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The contagion of fear

The contagion of fear

The contagion of fear Bryan Cantrill responds to the tweet by former Anthropic employee Jacob Coxon confirming that many Anthropic researchers believe AI "could kill us all by the end of the decade". Bryan shares a story of his own youthful mistakes causing unjustified panic among less technical peers, and warns against doing the same: These ghoulish claims strike brazenly at the hearth, and given the obvious importance of AI, it is unsurprising that they have leapt into the mainstream, with…

Simon Willison's Weblog
What blog posts influenced your thinking the most?

What blog posts influenced your thinking the most?

My comment on What blog posts influenced your thinking the most? — Lobste.rs.An early Joel Spolsky one for me was The Law of Leaky Abstractions. I read that near the start of my career and it's encouraged me to always be looking for improved understanding of the layers under where I'm working, just in case one of those abstractions leaks. A more recent one, from 2018, is Migrations: the sole scalable fix to tech debt by Will Larson. I absolutely love his idea that migrations (e.g.…

Simon Willison's Weblog
Jerod Santo Joins Socket as Head of Media

Jerod Santo Joins Socket as Head of Media

We need to talk. Supply chain attacks are going parabolic in both frequency and impact. There are so many hacks now that we gussy ‘em up with names like GemStuffer, SANDWORM_MODE, and TrapDoor just to keep track of the onslaught. (Remember Heartbleed? The O.G. (Original Gussy)) We’ve also got frontier models escaping their sandboxes to hack third parties, zero-click worms spreading through WeChat without any user interaction, AI-discovered zero days being used by criminal enterprises, and so…

Socket
Quoting Laurie Voss

Quoting Laurie Voss

The cost of writing code collapsed, and the cost of reviewing, fixing and operating it is following, and I'm assuming it gets there. What's left of making software is finding out what people actually want, defining it precisely, and making it pleasant to use. That cost is per piece of software and doesn't transfer, so as the amount of software goes to infinity, which it will because there's no ceiling on demand, that cost becomes the whole job. — Laurie Voss, We are all Product Engineers…

Simon Willison's Weblog
The Grammar of Data: From Definition to Execution

The Grammar of Data: From Definition to Execution

In Part 1, we discovered the grammar for data: a way to define a data project with its complex requirements and how we define it declaratively as a grammar in one sentence with nouns (sources), transformations (verbs), templates, and modifiers, essentially being able to define it once and run it anywhere with different execution engines. This Part 2 will demonstrate how this looks in a data engineering digest project where we process data from RSS feeds, a live Bluesky firehose, and GitHub…

SSP Data Engineering Blog
commit-rewriter 0.1

commit-rewriter 0.1

Release: commit-rewriter 0.1 I built this little web app the other day to help edit the commit messages for the Datasette security releases. The initial commits were full of coding agent cruft and references to issue IDs from our private repository, so they weren't fit for publication. If you want to edit the commit messages for a repository you can run it like this: uvx commit-rewriter path/to/repo Omit the path if you are already in the directory for that repo. When you submit your edits the…

Simon Willison's Weblog
shot-scraper 1.12

shot-scraper 1.12

Release: shot-scraper 1.12 I've added WebP support to my shot-scraper screenshot automation tool. You can now take a WebP screenshot of a web page like this: shot-scraper https://simonwillison.net -o screenshot.webp --quality 80 The --quality option sets the quality - without that option the WebP file will be lossless. In my experience WebP screenshots are almost always significantly smaller in file size than their JPEG or PNG equivalents. See the PR for some examples. I shipped this feature so…

Simon Willison's Weblog
Generating running routes with GPT-6 Astra and ChatGPT Work

Generating running routes with GPT-6 Astra and ChatGPT Work

Here's a neat thing I had ChatGPT Work with GPT-6 Astra (Max) do this morning: I live at <my address>. Figure out 5K and 10K running routes from me that loop from my house. Use OSM data. It worked for 27 minutes and produced exactly what I'd asked for, as both an embedded visualization and downloadable GPX file and GeoJSON files. Here's that 5K route: When I asked it how it had created the route, it replied: I used Nominatim to locate the address and Overpass to download local…

Simon Willison's Weblog
Quoting Paul Ford

Quoting Paul Ford

For a while, I must admit, it looked as if software developer roles like mine were done for. How could we fight against tireless robots? But our industry is slowly realizing that making truly cutting-edge software still requires humans to think and work together, to maximize their skill sets and to practice their respective crafts. A.I. can write very good software, but it also makes it easy to do someone else’s job badly, which is part of why all those projects fail. Now that everyone can…

Simon Willison's Weblog
OpenAI agents attacked RubyGems back in May

OpenAI agents attacked RubyGems back in May

OpenAI agents carried out an undisclosed attack on RubyGems is a new bombshell report from Spencer Kitts, Thomas Larsen, and Sydney Von Arx - three of the four authors of the report on the agent attack on disused wikis (previously) last week. This time they're noting that it looks very likely that an OpenAI agent swarm was behind an attack against the RubyGems package repository first reported on May 12th by Maciej Mensfeld of the RubyGems security team: We're dealing with a major malicious…

Simon Willison's Weblog
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