simonw

7 ms·

91.
by simonw 26d ago
> What I meant is that it's not being built to solve any problem most people actually have. How confident are you in that? ChatGPT has over a billion monthly active users now ( https://www.reuters.com/technology/
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by simonw 26d ago
You need expertise to productively use that AI. Try getting Claude to write you a graduate essay about quantum mechanics. If you don't have at least some understanding of the topic area it's effectively worthless. Now imagine some
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by simonw 26d ago
Yeah, that's why I said "I'm not sure how useful it is to say this", because I know a lot of people will be a) offended by the message or b) offended that I was the one to say it. That particular reference isn't fai
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by simonw 26d ago
> given the multitude of horrible websites that use 100% CPU and look ugly AI does not work even for web development! Yes, that's my point. You need taste and engineering skill to build websites that are good even with AI assistance
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by simonw 26d ago
> Do you feel that you have stopped learning or could not create software now without the tool? The rate at which I'm learning has gone up . I'm becoming a much more proficient software engineer, I'm learning how to opera
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by simonw 26d ago
I'm not sure how useful it is to say this, but I think a lot of people (myself included, a few years ago now) have been through this moment of existential crisis and come out the other side. The initial reaction, when some coding agent
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by simonw 26d ago
Discussed here yesterday: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49643982
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by simonw 27d ago
Those are for the people who still respect links.
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by simonw 27d ago
It's sad because I think links are the best thing about the web, and it's increasingly clear to me that many internet users either misunderstand or actively avoid them. Why do people post screenshots of an article on social medi
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by simonw 27d ago
The success of tailwind would not have happened without the work. Just because others have worked nine years without success doesn't mean you shouldn't get credit when you put that work in and are successful.
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by simonw 27d ago
Sadly, in 2026, you should never assume anyone will click a link.
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by simonw 27d ago
The pricing on this is a bit confusing. Does each execution of an agent session create a new environment? And is that environment then billed for at least a full hour (despite prices being quoted per 20 minutes), after which it naturally ex
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by simonw 27d ago
It rejected the most obvious way to work around this: > Ran `curl http://example.com/ `. It exited with code `0` and returned: ```text Domain forbidden ``` I haven’t modified `/etc/hosts` or run the second reque
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by simonw 27d ago
To save yourself the hassle of running your own sandboxed VM.
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by simonw 27d ago
I jumped straight to the section on configuring your sandbox's network access: https://developers.openai.com/api/docs/guides/agents-api/env... It offers three settings: enabled: Allow outboun
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by simonw 27d ago
That's a useful tip, thanks.
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by simonw 27d ago
Got some fun if slightly janky looking pelicans out of this one: https://tools.simonwillison.net/markdown-svg-renderer?url=ht... I ran it on all seven reasoning levels supported by OpenRouter, but the reasoning token counts
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by simonw 27d ago
> We match DeepSeek V4 Pro Base using ~50x fewer FLOPs – that’s around half of GPT3’s pretraining compute, or ~$0.5M on GB200. If this holds up that's a really big deal.
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by simonw 27d ago
Is this about the "improve the model for everyone" checkbox on https://chatgpt.com/#settings/DataControls or are there others to check, too? (That copy is a little flawed in my opinion, I'd prefer "
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by simonw 27d ago
9 years of work to "get lucky".
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WeWorm(calif.io)
7 points by simonw 28d ago|1 comments
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by simonw 28d ago
Why would an AI crawler do this? > Attackers found and deliberately targeted URLs that resulted in cache misses, such as non-existent pages with unique paths (404s) as well as temporary redirects (302s)
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by simonw 28d ago
Current evidence is that scrapers mostly aren't nearly considerate or sophisticated enough to take an "archive of all content" option if one exists. See https://people.kernel.org/monsieuricon/creepy-crawl
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by simonw 28d ago
I vibe-coded up an animated transition between Mercator and Equal Earth (using D3) the other day, if anyone's interested in that comparison: https://tools.simonwillison.net/equal-earth
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by simonw 28d ago
YC's seed round funding does not get them a seat on your board. They also don't own anything close to a controlling stake.
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by simonw 28d ago
How about if YC funded a startup in 2017 that offered solar powered cameras to help prevent package theft, and that startup then later evolved into a nation-wide surveillance network? (I personally am not a flan of Flock, and I've been
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by simonw 28d ago
Impressive SEO slop content farm they're running there.
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by simonw 28d ago
"YC created X" is a bit of a misleading framing, as is "it's their company". Flock were part of the YC Summer 2017 batch: https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/flock-safety "YC funded Floc
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by simonw 28d ago
Given how hard it is to build any form of financially sustainable model around an open source project I think we should actively celebrate anyone who manages to build a model that works, not dismiss it as a "gravy train".
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by simonw 28d ago
A crawler visiting your docs won't help a human decide to pay for your commercial service advertised on those docs.

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