simonw

15 ms·

391.
by simonw 2mo ago
If you are ever unlucky enough to need to spend a night at Stanford hospital one upside is that you can ask the medical staff there to show you the nearest pneumatic tube delivery point. They use them for prescriptions: https://w
392.
by simonw 2mo ago
Reigniting a blog after 14 years should be more common! A trick I used when I restarted my blog in 2017 after stopping publishing in 2010 was to backfill it with a bunch of content imported from other places - mostly my answers to questions
393.
by simonw 2mo ago
Here's a rendered copy of the pelican I found impressive, for people who don't have Safari: https://static.simonwillison.net/static/2026/gemini-3.7-flas...
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by simonw 2mo ago
The boring technology framing is meant to provide a hook to help people "have rational discussions about technical choices". It's a tool for inspiring conversation.
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by simonw 2mo ago
The original Jetstream is really cool - it's incredibly easy to start consuming the Bluesky firehose - you don't even need to use a server, you can consume it directly in the browser. I updated my browser demo to use the new Jet
396.
by simonw 2mo ago
It's fascinating. On the one hand, if you really want to unlock the potential of coding agents you can get a whole lot more value from them if you don't force yourself to read every line of code they produce for you. On the other
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by simonw 2mo ago
This talk is also available on YouTube: https://youtu.be/WkBPX-oDMnA?is=ojFaLX2onMn3ARhi
398.
by simonw 2mo ago
They seem to have reduced the price of 3.6 Flash at the same time that they released this 3.7 model: https://ai.google.dev/gemini-api/docs/pricing today has 3.6 Flash at $0.75/$3.75 until December 31st 2026,
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by simonw 2mo ago
Because people LOVE COMING UP with excuses to try a new technology under the basis that "this is appropriate for our use-case", and if you don't introduce a concept similar to innovation tokens you may find that six months la
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by simonw 2mo ago
... whoa, that's true! Thanks for catching that.
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by simonw 2mo ago
Weird take. It's clearly useful as a communication tool. You talk to your team, you say "Let's use boring technology. Read the essay, then we can discuss what boring technology means to us first."
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by simonw 2mo ago
Pretty sure it was this one linked in the OP. See this footnote: https://mcfunley.com/choose-boring-technology#f4 > A good example of this from my experience is Etsy’s activity feeds. When we built this feature, we were
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by simonw 2mo ago
> What if you know NodeJS really well? Or MongoDb? Then they're not boring. Boring isn't a universal trait, it has to be evaluated within the context of your own team.
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by simonw 2mo ago
Yeah, it's pretty unpopular among people who like to try out new technology on every given project. I've found it extremely useful over the years, personally.
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by simonw 2mo ago
The "introductory pricing" for this 3.7 Flash model is really weird. It's scheduled to double in price on December 31, 2026, but who would anticipate still using this model five months from now? Especially since 3.6 Flash cam
406.
by simonw 2mo ago
Spin? Looks to me like this is the tool in question, added in January: https://github.com/sqlite/sqlite/commits/master/ext/misc/tms...
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by simonw 2mo ago
DeepSeek really need to provide a PAGE for this model release. There's no blog post, there's not even a tweet. It's very unclear what we can link to!
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by simonw 2mo ago
If I live my life on the basis that some people don't share my sense of humor, and hence I should avoid doing anything funny that might be misunderstood, my life will be a lot less fun.
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by simonw 2mo ago
Default effort for OpenRouter. I'll try a grid of efforts... Wow, the low, medium, and high pelicans came out in surprisingly different styles: https://tools.simonwillison.net/markdown-svg-renderer#url=ht...
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by simonw 2mo ago
Nice bicycle chain, the little basket with a fish didn't show up in the right place: https://tools.simonwillison.net/markdown-svg-renderer#url=ht...
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by simonw 2mo ago
Is this the largest ever open weight model release by parameter count? I think it is.
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by simonw 2mo ago
Accessibility is about way more than just people who are blind.
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by simonw 2mo ago
<img> is missing required "src" attribute On 1,093 sites, 41.2% of the sample?
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by simonw 2mo ago
> We funded the open-source SQLite VFS shim that helped isolate the race condition almost immediately, and will help track down similar bugs in the future. Interesting example of a company funding open source - in this case paying for th
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by simonw 2mo ago
M5 Max MacBook Pro, 128GB of RAM.
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by simonw 2mo ago
This is slightly old news at this point - the BSides conference was in March, this article was published in May, we've had a whole lot of additional evidence since May that makes it unsurprising that AI can solve CTF challenges! Here&#
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by simonw 2mo ago
"ChatGPT costs ~$2 per message"?
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by simonw 2mo ago
By "established" I meant more that they now exist as products and are being first developed. I agree that most people still don't really understand what they are for - but I expect they already have way more exposure than Man
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by simonw 2mo ago
I don't read all of the code produced by my agents any more, but I like to reserve the ability to do so if I run into a particularly confusing bug, or for any code that's security adjacent.
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by simonw 2mo ago
Personally I find Rust a lot harder to read than Go. If you're going to have an agent write most of your code readability is very important.

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