Flux
Couleur d'accent
Why AI hasn’t replaced software engineers, and won’t

Why AI hasn’t replaced software engineers, and won’t

Why AI hasn’t replaced software engineers, and won’t Arvind Narayanan and Sayash Kappor take on the question of AI job losses through the lens of a profession that is uniquely suited to AI disruption - software engineering. In this essay, we argue that there is enough evidence to reject the narrative that once AI capabilities reach a certain threshold, it will cause mass layoffs. Given that this is true even in a sector with very few regulatory barriers, most other professions are likely to be…

Simon Willison's Weblog
Publishing WASM wheels to PyPI for use with Pyodide

Publishing WASM wheels to PyPI for use with Pyodide

The Pyodide 314.0 release announcement (via Hacker News) includes news I've been looking forward to for a long time: You can now publish Python packages built for Pyodide (or any Python runtime compatible with the PyEmscripten platform defined in PEP 783) directly to PyPI and install them at runtime. Previously, the Pyodide maintainers had to maintain, build, and host over 300 packages ourselves. This created a significant burden on our maintainers and became a major bottleneck for the…

Simon Willison's Weblog
Mapping SQLite result columns back to their source `table.column`

Mapping SQLite result columns back to their source `table.column`

Research: Mapping SQLite result columns back to their source `table.column` It would be neat if arbitrary SQL queries in Datasette could be rendered with additional information based on which columns from which tables were included in the results. To build that, we would need to be able to look at a SQL query like select users.name, orders.total from users join orders on orders.user_id = users.id and programmatically identify the table.column for each result - navigating not just joins but also…

Simon Willison's Weblog
US Government Forces Anthropic to Pull Claude Fable Days After Launch

US Government Forces Anthropic to Pull Claude Fable Days After Launch

For three days, Claude Fable 5 had users around the world one-shotting work they expected to take days or weeks: major code reviews, migrations, long-running builds, and projects some described as career-changing. Then access disappeared. If you were waiting for the weekend to try Claude Fable 5, you’re out of luck. Anthropic suspended access to Claude Fable 5 and Claude Mythos 5 on Friday night after receiving a US government export control directive blocking access by foreign nationals,…

Socket
Statement on the US government directive to suspend access to Fable 5 and Mythos 5

Statement on the US government directive to suspend access to Fable 5 and Mythos 5

Statement on the US government directive to suspend access to Fable 5 and Mythos 5 Well this is nuts: The US government, citing national security authorities, has issued an export control directive to suspend all access to Fable 5 and Mythos 5 by any foreign national, whether inside or outside the United States, including foreign national Anthropic employees. The net effect of this order is that we must abruptly disable Fable 5 and Mythos 5 for all our customers to ensure compliance. Access to…

Simon Willison's Weblog
OpenAI WebRTC Audio Session, now with document context

OpenAI WebRTC Audio Session, now with document context

OpenAI WebRTC Audio Session, now with document context I built the first version of this tool in December 2024 to try out the then-new OpenAI WebRTC API for interacting with their realtime audio models. Last month OpenAI introduced a brand new model to that API called GPT‑Realtime‑2, which they promoted as "our first voice model with GPT‑5‑class reasoning" - with a Sep 30, 2024 knowledge cut-off. I've been waiting for that model to show up in the ChatGPT iPhone app but it still hasn't, so I…

Simon Willison's Weblog
152 Chrome Live Wallpaper Extensions Hid Ad Tracking and Faked Google Search Traffic

152 Chrome Live Wallpaper Extensions Hid Ad Tracking and Faked Google Search Traffic

Socket's Threat Research Team identified a family of 152 Chrome Web Store new-tab "live wallpaper" extensions, built from one shared codebase but distributed across 38 separate Chrome Web Store publisher accounts and three brand backends, carrying a combined total of approximately 105,000 reported installs. Every listing declares on the Chrome Web Store that it will not collect or use user data, while the linked privacy policy admits the opposite: that the extensions log IP addresses, ISP,…

Socket
Esc