass and make plans to attend every screening except the one for kids. In kee...

"Good engineering management" is a fad Will Larson argues that the technology industry's idea of what makes a good engineering manager changes over time based on industry realities. ZIRP hypergrowth has been exchanged for a more cautious approach today, and expectations of managers has changed to match: Where things get weird is that in each case a morality tale was subsequently supe...

The data is in. The number one requested resource on my blog which doesn’t exist is: /robots.txt According to Netlify’s analytics, that resources was requested 15,553 times over the last thirty days. Same story for other personal projects I manage: iOS Icon Gallery: 18,531 requests. macOS Icon Gallery 10,565 requests. “That many requests and it serves a 404? Damn Jim, you better fix that quic...

Added to the film diary:Deadline at DawnHarold Clurman, 1946, ★★★½ Tagged: November 2025 Reply via email

Agent design is still hard Armin Ronacher presents a cornucopia of lessons learned from building agents over the past few months. There are several agent abstraction libraries available now (my own LLM library is edging into that territory with its tools feature) but Armin has found that the abstractions are not worth adopting yet: […] the differences between models are significant enough that...

Olmo is the LLM series from Ai2 - the Allen institute for AI. Unlike most open weight models these are notable for including the full training data, training process and checkpoints along with those releases. The new Olmo 3 claims to be "the best fully open 32B-scale thinking model" and has a strong focus on interpretability: At its center is Olmo 3-Think (32B), the best fully open 32B-scale t...

This is how the Great Notes Consolidation plan begins! Now it will probably take me a decade to have this all organised! 🤣

Sinterklaas! We saw his arrival last weekend in The Hague, but my photos were not good. Glad I got a nice one today.

I’ve never been much more than a casual fan of Stars of the Lid, but I’m always excited to see an impassioned archival project, and Jon Hicks has done a stellar job assembling this home for the band’s live recordings. Don’t miss Jon’s post about how the site came together. 🔗 Go to this link Tagged: November 2025, design, music, links, Stars of the Lid, Jon Hicks Reply via email

Huh, what a handy little tool. I can do stuff like this to avoid inlining CSS and getting stupid CSP errors. {{- $added := ".added{color:#888}" -}} {{- $css := resources.FromString "/assets/stylesheets/bookmarks.css" $added | minify | fingerprint -}} <link rel="stylesheet" href="{{ $css.RelPermalink }}" integrity="{{ $css.Data.Integrity }}" type="t...

We should all be using dependency cooldowns William Woodruff gives a name to a sensible strategy for managing dependencies while reducing the chances of a surprise supply chain attack: dependency cooldowns. Supply chain attacks happen when an attacker compromises a widely used open source package and publishes a new version with an exploit. These are usually spotted very quickly, so an attack o...

If you would like to send me a postcard or correspond with me by regular mail, I hope you will find my actual postal address useful.René CoignardFritz-Weineck-Straße 306766 Wolfen OT Wolfen-NordGermanyYou can also send mail to my PO box:René CoignardPostfach 11 0306754 WolfenGermany

This week on the People and Blogs series we have an interview with Alexandra Wolfe, whose blog can be found at wrywriter.ca. Tired of RSS? Read this in your browser or sign up for the newsletter. The People and Blogs series is supported by Karen and the other 125 members of my "One a Month" club. If you enjoy P&B, consider becoming one for as little as 1 dollar a month. ...

Your computer runs tons of processes in the background, and pulling a plug out of a socket when it is in the middle of something is not a good idea. Doing that to your running service is also pretty risky, but this is precisely what happens when you terminate your running server via ⌃ + c (that sends a SIGINT signal) or when your orchestration tool redeploys (SIGTERM). To be super accurate, it ...

Today marks four years since I registered the domain for my weblog, renecoignard.com. I’d never kept count of how long I’d been using it, but recently I noticed quite by chance that its birthday was coming up. Well then, I thought, this is a good opportunity to share something interesting related to it. Say, the history of the surname I once chose for myself in place of the one I inherited from...

Hot on the heels of Tuesday's Gemini 3 Pro release, today it's Nano Banana Pro, also known as Gemini 3 Pro Image. I've had a few days of preview access and this is an astonishingly capable image generation model. As is often the case, the most useful low-level details can be found in the API documentation: Designed to tackle the most challenging workflows through advanced reasoning, it excels ...

Previously, when malware developers wanted to go and monetize their exploits, they would do exactly one thing: encrypt every file on a person's computer and request a ransome to decrypt the files. In the future I think this will change. LLMs allow attackers to instead process every file on the victim's computer, and tailor a blackmail letter specifically towards that person. One person may be h...

Building more with GPT-5.1-Codex-Max Hot on the heels of yesterday's Gemini 3 Pro release comes a new model from OpenAI called GPT-5.1-Codex-Max. (Remember when GPT-5 was meant to bring in a new era of less confusing model names? That didn't last!) It's currently only available through their Codex CLI coding agent, where it's the new default model: Starting today, GPT‑5.1-Codex-Max will replac...

I sent out my weekly-ish Substack newsletter this morning and took the opportunity to record a YouTube video demonstrating my process and describing the different components that make it work. There's a lot of digital duct tape involved, taking the content from Django+Heroku+PostgreSQL to GitHub Actions to SQLite+Datasette+Fly.io to JavaScript+Observable and finally to Substack. The core pr...

I enjoyed listening to Feross Aboukhadijeh, founder and CEO of the security firm Socket, on the Changelog podcast “npm under siege”. The cat-and-mouse nature of security is a kind of infinite source of novel content, like a series of heist movies that never produces the same plot so you can never quite guess what happens next. I like how succintly Feross points out the paradox of trying to keep...

I’m spinning up something new with a buddy and you can guess what it is by what I’ve been writing about recently. Big picture, there are two visions for the future of computing: cyborgs and rooms. I’m Team Augmented Environments. Mainly because so much of what I care about happens in small groups in physical space: family time, team collaboration, all the rest. Then what happens when we’re tog...

Cloudflare's network began experiencing significant failures to deliver core network traffic [...] triggered by a change to one of our database systems' permissions which caused the database to output multiple entries into a “feature file” used by our Bot Management system. That feature file, in turn, doubled in size. The larger-than-expected feature file was then propagated to all the machines...

Your competitors will eat your lunch while you refactor

llm-gemini 0.27 New release of my LLM plugin for Google's Gemini models: Support for nested schemas in Pydantic, thanks Bill Pugh. #107 Now tests against Python 3.14. Support for YouTube URLs as attachments and the media_resolution option. Thanks, Duane Milne. #112 New model: gemini-3-pro-preview. #113 The YouTube URL feature is particularly neat, taking advantage of this API feature. I use...

Inspired by this conversation on Hacker News I decided to upgrade MacWhisper to try out NVIDIA Parakeet and the new Automatic Speaker Recognition feature. It appears to work really well! Here's the result against this 39.7MB m4a file from my Gemini 3 Pro write-up this morning: You can export the transcript with both timestamps and speaker names using the Share -> Segments > .json menu it...

Google Antigravity Google's other major release today to accompany Gemini 3 Pro. At first glance Antigravity is yet another VS Code fork Cursor clone - it's a desktop application you install that then signs in to your Google account and provides an IDE for agentic coding against their Gemini models. When you look closer it's actually a fair bit more interesting than that. The best introduction ...

Three years ago, we were impressed that a machine could write a poem about otters. Less than 1,000 days later, I am debating statistical methodology with an agent that built its own research environment. The era of the chatbot is turning into the era of the digital coworker. To be very clear, Gemini 3 isn’t perfect, and it still needs a manager who can guide and check it. But it suggests that “...

Google released Gemini 3 Pro today. Here's the announcement from Sundar Pichai, Demis Hassabis, and Koray Kavukcuoglu, their developer blog announcement from Logan Kilpatrick, the Gemini 3 Pro Model Card, and their collection of 11 more articles. It's a big release! I had a few days of preview access to this model via AI Studio. The best way to describe it is that it's Gemini 2.5 upgraded to ma...

I'm putting the leftover stickers from this year's batches up for sale

The fate of “small” open source Nolan Lawson asks if LLM assistance means that the category of tiny open source libraries like his own blob-util is destined to fade away. Why take on additional supply chain risks adding another dependency when an LLM can likely kick out the subset of functionality needed by your own code to-order? I still believe in open source, and I’m still doing it (in fits...

By using two sequential View Transitions when intercepting links with the Navigation API – one in the precommitHandler and one in the regular handler – you can fake a Two-Phase View Transition today!

Inks, pens, books, and links

Joseph Lerner, 1950, ★★★★ Relentlessly grimy from start to (almost) finish, teeming with hardboiled lowlifes of every flavor, and plenty of location shooting that makes for a great little Brooklyn time capsule. Tagged: November 2025, film diary, film, review, Joseph Lerner Reply via email

I recently added a bunch of app icons from macOS Tahoe to my collection. Afterwards, I realized some of them were missing relational metadata. For example, I have a collection of iMove icons through the years which are related in my collection by their App Store ID. However, the latest iMovie icon I added didn’t have this ID. This got me thinking, "Crap, I really want this metadata so I ...

With AI now, we are able to write new programs that we could never hope to write by hand before. We do it by specifying objectives (e.g. classification accuracy, reward functions), and we search the program space via gradient descent to find neural networks that work well against that objective. This is my Software 2.0 blog post from a while ago. In this new programming paradigm then, the new m...

I keep hearing and reading people bitching and moaning about the web being dead, lamenting the good old days of the web, when real people were out there, and sites weren’t all about promoting some shit nobody cares about or attempting to amass an audience only to then flip it in exchange for money. And I’m sitting here, screaming at my screen «That web you’re missing is still here, you dumbdumb...

Added to the film diary:FramedRichard Wallace, 1947, ★★★½No Safe HavenRonnie Rondell Jr., 1987, ★★★PhilaMOCA, Philadelphia, PABlackoutTerence Fisher, 1954, ★★½ Tagged: November 2025 Reply via email

llm-anthropic 0.22 New release of my llm-anthropic plugin: Support for Claude's new structured outputs feature for Sonnet 4.5 and Opus 4.1. #54 Support for the web search tool using -o web_search 1 - thanks Nick Powell and Ian Langworth. #30 The plugin previously powered LLM schemas using this tool-call based workaround. That code is still used for Anthropic's older models. I also figured o...

I’ve been threatening to get back into screenprinting for far too long, so this exhibition of prints pushing the medium far beyond its apparent limits seemed like it would provide a good nudge. Not a lot of the content really spoke to me, but this show was really more about technique, and in that regard, much of what was on display was astonishing. In all my years in the game, I can’t say I’ve ...

Needy programs. I’ve seen at least two other bloggers linking to this post. I’d usually stop and not post about it, but it’s too good to miss. And I miss simple software. I should write more about it.

parakeet-mlx Neat MLX project by Senstella bringing NVIDIA's Parakeet ASR (Automatic Speech Recognition, like Whisper) model to to Apple's MLX framework. It's packaged as a Python CLI tool, so you can run it like this: uvx parakeet-mlx default_tc.mp3 The first time I ran this it downloaded a 2.5GB model file. Once that was fetched it took 53 seconds to transcribe a 65MB 1hr 1m 28s podcast epis...

I had a look to see when I first mentioned Samuel Arbesman here. It was 2011: the average size of scientific discoveries is getting smaller. Anyway I’ve been reading his new book, The Magic of Code (official site). There’s computing history, magic, the simulation hypothesis, and a friendly unpacking of everything from procedural generation to Unix. And through it all, an enthusiastic appeal t...

GPT-5.1 Instant and GPT-5.1 Thinking System Card Addendum I was confused about whether the new "adaptive thinking" feature of GPT-5.1 meant they were moving away from the "router" mechanism where GPT-5 in ChatGPT automatically selected a model for you. This page addresses that, emphasis mine: GPT‑5.1 Instant is more conversational than our earlier chat model, with improved instruction followin...

This week on the People and Blogs series we have an interview with Nic Chan, whose blog can be found at nicchan.me. Tired of RSS? Read this in your browser or sign up for the newsletter. The People and Blogs series is supported by Radek Kozieł and the other 125 members of my "One a Month" club. If you enjoy P&B, consider becoming one for as little as 1 dollar a month. ...

Always nice to get emails from people sharing their thoughts on this topic. Looks like I’m not the only one feeling this way, and a few weeks back Jeremy wrote a post touching a very similar topic. It also made me smile seeing him mention Henry David Thoreau in his post because I just finished reading one of Thoreau’s books, I’m currently reading a second one, and there’s a third one waiting fo...

Introducing GPT-5.1 for developers OpenAI announced GPT-5.1 yesterday, calling it a smarter, more conversational ChatGPT. Today they've added it to their API. We actually got four new models today: gpt-5.1 gpt-5.1-chat-latest gpt-5.1-codex gpt-5.1-codex-mini There are a lot of details to absorb here. GPT-5.1 introduces a new reasoning effort called "none" (previous were minimal, low, medium, ...

Datasette 1.0a22 New Datasette 1.0 alpha, adding some small features we needed to properly integrate the new permissions system with Datasette Cloud: datasette serve --default-deny option for running Datasette configured to deny all permissions by default. (#2592) datasette.is_client() method for detecting if code is executing inside a datasette.client request. (#2594) Plus a developer expe...

Nano Banana can be prompt engineered for extremely nuanced AI image generation Max Woolf provides an exceptional deep dive into Google's Nano Banana aka Gemini 2.5 Flash Image model, still the best available image manipulation LLM tool three months after its initial release. I confess I hadn't grasped that the key difference between Nano Banana and OpenAI's gpt-image-1 and the previous generat...

On Monday, this Court entered an order requiring OpenAI to hand over to the New York Times and its co-plaintiffs 20 million ChatGPT user conversations [...] OpenAI is unaware of any court ordering wholesale production of personal information at this scale. This sets a dangerous precedent: it suggests that anyone who files a lawsuit against an AI company can demand production of tens of millions...

Almost every time I share a new example of an SVG of a pelican riding a bicycle a variant of this question pops up: how do you know the labs aren't training for your benchmark? The strongest argument is that they would get caught. If a model finally comes out that produces an excellent SVG of a pelican riding a bicycle you can bet I'm going to test it on all manner of creatures riding all sorts...

When their values don't change throughout the animation, CSS width / height animations can run on the Compositor, instead of being forced to run on the Main Thread.

I had a quick pair programming session with one of my colleagues. Can you imagine that Claude Code doesn’t need to be your only coding buddy? The validation rules needed a little tweak, so here is the piece of code I typed, and below is the version suggested by my friend. validation.Field(&r.ScheduledAt, validation.When(!(r.SendNow || r.DryRun), validation.Required)) validation.Field(...

The best leaders I've worked with were introverts. They listened more than they talked and built stronger teams because of it.

This post is a continuation of Paul Kafasis’ post “Tahoe’s Terrible Icons” where he contrasts the visual differences across a number of Apple’s updated icons in macOS Tahoe (a.k.a. the Liquid Glass update). While Paul’s post mostly covers icons for the apps you’ll find in the primary /Applications folder, there’s also a subset of possibly lesser-known icons in the /System/Library/CoreServices f...

The fact that MCP is a difference surface from your normal API allows you to ship MUCH faster to MCP. This has been unlocked by inference at runtime Normal APIs are promises to developers, because developer commit code that relies on those APIs, and then walk away. If you break the API, you break the promise, and you break that code. This means a developer gets woken up at 2am to fix the code B...

Two related pieces of writing are doing the loops in my head recently. The first is the editorial piece from Dense Discovery #361—thank you Mattia for sending it to me—where Kay wrote We’ve normalised giving our attention almost exclusively to people who already have obscene amounts of influence. And we amplify them by watching. The power law in action: a few rise to the top, and we keep them ...

Today in Brussels, a closed-door session of an EU working group will discuss Chatkontrolle 2.0. This legislative package would entirely strip EU citizens of their right to private communications. Rather amusing that only recently I wrote about EU parliamentarians proclaiming their victory over this idiotic bill, whilst in reality they’re now preparing to push through an even more aggressive ver...

Style connected UI elements with CSS pseudo-classes that respond to user interest. Interactive examples showing tooltips, forms, and navigation without JavaScript.

Yorgos Lanthimos, 2025, ★★★★ Among other things, I remain very appreciative of Lanthimos’s rare appetite for adventurous typography. Tagged: November 2025, film diary, film, review, Yorgos Lanthimos, PFS at the Bourse, Philadelphia, PA Reply via email

Create animated transitions between different states of your app without complex animation libraries.

The ::details-content pseudo-element lets you style the expandable content of details elements separately from the summary, no divs needed.

🔗 The Pivot by Charlie Stross - sent from a friend. Terrific reading.

Give your AI agent access to your running application. They can see errors, inspect the network tab, check the DOM, and debug issues while you work.

Whenever Apple does a visual refresh in their OS updates, a new wave of icon archiving starts for me. Now that “Liquid Glass” is out, I’ve begun nabbing the latest icons from Apple and other apps and adding them to my gallery. Since I’ve been collecting these icons for so long, one of the more interesting and emerging attributes of my collection is the visual differences in individual app icons...

Added to the film diary:Bones and AllLuca Guadagnino, 2022, ★★★TÁRTodd Field, 2022, ★★★★½The Blue GardeniaFritz Lang, 1953, ★★★Added to the music library:IconoclastsAnna von Hausswolff, 2025Wipers Box SetWipers, 2001Ringing FieldsDavid Bales, 2025Beacons in LimboCarnivorous Bells, 2025Thirst Walk / PlaybackShudder to Think, 2025 Tagged: November 2025 Reply via email

See what's rising, what's dying, and where the jobs are actually going

What I'm doing now. November 2025 edition

Over the years, I’ve been chewing on media related to nuclear weapons. This is my high-level, non-exhaustive documentation of my consumption — with links! 📖 The Making of the Atomic Bomb by Richard Rhodes. This is one of those definitive histories (it’s close to 1,000 pages and won a Pulitzer Prize). It starts with the early discoveries in physics, like the splitting of the atom, and goes up ...

Ok spoilers ahead. But Oedipus Rex a.k.a. Oedipus Tyrannus by Sophocles is almost 2,500 years old at this point so it’s fair game imo. The Oedipus story in a nutshell: Oedipus, who was secretly adopted, receives a prophecy that he will kill his dad. So to thwart fate he leaves his dad and winds up in a city with a missing king (btw killing an argumentative guy on the way). Many years after bec...

This week on the People and Blogs series we have an interview with Robb Knight, whose blog can be found at rknight.me. Tired of RSS? Read this in your browser or sign up for the newsletter. The People and Blogs series is supported by Cory Gibbons and the other 125 members of my "One a Month" club. If you enjoy P&B, consider becoming one for as little as 1 dollar a month....

Some good updates, saucepan thoughts, and lots of excellent links

Also, late in October, this happened: Got rid of a chunky 16-inch MBP and got an iPad Pro. I’m really liking it, even though I haven’t fully used it.