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Site URL: simonwillison.net/

Feed URL: simonwillison.net/atom/everything

Posts: 27

Followers: 6

New tags

https://simonwillison.net/2025/Jul/19/new-tags/#atom-everything

Published: July 19, 2025 02:02

A few months I added a tool to my blog for bulk-applying tags to old content. It works as an extension to my existing search interface, letting me run searches and then quickly apply a tag to relevant results. Since adding this I've been much more…

Quoting Steve Yegge

https://simonwillison.net/2025/Jul/19/steve-yegge/#atom-everything

Published: July 19, 2025 00:54

So one of my favorite things to do is give my coding agents more and more permissions and freedom, just to see how far I can push their productivity without going too far off the rails. It's a delicate balance. I haven't given them direct access to my bank…

Quoting Paul Kedrosky

https://simonwillison.net/2025/Jul/19/paul-kedrosky/#atom-everything

Published: July 19, 2025 00:25

One analyst recently speculated (via Ed Conard) that, based on Nvidia's latest datacenter sales figures, AI capex may be ~2% of US GDP in 2025, given a standard multiplier. [...] Capital expenditures on AI data centers is likely around 20% of the peak…

Vibe scraping and vibe coding a schedule app for Open Sauce 2025 entirely on my phone

https://simonwillison.net/2025/Jul/17/vibe-scraping/#atom-everything

Published: July 17, 2025 19:38

This morning, working entirely on my phone, I scraped a conference website and vibe coded up an alternative UI for interacting with the schedule using a combination of OpenAI Codex and Claude Artifacts. This weekend is Open Sauce 2025, the third edition of…

Quoting Terence Eden

https://simonwillison.net/2025/Jul/17/terence-eden/#atom-everything

Published: July 17, 2025 14:31

The modern workforce shouldn't be flinging copies to each other. A copy is outdated the moment it is downloaded. A copy has no protection against illicit reading. A copy can never be revoked. Data shouldn't live in a file on a laptop. It shouldn't be a…

Voxtral

https://simonwillison.net/2025/Jul/16/voxtral/#atom-everything

Published: July 16, 2025 21:11

Voxtral Mistral released their first audio-input models yesterday: Voxtral Small and Voxtral Mini. These state‑of‑the‑art speech understanding models are available in two sizes—a 24B variant for production-scale applications and a 3B variant for local…

common-pile/caselaw_access_project

https://simonwillison.net/2025/Jul/16/caselaw-access-project/#atom-everything

Published: July 16, 2025 19:18

common-pile/caselaw_access_project Enormous openly licensed (I believe this is almost all public domain) training dataset of US legal cases: This dataset contains 6.7 million cases from the Caselaw Access Project and Court Listener. The Caselaw Access…

Fell in a hole, got out.

https://simonwillison.net/2025/Jul/16/fell-in-a-hole-got-out/#atom-everything

Published: July 16, 2025 18:36

Fell in a hole, got out. This is an absolutely fascinating entrepreneurial war story by Medium CEO Tony Stubblebine, describing how they went from losing $2.6 million per month in 2022 to being monthly profitable since mid 2024. By the middle of 2022, the…

Shipping WebGPU on Windows in Firefox 141

https://simonwillison.net/2025/Jul/16/webgpu-firefox/#atom-everything

Published: July 16, 2025 13:51

Shipping WebGPU on Windows in Firefox 141 WebGPU is coming to Mac and Linux soon as well: Although Firefox 141 enables WebGPU only on Windows, we plan to ship WebGPU on Mac and Linux in the coming months, and finally on Android. From this article I…

Documenting what you're willing to support (and not)

https://simonwillison.net/2025/Jul/16/documenting/#atom-everything

Published: July 16, 2025 13:19

Documenting what you're willing to support (and not) Devious company culture hack from Rachel Kroll: At some point, I realized that if I wrote a wiki page and documented the things that we were willing to support, I could wait about six months and then it…

Reflections on OpenAI

https://simonwillison.net/2025/Jul/15/reflections-on-openai/#atom-everything

Published: July 15, 2025 18:02

Reflections on OpenAI Calvin French-Owen spent just over a year working at OpenAI, during which time the organization grew from 1,000 to 3,000 people and Calvin found himself in "the top 30% by tenure". His reflections on leaving are fascinating -…

xAI: "We spotted a couple of issues with Grok 4 recently that we immediately investigated & mitigated"

https://simonwillison.net/2025/Jul/15/xai-mitigated/#atom-everything

Published: July 15, 2025 13:42

xAI: "We spotted a couple of issues with Grok 4 recently that we immediately investigated & mitigated" They continue: One was that if you ask it "What is your surname?" it doesn't have one so it searches the internet leading to undesirable results, such…

ccusage

https://simonwillison.net/2025/Jul/14/ccusage/#atom-everything

Published: July 14, 2025 16:59

ccusage Claude Code logs detailed usage information to the ~/.claude/ directory. ccusage is a neat little Node.js tool which reads that information and shows you a readable summary of your usage patterns, including the estimated cost in USD per day. You…

Happy 20th birthday Django! Here's my talk on Django Origins from Django's 10th

https://simonwillison.net/2025/Jul/13/django-birthday/#atom-everything

Published: July 13, 2025 18:47

Today is the 20th anniversary of the first commit to the public Django repository! Ten years ago we threw a multi-day 10th birthday party for Django back in its birthtown of Lawrence, Kansas. As a personal celebration of the 20th, I'm revisiting the talk I…

Measuring the Impact of Early-2025 AI on Experienced Open-Source Developer Productivity

https://simonwillison.net/2025/Jul/12/ai-open-source-productivity/#atom-everything

Published: July 12, 2025 18:12

Measuring the Impact of Early-2025 AI on Experienced Open-Source Developer Productivity METR - for Model Evaluation & Threat Research - are a non-profit research institute founded by Beth Barnes, a former alignment researcher at OpenAI (see Wikipedia).…

Grok 4 Heavy won't reveal its system prompt

https://simonwillison.net/2025/Jul/12/grok-4-heavy/#atom-everything

Published: July 12, 2025 17:07

Grok 4 Heavy won't reveal its system prompt Grok 4 Heavy is the "think much harder" version of Grok 4 that's currenly only available on their $300/month plan. Jeremy Howard relays a report from a Grok 4 Heavy user who wishes to remain anonymous: it turns…

Quoting @grok

https://simonwillison.net/2025/Jul/12/grok/#atom-everything

Published: July 12, 2025 15:41

On the morning of July 8, 2025, we observed undesired responses and immediately began investigating. To identify the specific language in the instructions causing the undesired behavior, we conducted multiple ablations and experiments to pinpoint the main…

Musk’s latest Grok chatbot searches for billionaire mogul’s views before answering questions

https://simonwillison.net/2025/Jul/12/musks-latest-grok/#atom-everything

Published: July 12, 2025 03:44

Musk’s latest Grok chatbot searches for billionaire mogul’s views before answering questions I got quoted a couple of times in this story about Grok searching for tweets from:elonmusk by Matt O’Brien for the Associated Press. “It’s extraordinary,” said…

moonshotai/Kimi-K2-Instruct

https://simonwillison.net/2025/Jul/11/kimi-k2/#atom-everything

Published: July 11, 2025 18:33

moonshotai/Kimi-K2-Instruct Colossal new open weights model release today from Moonshot AI, a two year old Chinese AI lab with a name inspired by Pink Floyd’s album The Dark Side of the Moon. My HuggingFace storage calculator says the repository is 958.52…

Quoting Django’s security policies

https://simonwillison.net/2025/Jul/11/django-security-policies/#atom-everything

Published: July 11, 2025 16:51

Following the widespread availability of large language models (LLMs), the Django Security Team has received a growing number of security reports generated partially or entirely using such tools. Many of these contain inaccurate, misleading, or fictitious…

Generationship: Ep. #39, Simon Willison

https://simonwillison.net/2025/Jul/11/generationship/#atom-everything

Published: July 11, 2025 05:33

Generationship: Ep. #39, Simon Willison I recorded this podcast episode with Rachel Chalmers a few weeks ago. We talked about the resurgence of blogging, the legacy of Google Reader, learning in public, LLMs as weirdly confident interns, AI-assisted…

Postgres LISTEN/NOTIFY does not scale

https://simonwillison.net/2025/Jul/11/postgres-listen-notify/#atom-everything

Published: July 11, 2025 04:39

Postgres LISTEN/NOTIFY does not scale I think this headline is justified. Recall.ai, a provider of meeting transcription bots, noticed that their PostgreSQL instance was being bogged down by heavy concurrent writes. After some spelunking they found this…

Grok: searching X for "from:elonmusk (Israel OR Palestine OR Hamas OR Gaza)"

https://simonwillison.net/2025/Jul/11/grok-musk/#atom-everything

Published: July 11, 2025 00:21

If you ask the new Grok 4 for opinions on controversial questions, it will sometimes run a search to find out Elon Musk's stance before providing you with an answer. I heard about this today from Jeremy Howard, following a trail that started with…

Grok 4

https://simonwillison.net/2025/Jul/10/grok-4/#atom-everything

Published: July 10, 2025 19:36

Grok 4 Released last night, Grok 4 is now available via both API and a paid subscription for end-users. Key characteristics: image and text input, text output. 256,000 context length (twice that of Grok 3). It's a reasoning model where you can't see the…