simonw

29 ms·

751.
by simonw 3mo ago
Important to note the actual title is "OpenAI’s accidental cyberattack against Hugging Face is science fiction that happened" - the "that happened" is important, otherwise it sounds like I think the attack was made up. S
752.
by simonw 3mo ago
OK, my point here is that a YouGov poll about people's attitude to AI may not tell us anything actionable about how people feel about AI posters - it depends on how good they are at detecting them.
753.
by simonw 3mo ago
It's not an argument, it's an open question: do people who express a dislike of AI know when they see a poster that was generated with assistance from AI?
754.
by simonw 3mo ago
Gemini have absolutely been SVGmaxxing. They've openly talked about it.
755.
by simonw 3mo ago
> The pelican prompt is ridiculous Yes, deliberately so. It was never intended as a meaningful benchmark. The surprising thing was that for the first ~12 months performance on the stupid pelican benchmark did seem to correspond to the pe
756.
by simonw 3mo ago
Underlying data is available on GitHub: https://github.com/dylanjcastillo/blog/tree/main/_extras/pel...
757.
by simonw 3mo ago
This is fantastic I've been casually spot-checking other animals in other vehicles, because my absolute dream situation here is to catch an AI lab that's demonstrably better at pelicans on bicycles than other combinations. Catchin
758.
by simonw 3mo ago
What's weird here is that I should be in total agreement with you. I love it when AI tools are used to give people the ability to solve problems that previously they could not solve well. For the fliers I'm talking about here (thi
759.
by simonw 3mo ago
How many of the people who answer polls like that also have the ability to look at a poster and instantly clock that it was AI-generated?
760.
by simonw 3mo ago
I don't think it's a corner cutting thing though. These businesses weren't paying someone to make a flier. The business owner was sweating for an hour in Microsoft Word and producing something that looked terrible. I expect t
761.
by simonw 3mo ago
I'm fascinated by how AI poster designs have taken over local advertising in seemingly just the last six months - presumably because ChatGPT Images and Gemini Nano Banana finally got good enough at outputting text without obvious defec
762.
by simonw 3mo ago
Have you created other burner accounts to reply to me in the past, or is this your first one?
763.
by simonw 3mo ago
I'm a professional blogger now. I still also work on open source software. I'm even fine being called an "influencer" ( shudder ), but I take offense to accusations of unethical behavior. I think very hard about the ethi
764.
by simonw 3mo ago
I did hit a nerve. I don't like being accused of posting comments here for "low effort personal brand promotion" or nefarious financial motives.
765.
by simonw 3mo ago
Linking directly to the rendered markdown as opposed to a post on my blog is a poor way to promote my blog.
766.
by simonw 3mo ago
You and a few other people, but enough people still appreciate the bit that I'm going to keep doing it. They're easy enough to skip - click the little "-" icon and you'll collapse the entire sub-thread.
767.
by simonw 3mo ago
Pelicans for 3.6 Flash and 3.5 Flash-Lite (Cyber isn't available to me through the API yet.) https://tools.simonwillison.net/markdown-svg-renderer#url=ht...
768.
by simonw 3mo ago
> to precisely describe the full 3×3 grid takes a full 3.7k tokens It's a shame they didn't share that prompt - it would make that demo more convincing.
769.
by simonw 3mo ago
Yes, it generates the text without using a font. Same is true of other image models like ChatGPT Images and Gemini Nano Banana and Midjourney.
770.
by simonw 3mo ago
I was so excited when I saw "blaizzy" in the domain, because Prince Canuma's work around MLX has been of such uniquely high quality.
771.
by simonw 3mo ago
The message I get from this is that you need to treat modern frontier models as if they WILL find a way to achieve a goal if there's any available path. So if you don't want a model to do something, make sure it's running in
772.
by simonw 3mo ago
What method did you use to generate that one? I tried using their OpenAI-compatible API and got one that's a lot less fun (no animation) - https://tools.simonwillison.net/markdown-svg-renderer#url=ht...
773.
by simonw 3mo ago
I managed to get myself a working Qwen Cloud account, here's a pelican. The reasoning trace is pretty fun - three details I liked were "Could add helmet? No." and "Maybe add small bell? no." and "Need maybe add
774.
by simonw 3mo ago
I'm amused by how the whole reasoning model thing feels like a formalization of the old "think step by step" prompting hack, which was discovered against GPT-3 two years after that model was first released. My favorite trick
775.
by simonw 3mo ago
Show me evidence that they had previously fired any of the people who were hired. Your comment is exactly the misinterpretation I'm pushing back against here. The time period covered by this story starts three years ago! What kind of
776.
by simonw 3mo ago
As far as I can tell they all still understand that it's a joke.
777.
by simonw 3mo ago
I suspect that if you prefixed every user message with a date the model might get confused and start treating the date as more relevant to the current task than it actually is.
778.
by simonw 3mo ago
Interesting detail from Ben Thompson's piece on Chinese models - https://stratechery.com/2026/whos-afraid-of-chinese-models/ - apparently Xi Jinping gave this speech recently http://english.scio.go
779.
by simonw 3mo ago
Or they could add the frozen initial starting date once at the start, then inject an additional "the date is now X" message any time midnight passes.
780.
by simonw 3mo ago
Wow, that one is really good .

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