Flux
Quoting John Gruber

Quoting John Gruber

The real goldmine isn’t that Apple gets a cut of every App Store transaction. It’s that Apple’s platforms have the best apps, and users who are drawn to the best apps are thus drawn to the iPhone, Mac, and iPad. That edge is waning. Not because software on other platforms is getting better, but because third-party software on iPhone, Mac, and iPad is regressing to the mean, to some extent, because fewer developers feel motivated — artistically, financially, or both — to create well-crafted…

Simon Willison's Weblog
Gemini 3.1 Flash TTS

Gemini 3.1 Flash TTS

Gemini 3.1 Flash TTS Google released Gemini 3.1 Flash TTS today, a new text-to-speech model that can be directed using prompts. It's presented via the standard Gemini API using gemini-3.1-flash-tts-preview as the model ID, but can only output audio files. The prompting guide is surprising, to say the least. Here's their example prompt to generate just a few short sentences of audio: # AUDIO PROFILE: Jaz R. ## "The Morning Hype" ## THE SCENE: The London Studio It is 10:00 PM in a glass-walled…

Simon Willison's Weblog
Quoting Kyle Kingsbury

Quoting Kyle Kingsbury

I think we will see some people employed (though perhaps not explicitly) as meat shields: people who are accountable for ML systems under their supervision. The accountability may be purely internal, as when Meta hires human beings to review the decisions of automated moderation systems. It may be external, as when lawyers are penalized for submitting LLM lies to the court. It may involve formalized responsibility, like a Data Protection Officer. It may be convenient for a company to have…

Simon Willison's Weblog
datasette-ports 0.3

datasette-ports 0.3

Release: datasette-ports 0.3 A small update for my tool for helping me figure out what all of the Datasette instances on my laptop are up to. Show working directory derived from each PID Show the full path to each database file Output now looks like this: http://127.0.0.1:8007/ - v1.0a26 Directory: /Users/simon/dev/blog Databases: simonwillisonblog: /Users/simon/dev/blog/simonwillisonblog.db Plugins: datasette-llm datasette-secrets http://127.0.0.1:8001/ - v1.0a26 Directory:…

Simon Willison's Weblog
Zig 0.16.0 release notes: "Juicy Main"

Zig 0.16.0 release notes: "Juicy Main"

Zig 0.16.0 release notes: "Juicy Main" Zig has really good release notes - comprehensive, detailed, and with relevant usage examples for each of the new features. Of particular note in the newly released Zig 0.16.0 is what they are calling "Juicy Main" - a dependency injection feature for your program's main() function where accepting a process.Init parameter grants access to a struct of useful properties: const std = @import("std"); pub fn main(init: std.process.Init) !void { ///…

Simon Willison's Weblog
datasette PR #2689: Replace token-based CSRF with Sec-Fetch-Site header protection

datasette PR #2689: Replace token-based CSRF with Sec-Fetch-Site header protection

datasette PR #2689: Replace token-based CSRF with Sec-Fetch-Site header protection Datasette has long protected against CSRF attacks using CSRF tokens, implemented using my asgi-csrf Python library. These are something of a pain to work with - you need to scatter forms in templates with <input type="hidden" name="csrftoken" value="{{ csrftoken() }}"> lines and then selectively disable CSRF protection for APIs that are intended to be called from outside the browser. I've been following…

Simon Willison's Weblog
Trusted access for the next era of cyber defense

Trusted access for the next era of cyber defense

Trusted access for the next era of cyber defense OpenAI's answer to Claude Mythos appears to be a new model called GPT-5.4-Cyber: In preparation for increasingly more capable models from OpenAI over the next few months, we are fine-tuning our models specifically to enable defensive cybersecurity use cases, starting today with a variant of GPT‑5.4 trained to be cyber-permissive: GPT‑5.4‑Cyber. They're also extending a program they launched in February (which I had missed) called Trusted Access…

Simon Willison's Weblog
Cybersecurity Looks Like Proof of Work Now

Cybersecurity Looks Like Proof of Work Now

Cybersecurity Looks Like Proof of Work Now The UK's AI Safety Institute recently published Our evaluation of Claude Mythos Preview’s cyber capabilities, their own independent analysis of Claude Mythos which backs up Anthropic's claims that it is exceptionally effective at identifying security vulnerabilities. Drew Breunig notes that AISI's report shows that the more tokens (and hence money) they spent the better the result they got, which leads to a strong economic incentive to spend as much as…

Simon Willison's Weblog
Summary: AI Governance to Avoid Extinction

Summary: AI Governance to Avoid Extinction

With AI capabilities rapidly increasing, humans appear close to developing AI systems that are better than human experts across all domains. This raises a series of questions about how the world will—and should—respond. In the research paper AI Governance to Avoid Extinction: The Strategic Landscape and Actionable Research Questions, originally published in May 2025, MIRI’s […] The post Summary: AI Governance to Avoid Extinction appeared first on Machine Intelligence Research Institute.

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