simonw

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31.
by simonw 8d ago
If there's any company in the world that can survive a lot of extra traffic being pushed through their systems it's Cloudflare. I bet these new tunnels end up being a fraction of a percentage point of their network traffic.
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by simonw 8d ago
I take it you didn't read the article, then.
33.
by simonw 8d ago
The recent OpenAI wiki spam indecent was interesting because it helped reveal some of how they are training their models for research tasks: https://collusion.wiki/ See also this piece on misalignment from OpenAI https:&#x
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by simonw 8d ago
Yeah, for this to feel credible you need to make sure the model doesn't figure out that you're planning to build a solution yourself.
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by simonw 8d ago
I've been using GPT-6 Pro in ChatGPT (and its predecessor GPT-5.6 Pro) and it's been incredibly effective. I don't think it's available on anything less than the OpenAI $100/month plan though.
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by simonw 8d ago
Back in 2018 they were working on Formality, an Ethereum formal verification project. They are the Victor in this video about it: https://slideslive.com/38911748/introducing-formality Here's the GitHub repo for th
37.
by simonw 8d ago
> It will never tell you that what you’re building already mostly exists as work that you can build on. It will if you remember to ask it. I've got into the habit of starting any new project with a session where I ask a search-enabl
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by simonw 8d ago
You don't blind trust them in the fact checking. You check what they point out.
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by simonw 8d ago
See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49747070#49748296
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by simonw 8d ago
What?
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by simonw 8d ago
That's what the piece says.
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by simonw 8d ago
I saw "load-bearing" there and instantly assumed Thomas was making a deliberate point that it's OK to use terms that LLMs have poisoned provided you use them effectively and in a way that adds to the piece. I'm personall
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by simonw 8d ago
I do this all the time. It's shocking how well it works. A year or two ago suggesting that someone use LLMs for fact checking would get you laughed out of a room, but today the good ones (Fable, GPT-5.6/6) with a search tool enabl
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by simonw 8d ago
I've been formulating this idea for a while now, but I don't think I've written it up properly anyway. I should do that!
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by simonw 8d ago
I figured them out, starting from the GGUF on Hugging Face. If you have found better instructions and they work then use those instead! Personally I prefer to download models directly rather than running some `./setup.sh` script where
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by simonw 8d ago
I used that to Generate an SVG of a pelican riding a bicycle: https://tools.simonwillison.net/markdown-svg-renderer?url=ht... It took 18 minutes 20 seconds. Pretty decent for a 5.5GB model file.
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by simonw 8d ago
A while back I satirically suggested https://simonwillison.net/2026/Jul/17/spot-birds-not-golf/ that if hyperscalers wanted to relieve the pressure over data center water use they could buy up a few doze
48.
by simonw 8d ago
If you want to try out out the GGUFs from https://huggingface.co/prism-ml/Ternary-Bonsai-2-27B-gguf#th... be aware that you need Prism's llama.cpp fork to get them to work, from https://github.com/
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by simonw 8d ago
Like golf courses in the desert. (... Palm Springs has around 100 golf courses)
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by simonw 8d ago
I love how well this comment captures the experience of engaging with LLMs as a way to deliberately challenge and expand knowledge. When I see people worry about LLMs atrophying their mental abilities I assume they haven't thought very
51.
by simonw 9d ago
Yeah, that goes against my experience. Agents can absolutely one-shot games, but the gap between something that looks like a game and something that is fun to play and worth trying for more than a few minutes is gaping wide.
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by simonw 10d ago
Maybe they learned something from creating Sydney.
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by simonw 10d ago
Pet peeve: > In a lengthy essay, Suleyman praised Anthropic boss Dario Amodei and his team for being "thoughtful, principled, and intellectually honest people" - but nevertheless questioned the company. I wish people in mainstr
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by simonw 10d ago
Tip: put a big note on your closing slide that says "Come and talk to me about this in the hallway".
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by simonw 10d ago
Absolutely this. One of the main reasons to give a presentation at a conference is that it means you can talk to people about it afterwards. "Hey, I liked your talk" is a freebie ice-breaker for anyone else, so it's much easi
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by simonw 11d ago
Needs "July 2026" date attached to it, this is old news at this point, Hugging Face got bought by NVIDIA since this story!
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by simonw 11d ago
Given restaurant margins are in the single digit percentage points, even a 2% loss of customers could be a big deal.
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by simonw 11d ago
Internet Archive was almost destroyed by a copyright lawsuit from book publishers within the last few years. I expect they aren't excited to take on any additional risk of similar lawsuits right now.
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by simonw 11d ago
> Here’s what’s going on. The Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine has been hit by waves of high-volume automated traffic, and we’ve put protections in place to keep the service running. I'm pretty certain this is scrapers that are tr
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by simonw 11d ago
I mean sending messages to someone who you know is a human being - a friend, a coworker, a subject-expert, a journalist. If you know that you're messaging a non-human (or likely-non-human) then the social stigma shouldn't apply.

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