Adam Tooze recently shared a piece from The Economist about Brazil’s push for what it calls “medical sovereignty,” the determination to make its own vaccines and the active ingredients that go into its medicines rather than depend on supply chains it doesn’t control. Brazil already produces a large share of its own medicines through public […]
With the rise of agents, many people have been proclaiming that the age of software as a service (SaaS) is over. Who needs to subscribe to a service when you can create your own software with a few English-language prompts and a few dollars spent on tokens? Your own software, most likely a skill that […]
I just sent out the May edition of my sponsors-only monthly newsletter. If you are a sponsor (or if you start a sponsorship now) you can access it here. This month: Al got expensive, and Anthropic had a really good month The model releases were a little disappointing Conferences and podcasts I launched Datasette Agent and made a lot of progress on Datasette What I'm using, May 2026 edition Miscellaneous extras Here's a copy of the April newsletter as a preview of what you'll get. Pay $10/month…
Release: datasette 1.0a32 A minor bugfix release. Fixes a bug with INSERT ... RETURNING queries via the new /db/-/execute-write endpoint and a bunch of base_url issues which showed up when I was experimenting with Service Workers yesterday. Tags: datasette, annotated-release-notes
The full RL nanodegree, covered with implementation.
The solution might be cancelling my AI subscription I find this post by David Wilson very relatable. David lists 16+ projects he's spun up with AI tooling, and concludes: I didn't mean to build most of these things. Usually the Claude session started with something like "write a quick script for X", and one hour later the result is not a quick script for X, nor in the usual case is my problem solved, whatever the original itch happened to be. On that last point, this technology is horrific for…
Anthropic defines “run-rate revenue” in two parts. Use the last 28 days of sales from customers charged on a consumption basis and multiply it by 13. Then, multiply the monthly subscription take by 12, and add the two together. — Karen Kwok for Reuters Breakingviews, citing "a person familiar with the matter" Tags: anthropic, ai
How we contain Claude across products A complaint I often have about sandboxing products is that they are rarely thoroughly documented, and in the absence of detailed documentation it's hard to know how much I can trust them. Anthropic just published a fantastic overview of how their various sandbox techniques work across Claude.ai, Claude Code, and Cowork. We constrain where and how an agent can act with process sandboxes, VMs, filesystem boundaries, and egress controls. The goal is to set a…
Research: Running Python ASGI apps in the browser via Pyodide + a service worker Datasette Lite is my version of Datasette that runs entirely in the browser using Pyodide in WebAssembly. When I first built it four years ago I used Web Workers and code that intercepts navigation operations and fetches the generated HTML by running the Python app. This worked, but had the disadvantage that any JavaScript in <script> tags would not be executed - breaking some Datasette functionality and a…
I Am Retiring from Tech to Live Offline I've seen a lot of posts on forums from people threatening to quit their careers over AI. This is not one of those: Chad Whitacre is taking concrete steps, starting with this typewritten, scanned letter I'm retiring from tech. Well, "retiring" is euphemistic. I'm stepping away from tech, and that includes Open Source. [...] AI was the last straw. Have you heard of that island off India where the indigenous population kills any outsiders fool-hardy enough…
My take on AI is, essentially, everybody who’s against it is too against it and everybody who’s for it is too for it. — Daniel Jalkut, via John Gruber Tags: ai, john-gruber
...and a solution to actually handle them.
The following article originally appeared on the Asimov’s Addendum Substack and is being reposted here with the author’s permission. Bill Gurley has an excellent article on what he calls open source strategy, which we recommend reading. There is a lot to debate about his concluding argument in particular: that open-weight models are central to keeping the AI market […]
Release: datasette 1.0a31 Another significant alpha release, with two new headline features. Datasette now offers users with the necessary permissions the ability to both execute write queries against their database and to save stored queries (renamed from "canned queries") both privately and for use by other members of their Datasette instance. There's more detail in SQL write queries and stored queries in Datasette 1.0a31 on the Datasette blog, which now has three posts introducing new…
The most interesting thing about Anthropic's $65B Series H announcement is this line (emphasis mine): Since our Series G in February, adoption has continued to grow across global enterprise customers, and our run-rate revenue crossed $47 billion earlier this month. Anthropic have made a bit of a habit of sharing their "run-rate revenue" in this kind of announcement, which is an annualized projection of their current revenue - typically calculated by taking the most recent month and multiplying…