Curated river of news
Latest posts from blogs I follow
We recently went on a 9 day trip to Japan. It was awesome. Japan has been at the top of my bucket list since ~2020 but with Covid, getting married, and having a kid we just never found the right ...
Why we need collaborative AI engineering
Weaver, seen from the Front, Vincent van Gogh, 1884 Something that’s been floating around in my head lately is the idea that I don’t know any truly good engineers who are also not good at at product design. Product design ...
Thanks to a tip from Rahim Nathwani, here's a uv run recipe for transcribing an audio file on macOS using the 10.28 GB Gemma 4 E2B model with MLX and mlx-vlm: uv run --python 3.13 --with mlx_vlm --with torchvision --with ...
I quipped on BlueSky: It’s interesting how AI proponents are often like "skill issue" when the LLM doesn't work like someone expects. Whereas when human-centered UX people see someone using it wrong, they're like "skill issue on us, the people ...
AI Only Has to Beat 3/10/images/ai-only-has-to-beat-3-out-of-10.webp/images/ai-only-has-to-beat-3-out-of-10.webp I think there's a misconception about how AI will break and change things. The Mythos hype has convinced people that AI is about to be so advanced that it can overcome our great cyber...
Sundays are for remembering the glorious sunshine you enjoyed but half a week ago, while looking out at eleven degrees Celsius' worth of grey skies and drizzle. Did you know some people actually like rain? Imagine. The weather taste equivalent ...
This newsletter is free to read, and it’ll stay that way. But if you want more - extra posts each month, no sponsored CTAs, access to the community, and a direct line to ask me things - paid subscriptions are ...
I spoke at Deep Dish Swift in Chicago!
SQLite 3.53.0 SQLite 3.52.0 was withdrawn so this is a pretty big release with a whole lot of accumulated user-facing and internal improvements. Some that stood out to me: ALTER TABLE can now add and remove NOT NULL and CHECK ...
Tool: SQLite Query Result Formatter Demo See my notes on SQLite 3.53.0. This playground provides a UI for trying out the various rendering options for SQL result tables from the new Query Result Formatter library, compiled to WebAssembly. Tags: tools, ...
Today's links Don't Be Evil: Evil genius is just a lack of shame. Hey look at this: Delights to delectate. Object permanence: FBI x Trotsky; Jakob Nielsen x headlines; Floppy disk stained glass; Zero tolerance for mismatched socks; EFF v ...
In this article I share my personal highlights of PyCon Lithuania 2026. Shout out to the organisers and volunteers This was my second time at PyCon Lithuania and, for the second time in a row, I leave with the impression ...
After months of pleading for the sun to show its face, I'm actually feeling quite warm now. Potentially, I'd go so far as to say I'm too toasty. I'm not saying I'm looking forward to winter. But I'm not not ...
Whenever a new technology shows up, the conversation quickly splits into camps. There are the people who reject it outright, and there are the people who seem to adopt it with religious enthusiasm. For more than a year now, no ...
Regarding Ronan Farrow and Andrew Marantz’s epic profile of Sam Altman in The New Yorker.
Aperture Collapse/images/blog/aperture-collapse/header.webp/images/blog/aperture-collapse/header.webp I've been playing with this idea of Aperture Collapse. It's a problem I have that I suspect a lot of people have as well. It's where AI has magnified our capabilities so much as builders that we...
Lenny posted another snippet from our 1 hour 40 minute podcast recording and it's about kākāpō parrots! Tags: kakapo
When you pip install a package with compiled code, the wheel you get is built for CPU features from 2009. Want newer optimizations like AVX2? Your installer has no way to ask for them. GPU support? You're on your own ...
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. ...
This year I’ve been asked more than ever before what web development “stack” I use. I always respond: none. We shouldn’t have a go-to stack! Let me explain why. What stack? My understanding is that a “stack” is a choice ...
The document wars, e-mail hosting discourse, and the return of an old friend
A quick but important reminder that font-family declarations don’t inherit fallback stacks the way many developers assume.
Maybe it was the past few months of RAMnarök hacking away at my optimism, but my first thoughts upon handling the fifty-buck Epomaker HE68 Lite fixated on how it might not just be cheap in the good way. Surrounded by ...
Today's links Canny Valley and Creative Commons: Another bite at the apple. Hey look at this: Delights to delectate. Object permanence: Bidenomics needs to be bigger; Al Franken's balanced war budget; Bernie x The Pope; Art is a money-laundry; UK ...
This newsletter is free to read, and it’ll stay that way. But if you want more - extra posts each month, no sponsored CTAs, access to the community, and a direct line to ask me things - paid subscriptions are ...
I spoke in Seoul, South Korea to an incredibly bright group of participants!
A talk, a workshop, and a podcast at AIE Europe. Here's what I did.
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
Play this short quiz to test your Python knowledge! At PyCon Lithuania 2026 I did a lightning talk where I presented a “Who wants to be a millionaire?” Python quiz, themed around iterables. There's a whole performance during the lightning ...
Me, in 2025, on Mastodon: I love tools like Netlify and deploying my small personal sites with git push But i'm not gonna lie, 2025 might be the year I go back to just doing builds locally and pushing the ...
A clever approach for selecting multiple dates on a calendar where the :nth-child()'s “n of selector” syntax does all the heavy lifting... even in the JavaScript. Selecting a Date Range in CSS originally handwritten and published with love on CSS-Tricks. ...
