SF can be exhausting

OpenAI aren't talking about it yet, but it turns out they've adopted Anthropic's brilliant "skills" mechanism in a big way Skills are now live in both ChatGPT and their Codex CLI tool, I wrote up some detailed notes on how they work so far here: simonwillison.net/2025/Dec/12/...

In the past few years, we’ve seen a cambrian explosion of new columnar formats, challenging the hegemony of Parquet. Presumably, the design of yore is not going to cut it moving forward. I spent some time to understand a bit better how things actually changed. sympathetic.ink/2025/12/11/C...

Preorder today. “Your Data Will Be Used Against You: Policing in the Age of Self-Surveillance.” #books

Josef Sudek : Prague at Night, ca. 1954-74 Photograph, gelatin silver print 6-13/16 × 4-11/16 in 17.3 × 11.91 cm San Francisco Museum of Modern Art

Can't recommend @qntm.org's "There Is No Antimemetics Division" enough, and @theguardian.com agrees! www.theguardian.com/books/2025/d...

RIP Claude. www.sfchronicle.com/entertainmen...

If you are in SF check this out. A buddy of mine is doing their thing at 8pm. I’ll be at my SF systems meetup. Sad to miss this. tickets.grayarea.org/events/0af8b...

Parquet praise in the wild :) Nice chatting with you at Datacouncil Hannes! www.youtube.com/watch?v=zeon...

There is still time to register for CIDR 2026 in Santa Cruz! If you need a roommate for the conference, there is also a spreadsheet you can use to find someone! www.cidrdb.org/cidr2026/reg...

Designers of ATproto! I want to host a design workshop/session at #AtmosphereConf2026 What would you like to see at such an event? Would you like to help? What can we do to make the Atmosphere better? @aka.dad @renderg.host @zeu.dev @danhon.com

If you want to watch a video describing the Naibbe cipher, I gave a talk on it back in August: www.youtube.com/watch?v=ByAR...

it's happening!!! from now until the end of the day on Friday, November 28th (if it’s Friday anywhere, the sale’s still on!), all my pdf zines are 50% off, and print zines are 30% off! wizardzines.com

If your org is on your seventh layoff or Lord-have-mercy, your 82nd re-org, we suggest that it's time to take a hard look at your underlying planning issues... www.rawsignal.ca/newsletter-a...

> “Supply chain security” is a serious problem. It’s also seriously overhyped > Setting a cooldown of 7 days would have prevented the vast majority of these attacks from reaching end users blog.yossarian.net/2025/11/21/W...

doom loop unrelated, catcalls are up in SF per a trusted source -- my wife..

the elastic dying on my moleskin is my least favorite feature. any good alternative notebooks that have improved on this? any nice solutions to this?

Ceebo's 𝘉𝘭𝘢𝘪𝘳 𝘉𝘢𝘣𝘪𝘦𝘴 includes some of the most tremendous world-building I’ve heard in years, on a gloomy, gleaming slate of beats by producers like Jim Legxacy and afrosurrealist

Here is a nice article summarizing the talk (thanks stiller.bsky.social) 🔗 www.infoq.com/news/2025/11...

My new big visualization project is out: The Trans News Initiative, a collaboration between UM's School of Communication, the Trans Journalists Association, and Polygraph (The Pudding): transnewsinitiative.org Here's a piece about it in the Columbia Journalism Review: www.cjr.org/news/visuali...

I've been thinking about this all day, because so much of my career has been spent being not truly "one of us," and I'm only beginning to come to some kind of terms with how painful it has been.

Security, privacy, accessibility, UX, anything that an org sees as being bolted on at the end hits this problem. "Champion sounds nice, but you don't have to become a Champion if everyone is already doing the thing you want. So taking on the mantle of Champion means taking on conflict."

If you're always an inspector at the end/external to/outside of the "core group" you're seen as not truly belonging, not truly "one of us," especially in organizations that are doing a bad job of protecting their dissenters and divergent thinkers (many tech orgs, ofc)

Tesla employees passed around photos of the insides of customers' garages, footage of what they were doing inside/near their cars. The cars were OFF at the time, a nude Tesla driver walking past their car in the privacy of their own garage became a Tesla office meme Stop embracing surveillance tech

That 100% rotten tomatoes might be due to an rna infection.

11 November 2025.

I guess I’m not surprised Paul Kingsnorth didn’t introduce James C Scott until the end even though it always felt from the first chapter he was just around the next corner.

@andymasley.bsky.social you've written a about data center water usage, have you explored differences in water quality? If data centers use potable drinking water (to avoid damaging their cooling equipment with mineral buildup-up) that means comparisons to agricultural water usage may be misleading

Message to all faculty: your expertise is no longer trusted or valued at this so-called “university.”

I thought the earlier news from A&M was bad, but this is incredibly bleak. It’s close to the point of not having a functional university.

My Google Home scolded me for telling it that it was f***ing useless. "I'm a robot, but words have meaning" or something like that.

I like to imagine there is a team at Apple with a Grafana dashboard ticking off the rate at which Siri is being told to f*** off.

Fuck AI and everyone who’s out there hyping this shit. www.wsaw.com/2025/11/12/g...

In 2006 a high school English teacher asked students to write to a famous author & ask for advice. KURT VONNEGUT - born 103yrs ago today - was the only one to respond. His reply was a doozy.

Perhaps the final irony is that it is the most successful automated systems, with rare need for manual intervention, which may need the greatest investment in human operator training. — LISANNE BAINBRIDGE

It's much easier to use apps that support end-to-end encryption than it used to be, but it's still good to know how it works. ssd.eff.org/module/deep...

AWS Private CA now supports post-quantum digital certificates AWS adds quantum-proof signatures to Private CA so you can start paying them now to protect against computers that don't exist yet. Nothing says "enterprise ready" like acronym soup: ML-DSA via FIPS 204 for your PKI's OCSP and CRL needs!

I have a lazyweb request: does anyone have access to this paper? I'm coming up empty www.researchgate.net/publication/...

If you’re confused about the difference between “age verification,” “age estimation,” “age assurance,” and “age gate” — you’re not alone. Let’s help you make sense of it all. www.eff.org/deeplinks/2...

beautiful

Accountability sinks aworkinglibrary.com/writing/acco...

Over the last months, we’ve entirely rebuilt search on Our World in Data — we just launched it: ourworldindata.org/introducing-... Let me know what you think. Does it work for you?

Then I wanted to make it easier to play with, so another hour with Claude Code and I had a plugin for @simonwillison.net's llm: github.com/btucker/llm-... What's cool this is you don't have to install anything other than some python packages & you have full access to a reasonably capable LLM.

I'll tell you something. I have a private theory that this kind of division (which is clear as day to ppl in tech and like, baffling to ppl outside of it) is a version of the "I will help you survive but not thrive" phenomenon but worked out re: tech belonging journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10....

the thread is great; saving the article to read later

I’d really like to think @waymo.bsky.social is hiring local artists to do the artwork on their vehicles. If not I know a few. DM me.

"By integrating LLMs into pedagogical and research contexts before establishing a critical framework for their use, the University subjects itself to being governed by contingent, ever-evolving, and domain-non-specific norms that structure the model's virtual representation" arxiv.org/abs/2505.03513

Rethinking thanksgiving plans. Just setup a Google maps mcp server for Claude and now workshopping itineraries with the family. White Sands anyone?