Russell wrote a great comment on my last post (thanks!): What benefits do these things offer when a general purpose computer can do so many things nowadays? Is there a USB keyboard that you can connect to a laptop or phone to do these things? I presume that all recent phones have the compute power to do all the synthesis you need if you have the...
The best part of playing Wordle is when you enter the first word waiting to see which letters turn up green. The biggest disappointment is when there are no green letters. A close second is when there’s one, and it’s just a vowel. Then you enter a second word revealing no more green letters. At […]
CSS frameworks have become a hot topic in front-end development in recent years. Tailwind CSS has emerged as a noteworthy contender, separating the developer community from either love or hate for Tailwind.In this article, I will talk about the advantages of Tailwind CSS compared to traditional CSS, focusing on
This is the second half of a post about using Nix to automate a fuzz testing workflow. At this point, I can run honggfuzz against pdftotext, but it takes a bit of manual effort to get things started. I promised in part one that I’d get all of the installation and fuzzing down to a single command. Downloading tricky PDFs In my ad-hoc fuzzing, I...
We enhanced the ability of the upgraded Claude 3.5 Sonnet and Claude 3.5 Haiku to recognize and resist prompt injection attempts. Prompt injection is an attack where a malicious user feeds instructions to a model that attempt to change its originally intended behavior. Both models are now better able to recognize adversarial prompts from a user...
Fuzz testing is a technique for automatically uncovering bugs in software. The problem is that it’s a pain to set up. Read any fuzz testing tutorial, and the first task is an hour of building tools from source and chasing down dependencies upon dependencies. I recently found that Nix eliminates a lot of the gruntwork from fuzz testing. I created...
Claude Artifact Runner One of my least favourite things about Claude Artifacts is the way it defaults to writing code in React in a way that's difficult to reuse outside of Artifacts. I start most of my prompts with "no react" so that it will kick out regular HTML and JavaScript instead, which I can then copy out into my tools.simonwillison.net...
According to a document that I viewed, Anthropic is telling investors that it is expecting a billion dollars in revenue this year. Third-party API is expected to make up the majority of sales, 60% to 75% of the total. That refers to the interfaces that allow external developers or third parties like Amazon's AWS to build and scale their own AI...
OpenAI’s monthly revenue hit $300 million in August, up 1,700 percent since the beginning of 2023, and the company expects about $3.7 billion in annual sales this year, according to financial documents reviewed by The New York Times. [...] The company expects ChatGPT to bring in $2.7 billion in revenue this year, up from $700 million in 2023,...
rustc_driver a deeper rabbit hole than expected what happens when you run cargo clippy? well, we can ask cargo what it does: $ cargo clippy -v Checking example v0.1.0 (/home/jyn/src/example) Running `/home/jyn/.rustup/toolchains/nightly-x86_64-unknown-linux-gnu/bin/clippy-driver /home/jyn/.rustup/toolchains/nightly-x86_64-unknown-linux-gnu/bin/rustc...
Earlier this week, I stumbled upon this brilliant marketing-slash-documentation idea from SingleStore — notebooks as a first-party page! There are a handful of nice things about this idea: Very easy to fan out. You're not going to really run out of sample notebooks from which you can create pages. Easy to share and 'productize'. Lends itself...
Earlier this week, I stumbled upon this brilliant marketing-slash-documentation idea from SingleStore — notebooks as a first-party page! There are a handful of nice things about this idea: Very easy to fan out. You're not going to really run out of sample notebooks from which you can create pages. Easy to share and 'productize'. Lends itself...
Inside Anthropic's unique approach to preventing talent poaching and maintaining organizational equality
How I used Cloudflare Zaraz to offload third party scripts and improve my website performance.
In the last two parts we introduced the poll system call and, with it, patterns around evented I/O. poll has the advantage of being simple to use and supported on most platforms. However, as we saw, we need to iterate through all monitored sockets to figure out which is ready. Another awkwardness with poll's API is associating...
Wayback Machine: Models - Anthropic (8th October 20240 The Internet Archive is only intermittently available at the moment, but the Wayback Machine just came back long enough for me to confirm that the Anthropic Models documentation page listed Claude 3.5 Opus as coming “Later this year” at least as recently as the 8th of October, but today makes...
someone filed an issue on an 11ty repo to get help with their slow astro build 😅OSS is *wild* y’all
Firstly, I made this blog with two key influences in mind: Herman Martinus’ Bear Blog for it’s simple & lightweight ethos InvisibleUp’s unique article banners featured with each post I mentioned this prior in a now-deleted blog post. With that post now gone, I feel it’s best to publicly credit my influences again and this is the best post to do...
I’ve been having a number of communications problems in my interactions with my doctors at Kaiser lately, and it’s becoming one of those things where the burden and onus entirely is placed upon me to sort out, and that’s exhausting for the actually autistic and chronically fatigued, to have to be constantly micromanaging things just to make sure...
A couple of things all coalescing into the same general window of time has got me to think, not with any meaningful conclusion or anything, about what happens when communal spaces close for good. The Vancouver International Film Festival took place recently and it happened to overlap with the closure of social media site Cohost.org. Everyone got...
For the same cost and similar speed to Claude 3 Haiku, Claude 3.5 Haiku improves across every skill set and surpasses even Claude 3 Opus, the largest model in our previous generation, on many intelligence benchmarks. Claude 3.5 Haiku is particularly strong on coding tasks. For example, it scores 40.6% on SWE-bench Verified, outperforming many...
Two big announcements from Anthropic today: a new Claude 3.5 Sonnet model and a new API mode that they are calling computer use. (They also pre-announced Haiku 3.5, but that's not available yet so I'm ignoring it until I can try it out myself.) Computer use is really interesting. Here's what I've figured out about it so far. You provide the...
No Newsletter next week I'll be speaking at USENIX SRECon! TLA from first principles I'm working on v0.5 of Logic for Programmers. In the process of revising the "System Modeling" chapter, I stumbled on a great way to explain the temporal logic of actions that TLA+ is based on. I'm reproducing that bit here with some changes to fit the newsletter...
Reading Time: 23 minutes This post from a week ago talked about three decision-making traps that technical leaders fall into like flies into a honey jar: These traps wreak havoc in individual decision making. So, naturally, we’ve ported the assumptions underlying these traps to many of the structures we use to make decisions in teams. Then,...
“A mathematician’s reputation rests on the number of bad proofs he has given. (Pioneer work is clumsy.)” — A. S. Besicovitch I’m sure I’ve written about this quote somewhere, but I can’t find where. The quote comes from A Mathematician’s Miscellany by J. E. Littlewood, citing Besicovitch. I’ve more often seen the quote concluding with […] The...
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Last March, I released my first experiment in post-centralized social media called “Likes”. The idea was simple: an image you can click to leave a Like on the page:
Just like that, BazelCon 2024 came and went. So… it’s obviously time to summarize the two events of last week: BazelCon 2024 and the adjacent Build Meetup. There is A LOT to cover, but everything is here in just one article!
After setting up DNSControl I wanted to use it to move away from DigitalOcean[1] to Bunny DNS. I'd already moved my servers to Hetzner but the DNS was more complicated. This domain, for example, has 45 records for subdomains, CNAMES for Netlify, plus verification stuff so I didn't want to risk moving it manually. I added my Bunny API keys to...
A great post from @avidlarge on the @cloudcannon blog—having revisions in your git history is a technically superior solution: more powerful, robust, and insulated from unnecessary drama.https://cloudcannon.com/blog/content-is-sacred-so-own-your-revision-history/
What it was like being a part of my first Apple hardware embargo.
In March 2022 I wrote a description of the Quantum Technology Ecosystem. I thought this would be a good time to check in on the progress of building a quantum computer and explain more of the basics. Just as a reminder, Quantum technologies are used in three very different and distinct markets: Quantum Computing, Quantum […]
Web excursions brought to you in partnership with CleanShot X, the absolute, hands-down best app for Mac screenshots. Get one of my all-time favorite apps here. What? Two web excursions in 7 days? In this economy? I just found some extra stuff over the weekend… Busy Status Bar — Productivity Multi-tool Device with an LED pixel screen Displays...
I commented on Lobsters that /tmp is usually a bad idea, which caused some surprise. I suppose /tmp security bugs were common in the 1990s when I was learning Unix, but they are pretty rare now so I can see why less grizzled hackers might not be familiar with the problems. I guess that’s some kind of success, but sadly the fixes have left behind...
In The Sea and Summer, Melbourne of the mid-twenty-first century is half buried under the rising sea.
The type and amount of food consumed by hikers on the Appalachian or Pacific Crest Trails is truly mind-boggling.
My mother died recently, after a long decline in her health, and I was one of the main people who helped take care of her. (Here’s her obituary.) While caring for her, preparing for her …
Someone asked me for pointers on doing product management (and, to a lesser extent, project management) in Free/Libre Open Source Projects for the first time, after many years of experience in proprietary software. I basically …
Leonard and I frequently play edutainment webgames, and thus we're slowly getting better at various realms of human knowledge. Recently we've added a few new games to the rotation. Metaflora has clarified for us how …
My country's Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) offers a bunch of free independent study online classes. I started poking around and there's some neat stuff in there.You can read all the material for free online, …
Someone in a group chat mentioned a particular annoyance in dealing with doctors, nurses, and similar medical experts. Sometimes you take pains to ask them a specific, deliberately-worded question, and they don't really seem to …
Colleagues ask me for advice on diversifying their hiring pipelines, recruiting and retaining volunteer contributors, and addressing diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) in marketing to and taking care of their users. Here are a few …
I have learned or re-learned a smattering of lessons in the last few months, concerning athletic activities and inhabiting my body in general.Sometimes, when I do crunches or sit-ups or similar abdominal exercises, my neck …
I started on a more systematic 2023 retrospective post, and found that a pretty significant amount of my 2023 centered on stuff I don't want to talk about on my blog. Feel free to ask …
You are a selected audience. That is to say, you have selected, yourself, to read this. You have a variety of reasons to do so, and I imagine that, for some of you, you do …
How should we think about trust when it comes to adding new maintainers to a project? Another way of saying that is: if I'm an existing project maintainer, considering whether to entrust you with co-maintainership, …
I'm partway through a wilderness medicine textbook from NOLS (formerly National Outdoor Leadership School). Something from the section on burns keeps ringing in my head because it's interesting in its literal truth but also figuratively …
(This is one of the "people are wrong on the internet!!!" posts I write to clear it out of my head. And then refer back to later in future arguments, in imagined triumph, as though …
Please help join a celebration for the 20th anniversary of the software project Beautiful Soup on May 19th, 2024! For twenty years, this screen-scraping library has made it easier to get data out of HTML.You …
A few times in the past week, I've spoken with artists who are working on uncomfortable art -- the kind of art that intentionally challenges the audience with displeasure. In one of them, it's like …
I love The Great Gatsby (if you absolutely loathe it, turn back now!) and recently got to watch a preview performance of a Broadway theatrical adaptation (opens April 25th). I have already inflicted several thoughts …
If you work on open source software, especially command-line tools, I want you to know about newly available research reports and design guidance, and a user research HOWTO, that you can pick up and reuse.The …
Today I’m giving the closing keynote address at PyCon US 2024, sharing “Untold stories from six years working on Python packaging.”I aim to post a fuller transcript with slides within the next several weeks. But, …
We live in interesting times.A friend of mine was taking an online class yesterday, and big national news (President Biden deciding not to pursue re-election) interrupted that class. The news distracted everyone and shattered concentration.Sometimes …
In mid-June I caught COVID-19 for, I'm pretty sure, the first time. The current dominant variants are transmissible enough that they got past my defenses. I believe I caught the virus either while wearing an …
The cybersecurity expert SwiftOnSecurity, a decade ago, wrote a parable called "A Story About Jessica" and posted it to their (now-deleted) Tumblr blog. I found it moving and insightful. The consultancy Superbloom pointed to it …
My friend Mel Chua died this week.I'm middle-aged now. I started this weblog as a young adult, and now it's been more than twenty years, and today I'm really feeling that change.Nearly eleven years ago, …
This week, US Presidential candidate Kamala Harris announced that her choice to join her on the ballot as running mate is Tim Walz, who's currently governor of Minnesota.A number of people on Bluesky, in the …
My friend Ned Batchelder posted, "A list of commits is not a changelog!" and spurred this post.Summary: We'd all benefit from restoring the distinction between a detailed changelog and brief release notes, but that's hard …