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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

Scientists crack 60-year efficiency challenge in organic solar tech with new design

For more than six decades, scientists have been developing organic solar cells as a lightweight,...

Interesting Engineering · EN

Water-resistant microneedles made by MIT for vaccinating small farmed fish

Researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), working with the U.S. Department of Agriculture...

Interesting Engineering · EN

70,000Wh energy storage system built with old EV batteries retains over 90% capacity

A German startup has given old e-scooter batteries a second life by using them to...

Interesting Engineering · EN

US Marine Corps’ Viper and Venom Helicopters set for major SPINE upgrades

The US Marine Corps is preparing a major upgrade for its AH-1Z Viper attack helicopters...

Interesting Engineering · EN

World’s oldest? 66-pound Stone Age anchor found 65 feet down on Norwegian seabed

Archaeologists in western Norway have recovered a grooved, 66-pound stone from the seabed beneath a...

Interesting Engineering · EN

Solid-state battery survives 400°F heat, exceeds 1,200 cycles, targets 600-mile range

Next-generation all-solid-state batteries are gaining attention in the electric vehicle battery market, with several battery...

Interesting Engineering · EN

Bizarre cyberattack turns supermarket freezers into 122-degree ovens in six countries

Cyberattacks against supermarket refrigeration systems have disrupted grocery operations across Europe, with hackers remotely manipulating...

Interesting Engineering · EN

US student’s jet-powered drone hits 491 mph to claim world’s fastest-flight record

A jet-powered drone built in the dormitory of a U.S. university broke the world record...

Interesting Engineering · 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

How will OpenAI compete?

OpenAI has some big questions. It doesn’t have unique tech. It has a big user base, but with limited engagement and stickiness and no network effect. The incumbents have matched the tech and are leveraging their product and distribution. And a lot of the value and leverage will come from new experiences that haven’t been invented yet, and it can’t invent all of those itself. What’s the plan?

Benedict Evans · EN

Predicting AI job exposure

Many people would like to analyse which jobs, companies and industries are most exposed to AI, and assign scores, build charts, and map that against the progress of LLMs. I think this is mostly impossible: you don’t know how the jobs will change, you don’t know what else will change around this, and you can’t measure work like that anyway.

Benedict Evans · EN

Ways to think about token pricing

AI is in a supply crunch today, but what happens when we come out of it? How and where will supply, demand, price, capacity and capex get back into equilibrium? Today, model labs can name their price, but why won’t they end up as low-margin commodity infrastructure?

Benedict Evans · EN