科技

Ed Zitron's AI prediction track record

I was curious how well the predictions of the most widely cited AI skeptic I've seen (Ed Zitron) have done, so I looked at how his predictions panned out. To disclose my own biases, I've never had a particularly strong pro or anti AI progress position. For example, in 2022, I did a comprehensive look at predictions Futurists made, including well-respected folks like Kurzweil and found them to be generally wrong on both the prediction results as well as the reasoning. On the flip side, in 2015, I wrote about how people were underestimating AI's ability to displace humans in jobs and have repeat

Dan Luu · EN

How well do agents use test and verification techniques?

We previously noted that, while it's easier than ever to hit a particular quality bar by having coding agents use effective test techniques, software quality seems to be getting worse , indicating that whatever defaults developers are using may not work very well. Here, we test if simple instructions to agents to use particular techniques or libraries improve implementation correctness, as a kind of test to see how effective agents are when guided by someone with no expertise in testing who's maybe heard that you should apply certain techniques or use certain libraries. We'll re-use the Zstd i

Dan Luu · EN

There's no point at which turning your brain off will work

In early 2025, I started seeing people turn off their brain as they use LLMs 1 . They would have an LLM take an action (summarize text, write some code, etc.), and just assume that it worked 2 . This generally didn't work in early 2025 and the result was often quite silly. As LLMs have gotten better, I've seen more of this. Sometimes, people will try to get the LLM to write some code for them and basically just assume that it works 3 . Sometimes there's a human in the loop and, if the thing doesn't work, they'll ask the LLM to figure out the problem and solve it. Niklas Gruhn calls some varian

Dan Luu · EN

“We should be more ambitious with the software we build”

Since early this year, Michael Malis (of pgrust ) has been showing me interesting things he's done and saying [W]e should be more ambitious 1 with the software we build There is, understandably, a lot of skepticism about projects like pgrust because there are so many low-quality AI-generated projects out there. If I didn't know Malis and didn't look into it, I would just assume that pgrust was another vibe slopped project that's never going to work. But I know Malis well enough to trust his work without looking into it, and if you look into it a bit, you'll see that in testing pgrust, he's tes

Dan Luu · EN

Notes on clarifying man pages

Hello! After spending some time working on the Git man pages last year, I’ve been thinking a little more about what makes a good man page. I’ve spent a lot of time writing cheat sheets for tools (tcpdump, git, dig, etc) which have a man page as their primary documentation. This is because I often find the man pages hard to navigate to get the information I want. Lately I’ve wondering – could the man page itself have an amazing cheat sheet in it? What might make a man page easier to use? I’m still very early in thinking about this but I wanted to write down some qu

Julia Evans · EN

Examples for the tcpdump and dig man pages

Hello! My big takeaway from last month’s musings about man pages was that examples in man pages are really great, so I worked on adding (or improving) examples to two of my favourite tools’ man pages. Here they are: the dig man page (now with examples) the tcpdump man page examples (this one is an update to the previous examples) the goal: include the most basic examples The goal here was really just to give the absolute most basic examples of how to use the tool, for people who use tcpdump or dig infrequently (or have never used it before!) and don’t remember how it works. S

Julia Evans · EN

Testing Vue components in the browser

Hello! One of my long term projects on here is figuring out how to write frontend Javascript without using Node or any other server JS runtime. One issue I run into a lot in my frontend JS projects is that I don’t know how to write tests for them. I’ve tried to use Playwright in the past, but it felt slow and unwieldy to be starting these new browser processes all the time, and it involved some Node code to orchestrate the tests. The result is that I just don’t test my frontend code which doesn’t feel great. Usually I don’t update my projects much either so it doe

Julia Evans · EN

Links to CSS colour palettes

A while back I decided to stop using Tailwind for new projects and to just write vanilla CSS instead. But one thing I missed about Tailwind was the colour palette ( here as CSS ). If I wanted a light blue I could just use blue-100 and if I didn’t like it maybe try blue-200 or blue-50 . I’m not very good with colours so it makes a big difference to me to have a reasonable colour palette that somebody who is better at colour than me has thought about. But I’m also a little tired of those Tailwind colours, so I asked on Mastodon today what other colour palettes were out there. A

Julia Evans · EN

Moving away from Tailwind, and learning to structure my CSS

Hello! 8 years ago, I wrote excitedly about discovering Tailwind . At that time I really had no idea how to structure my CSS code and given the choice between a pile of complete chaos and Tailwind, I was really happy to choose Tailwind. It helped me make a lot of tiny sites! I spent the last week or so migrating a couple of sites away from Tailwind and towards more semantic HTML + vanilla CSS, and it was SO fun and SO interesting, so here are some things I learned! As usual I’m not a full-time frontend developer and so all of my CSS learning has happened in fits and starts over many year

Julia Evans · EN

Learning a few things about running SQLite

Hello! I’ve been working on a Django site recently, and I decided to use SQLite as the database. When I was getting started with using SQLite as database for a website I read a bunch of blog posts about how it is totally fine to use SQLite in production for a small site and I think it is totally fine, but what I did not fully appreciate is that SQLite is still a database, databases are complicated, and I do not know a lot about operating databases. So here are a couple of small things I’ve been learning about running SQLite. This is the 4th website I’ve used SQLite for, and I

Julia Evans · EN

Some more things about Django I've been enjoying

Hello! I’m on a funny journey right now where I’m trying to learn how to make websites in a sort of 2010 style, where I have an SQL database and render some HTML on the backend. It’s kind of an interesting journey because it doesn’t necessarily feel “easy” to me to make websites in this way: I never learned how to do it in the 2000s or 2010s, and there’s a lot I need to learn. So here are some Django features that make building this kind of site feel more achievable than when I was trying and failing to use Go’s standard library or Flask. And I&r

Julia Evans · EN

Replacing the old battery on rechargeable bike lights

Hello! Recently I needed bike lights for my bike. And I remembered that I already had rechargeable bike lights that I bought ten years ago, that I hadn’t tried in a long time. I tried to recharge them, but after fully charging them, they only worked for maybe 5 minutes before they turned off again. I don’t know much about electronics, but I’ve been curious about whether it’s possible to fix old electronics for a long time, and this seemed like the perfect repair project because I might just need to replace the battery. So I went to the local queer makerspace where I&rsq

Julia Evans · EN

Building a multiplayer game world with autonomous Fable-class models

How I Built the Most AI-Pilled Company in the World Don't be put off by the clickbait headline, this piece by Jacob Sansbury describing how they are building Spawn is a fascinating exploration of the bleeding edge of what's possible with agentic engineering against frontier models. Spawn is a massively multiplayer gaming environment where players can use prompts (to the in-game agent, Savi) to modify the game world. I fired it up on my phone for a few minutes and was able to prompt a castle into existence, then a dragon, then ride the dragon to fly around that castle. By Jacob's telling, Spawn

Simon Willison · EN

API credits benefit for eligible ChatGPT subscriptions

API credits benefit for eligible ChatGPT subscriptions Earlier this month Anthropic announced a generous new benefit for their Max and Team subscriptions: $100, $200, and $500 per month subscribers would get the equivalent quantity of (expiring) credits to use with the Anthropic API. OpenAI have now launched pretty much exactly the same deal: if you have a $100, $200, or $500 subscription plan with them you now get that same quantity of credits to apply to one of your API organizations. I maintain subscriptions with both companies, so this is great news for me! I may even ship some public-faci

Simon Willison · EN

dbreunig/nesformer

dbreunig/nesformer Inspired by qwenputer by Divyansh Agrawal, Drew Breunig baked a working emulator for a Nintendo Entertainment System 6502 CPU into the weights of Qwen3.5-4B. You can now play NES ROMs such as Super Mario Bros (very slowly) running inside Qwen! In a comment on Hacker News Drew reveals the Opus 5.5 prompts he used to build this system: Read this article and any relevant source code: https://divagr.com/blog/qwenputer. Then explore if you could emulate the chip and ram in a Nintendo Entertainment System (as people do today with FPGAs in MISTRs) using this technique. If so, what

Simon Willison · EN

datasette-llm 0.1a9

Release: datasette-llm 0.1a9 I have some big upgrades to Datasette Agent in the pipeline, but in the meantime here's a tiny user experience improvement to the underlying datasette-llm plugin. It now picks up the default model used by LLM , which means you can start using Datasette Agent without needing to explicitly configure a default model: uvx --with datasette-agent datasette content.db --internal internal.db Previously you would also need to specify a model with -s plugins.datasette-agent.default_model gpt-6-astra . Tags: datasette , llm , datasette-agent

Simon Willison · EN

How We Took Over ChatGPT Accounts

How We Took Over ChatGPT Accounts Parameter Labs describe an exploit they found against ChatGPT's implementation of the artifacts pattern (OpenAI used to call this "Canvas" but it looks like the latest revision is called HTML previews ), where interactive custom HTML apps are displayed in a sandboxed iframe. It's important that HTML in these stays tightly sandboxed to avoid untrusted code interacting with OpenAI APIs and accessing private data. Parameter found quite a complex attack chain. OpenAI use the MathLive JavaScript library as part of their graph support, and that library includes its

Simon Willison · EN

Quoting Kyle Kingsbury

More broadly, the use of LLMs erodes trust in documentation, in software, and in the organizations which produce them. Perhaps engineers will begin to treat any new software project with suspicion—the signals we used to rely on as markers of a mature system are now easier to counterfeit. [...] In the age of LLMs, what can maintainers do to ensure correct software and accurate documentation? Having done that work, how can they demonstrate its quality to users? — Kyle Kingsbury , Jepsen results for ParticleDB 1.1.4 Tags: kyle-kingsbury , llms , ai , generative-ai , ai-misuse

Simon Willison · EN

If in doubt, delete the uv.lock file

I've been getting the occasional confusing Python dependency error since switching over to Python 3.15 and the rule I'm having to remember is: If in doubt, delete the uv.lock file Most of my projects are libraries which don't include a uv.lock file, since it's rude for a library dependency to lock versions for anything else that uses it. Running uv run pytest etc tends to leave uv.lock files lying around, which are listed in .gitignore and so do not get committed to my repositories. But... sometimes that uv.lock pins a version of a dependency that doesn't yet have a Python 3.15 wheel. An examp

Simon Willison · EN

The U.S. Census Bureau and “Super Intelligence”

I was reminded today of AI Adoption Rate Trending Down for Large Companies , a chart produced by Apollo Global Management in September 2025, which appeared to show a slowdown in U.S. corporate AI adoption based on numbers collected by the U.S. Census Bureau. At the time I used that chart to demonstrate GPT-5 data analysis , and then to experiment with Claude's new Code Interpreter . I decided to try running those numbers again to see what had changed over the past year, and in doing so learned that the Bureau has fallen foul of Executive Order 14434 , aka the asinine Super Intelligence one. Fi

Simon Willison · EN

What kind of disruption?

Software ate the world. Uber and Airbnb didn’t sell software - they disrupted and redefined markets. But what kind of disruption are we talking about ?

Benedict Evans · EN

GenAI’s adoption puzzle

Generative AI chatbots might be a life-changing transformation in the nature of computing, that can replace all software, but so far, most of its users only pick it up every week or two, and far fewer have made it part of their lives. Is that a time problem or a product problem?

Benedict Evans · EN

AI metrics

With every platform shift, we want to measure the growth but we’re confused about what to measure. That’s partly a problem of data and definitions, but it’s really a question about what this is going to be.

Benedict Evans · EN

AI, networks and Mechanical Turks

How far do LLMs give us a step change in how good a search and recommendation system can be? Do they let you build one without needing a vast user base of your own?

Benedict Evans · EN