Microsoft open-sourced a sizable chunk of the GitHub Copilot VS Code extension today (MIT licensed) - I did some spelunking to try and find the LLM prompts that make it all work https://simonwillison.net/2025/Jun/30/vscode-copilot-chat/

Timeline cleanser: Ring of Kerry in the rain. #ireland #photography #landscapephotography

Guess what! The prototype of the new #plushtodon series has arrived. It will be available later this year in this and one other color!

Reorienting MRO Massively Increases Its Subsurface Scanning Power https://www.universetoday.com/articles/reorienting-mro-massively-increases-its-subsurface-scanning-power

Finally got a chance to play around with @khaost's ExtensionKit sample project. Runs straight outta the box on iPad! Unfortunately not on Mac Catalyst (seems to need an entitlement?) TL;DR, however — you can now build and use plugins in your iOS apps (🥳) […] [Original post on mastodon.social]

«I guess the main point is understand the data types you’re using. You wouldn’t use an 8-bit integer to handle values in the thousands, but it’s fine if the values stay under one hundred. The same rules apply to floating point. You just have to know how they work.» […]

Looks like this headline was constructed to violate @ianb’s law… https://apple.news/AxKolRBihRpy493vkr7KB2Q

PSA: If you use OneDrive on Mac, and your company has changed how it identifies the one drive folder, you might get more than one OneDrive folder which you cannot remove, not even using sudo. The way to reset things — assuming nothing is pending from uploading to OneDrive — is to follow the […]

I think "context engineering" is going to stick - unlike "prompt engineering" it has an inferred definition that's much closer to the intended meaning, which is to carefully and skillfully construct the right context to get great results from LLMs […]

Who among us wouldn't be tempted to trick an AI vending machine into stocking tungsten cubes and then giving them away to us for free? https://simonwillison.net/2025/Jun/27/project-vend/

i've probably asked this before but does anyone have a favourite html templating library for writing web apps in Go? so far I've tried html/template (which I find hard to typesafe templ (which enforces some rules about HTML that I find weird, like "you have to close your <li> tags") i don't […]

It sounds like Apple is extending the Core Technology Fee to *all apps in the EU*

Creative Commons launches “CC Signals”. Quote: “TL;DR – What are CC signals? “CC signals are a proposed framework to help content stewards express how they want their works used in AI training—emphasizing reciprocity, recognition, and sustainability in machine reuse. They aim to preserve open […]

More on the crisis in open-source maintenance as exemplified by libxml2: https://lwn.net/SubscriberLink/1025971/73f269ad3695186d/ Some money *has* to start flowing into this community or the foundations we all rely on will start rotting away. Given the many-billions-per-quarter in Big Tech […]

new zine: The Secret Rules of the Terminal https://jvns.ca/blog/2025/06/24/new-zine--the-secret-rules-of-the-terminal/

Apps built as Claude Artifacts now have the ability to run prompts of their own, billed to the current user of the app, not the app author I reverse engineered the tool instructions from the system prompt to see how it works - notes here […]

The Intel 80186 was to the Intel 8086 what the 68010 was to the 68000: a small improvement that almost made it into the original design but was issued as a different chip… and almost nobody used them, and waited for the 80286/68020 instead […]

If you missed it: @esoastronomy is changing to yearly proposal cycles! (As someone working in space based astro that's what I'm used to, half-yearly calls sound very stressful 😬) #eas2025 #Astrodon

I wish all my app designs had the confidence of FileMerge, who picked a layout in NEXTSTEP in the early 90s and for the most part hasn't thought to change a pixel since

There are some interesting details about how Anthropic trained their models tucked away in today's summary judgement: they bought, chopped up and scanned millions of dollars worth of books! https://simonwillison.net/2025/Jun/24/anthropic-training/

You could have named one of these, @akosma 😉 https://mastodon.online/@davidwilkins/114731762274205784

#arxiv is a rebel movement gone mainstream. -- Licia Verde at #eas2025, from her speech accepting Jocelyn Bell Burnell Inspiration Medal from the European Astronomical Society on behalf of ArXiv #openscience

Whoa... With the new software (so pretty soon) the #arxiv order will be randomized. No more race to rhe first to submit on a given day! #Astrodon #eas2025

I set up a Timelapse on the roof yesterday but then one kid started screaming, and then the other kid staters screaming, and then the first kid started screaming again because the other kid was screaming, and I tried so hard not to scream that I forgot it was up there so here you have hours.

🥳 It's #RubinFirstLook day and the Universe sure is beautiful! Here's the evidence backing up my BBC Radio 4 Today assertion that Rubin's Trifid nebula image looks just like a jellyfish! You are welcome 🤗🔭 Join the watch party online today at 16:00 UK time! 🎥: www.youtube.com/live/Zv22_Am...

it's happening! "The Secret Rules of the Terminal" is coming out tomorrow! here's the table of contents:

If you, as an iPad developer, actually do the work and adopt the iPadOS 26 design language and layouts and modern APIs, you really will be able to just 'check a box' in Xcode and have a native Mac app, with the least amount of bespoke platform work since Catalyst was introduced. That's pretty […]

The great part about iPad's new windowing model is that you can't hide from it if you're a developer. Users are going to window your apps, layouts are going to be resized, and your menu bar is going to be investigated. The menu bar API, which is shared with […] [Original post on mastodon.social]

visionOS appears to work so much better with the PSVR controllers that it’s almost unbelievable that it shipped without hand controllers of its own https://youtu.be/702AKubkmGE?si=wWSr8uyBYaKlS8r0

I'm finding I'm removing a lot of my Mac Catalyst #ifdefs in my apps and turning them into runtime checks to enable advanced features on iPad, too. I think this is the 'missing link' between iPad and (Mac Catalyst + visionOS) that I talked about two years ago — the common ancestor that was […]

Die Universitätsbibliothek in Aberdeen ist sensationell. Einer der schönsten Orte zum Lernen, die ich je gesehen habe. #scotland

Ein meh Artikel insgesamt (evtl leucht satirisch, aber kommt nicht so ganz raus), aber diese Sätze von Marlene Engelhorn sitzt: "Man muss sich Vermögen vorstellen als Suchtkrankheit. Man wird geboren als Süchtige, umgeben von Süchtigen", sagt Engelhorn. Für viele Reiche sei der Selbstwert mit […]

The more time I spend with this design, and these APIs, the more I'm coming to understand that the iOS platform now has three distinct Postures. It used to just be 'iPhone' and 'iPad' (corresponding to size classes of Compact and Regular). But now we've […] [Original post on mastodon.social]

Speaking of not feeling native anymore, there is a wiiiiide gap now between apps written or designed for the early years of iPad, and what is state of the art on the platform today. But so many devs either bounced off the platform while it was still so hamstrung by its original form factor and […]

München-Empfehlungen? Kontext: Ich habe, vor mehr als 15 Jahren, in München studiert. Kenne die Stadt also gut von früher, war aber ~7-8 Jahre nicht da. Komme die letzte Juli Woche für ein paar Tage und Suche nach Geheimtipps für tolle Läden für Keramik, Einrichtung oder Schmuck & Kleidung […]

Blogged too much today and had to send it all out in a newsletter - it's a pretty fun one, covering Gemini 2.5 and Mistral Small 3.2 and the fact that most LLMs will absolutely try and murder you given the chance (and a suitably contrived scenario) […]

The 'danger' of giving iPad more power, as per iPadOS 26, is that users will then come to demand and expect /even more/ from it. I think iPad passes a threshold with this release, and you might not even notice it unless you're testing on External Display mode (i.e. M-series or higher) — but it […]

AI bots that scrape the internet for training data are hammering the servers of libraries, archives, museums, and galleries, and are in some cases knocking their collections offline, according to a new survey published today. While the impact of AI bots on open collections has been reported […]

i was just wondering the other day if there's an alternative to `jq` which uses Javascript syntax to filter JSON and there is! it's called `fx` https://fx.wtf/getting-started (via @indirect: https://andre.arko.net/2025/06/13/2025-06-13-fx/)

I've been using iPadOS 26 on an external display for a bit, and I have some strong feelings. It does need tweaks, for sure, but not a lot of them. It's the closest this platform has ever felt to being a real computer — I would even go as far as to say the onus has now shifted back onto app […]

Icon Composer is just a whole lot of fun — I can get away with pretending to be a designer for a little bit longer before anybody notices!

au pair programming is when you have enough money and space to afford an au pair so you can focus on the programming

In macOS 26, iOS apps linked with the new SDK blend in a lot more than before. A well-designed iPad app (i.e. not a Catalyst app) might be hard to pick out from native apps on the system — though they retain a lot more of their animations and Liquid Glass […] [Original post on mastodon.social]

If you use "AI agents" (LLMs calling tools in a loop) you need to be aware of the Lethal Trifecta Any time you combine access to private data, exposure to untrusted content and the ability to externally communicate an attacker can trick the system into stealing your data […]

[Minecraft] Minecraft is adding a feature called a "player locator bar" it helps people to find each other when playing on multiplayer servers. I wish, from an educational perspective they had implemented this as "opt in" rather than "opt out" ... you can hide your location in game but you […]

En muchos sitios hay proyectos molones que necesitamos difundir más. Hoy he descubiero "The Why Not Lab" que ha desarrollado con trabajadores y trabajadoras herramientas digitales de protección de derechos laborales: https://www.thewhynotlab.com/services/tools-and-guides

Is it just me or is Finder significantly faster at browsing folders of tens of thousands of items like images now in macOS 26?

Hey, remember User Friendly? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_Friendly #discontinued #nostalgia

Another prompt injection paper review! This time it's "An Introduction to Google’s Approach to AI Agent Security" by Santiago Díaz, Christoph Kern, and Kara Olive There are some really interesting ideas in here, particularly around Google's three core principles for agent security […]

Just added a new store to the fediverse mechandise awesome list, Forge & Craft. Get an amazing fediverse t-shirt and check out the rest of their merch, too! Any sales, fedi related or not, support the creators directly. https://shop.forgeandcraft.co.uk/ #fedimerch