Kākāpō parrots
Lenny posted another snippet from our 1 hour 40 minute podcast recording and it's about kākāpō parrots! Tags: kakapo
Lenny posted another snippet from our 1 hour 40 minute podcast recording and it's about kākāpō parrots! Tags: kakapo
I think it's non-obvious to many people that the OpenAI voice mode runs on a much older, much weaker model - it feels like the AI that you can talk to should be the smartest AI but it really isn't. If you ask ChatGPT voice mode for its knowledge cutoff date it tells you April 2024 - it's a GPT-4o era model. This thought inspired by this Andrej Karpathy tweet about the growing gap in understanding of AI capability based on the access points and domains people are using the models with: [...] It…
Tool: GitHub Repo Size GitHub doesn't tell you the repo size in the UI, but it's available in the CORS-friendly API. Paste a repo into this tool to see the size, for example for simonw/datasette (8.1MB). Tags: cors, github
Release: asgi-gzip 0.3 I ran into trouble deploying a new feature using SSE to a production Datasette instance, and it turned out that instance was using datasette-gzip which uses asgi-gzip which was incorrectly compressing event/text-stream responses. asgi-gzip was extracted from Starlette, and has a GitHub Actions scheduled workflow to check Starlette for updates that need to be ported to the library... but that action had stopped running and hence had missed Starlette's own fix for this…
Meta announced Muse Spark today, their first model release since Llama 4 almost exactly a year ago. It's hosted, not open weights, and the API is currently "a private API preview to select users", but you can try it out today on meta.ai (Facebook or Instagram login required). Meta's self-reported benchmarks show it competitive with Opus 4.6, Gemini 3.1 Pro, and GPT 5.4 on selected benchmarks, though notably behind on Terminal-Bench 2.0. Meta themselves say they "continue to invest in areas with…
I have a feeling that everyone likes using AI tools to try doing someone else’s profession. They’re much less keen when someone else uses it for their profession. — Giles Turnbull, AI and the human voice Tags: ai-ethics, writing, ai
GLM-5.1: Towards Long-Horizon Tasks Chinese AI lab Z.ai's latest model is a giant 754B parameter 1.51TB (on Hugging Face) MIT-licensed monster - the same size as their previous GLM-5 release, and sharing the same paper. It's available via OpenRouter so I asked it to draw me a pelican: llm install llm-openrouter llm -m openrouter/z-ai/glm-5.1 'Generate an SVG of a pelican on a bicycle' And something new happened... unprompted, the model decided to give me an HTML page that included both the SVG…
Anthropic didn't release their latest model, Claude Mythos (system card PDF), today. They have instead made it available to a very restricted set of preview partners under their newly announced Project Glasswing. The model is a general purpose model, similar to Claude Opus 4.6, but Anthropic claim that its cyber-security research abilities are strong enough that they need to give the software industry as a whole time to prepare. Mythos Preview has already found thousands of high-severity…
Research: SQLite WAL Mode Across Docker Containers Sharing a Volume Inspired by this conversation on Hacker News about whether two SQLite processes in separate Docker containers that share the same volume might run into problems due to WAL shared memory. The answer is that everything works fine - Docker containers on the same host and filesystem share the same shared memory in a way that allows WAL to collaborate as it should. Tags: docker, sqlite
Google AI Edge Gallery Terrible name, really great app: this is Google's official app for running their Gemma 4 models (the E2B and E4B sizes, plus some members of the Gemma 3 family) directly on your iPhone. It works really well. The E2B model is a 2.54GB download and is both fast and genuinely useful. The app also provides "ask questions about images" and audio transcription (up to 30s) with the two small Gemma 4 models, and has an interesting "skills" demo which demonstrates tool calling…
Release: datasette-ports 0.2 No longer requires Datasette - running uvx datasette-ports now works as well. Installing it as a Datasette plugin continues to provide the datasette ports command. Tags: datasette
Release: scan-for-secrets 0.3 New -r/--redact option which shows the list of matches, asks for confirmation and then replaces every match with REDACTED, taking escaping rules into account. New Python function redact_file(file_path: str | Path, secrets: list[str], replacement: str = "REDACTED") -> int. Tags: projects
Tool: Cleanup Claude Code Paste Super-niche tool this. I sometimes copy prompts out of the Claude Code terminal app and they come out with a bunch of weird additional whitespace. This tool cleans that up. Tags: tools, claude-code
Release: datasette-ports 0.1 Another example of README-driven development, this time solving a problem that might be unique to me. I often find myself running a bunch of different Datasette instances with different databases and different in-development plugins, spreads across dozens of different terminal windows - enough that I frequently lose them! Now I can run this: datasette install datasette-ports datasette ports And get a list of every running instance that looks something like this:…
Eight years of wanting, three months of building with AI Lalit Maganti provides one of my favorite pieces of long-form writing on agentic engineering I've seen in ages. They spent eight years thinking about and then three months building syntaqlite, which they describe as "high-fidelity devtools that SQLite deserves". The goal was to provide fast, robust and comprehensive linting and verifying tools for SQLite, suitable for use in language servers and other development tools - a parser,…