I know I'm more than a week late to this one, but this was one hell of a mic drop and absolutely worth spending 1 minute on programming humor:

Universal Music Group has given Rick Beato 4 days to delete his interviews with Universal artists, or his entire channel will be deleted from YouTube: www.youtube.com/watch?v=zBq_...

SVT has a live broadcast of the moving of Kiruna's church to its new location! Kiruna is the Swedish town where all the buildings are being moved 2 miles east, due to subsidence caused by a nearby mine.

New branding and a logo refresh for Eurovision. Apparently the new font is called Singing Sans.

That new Gemma3 270M AI model from Google really is cute! I tried asking it that same question "What is it like to be a bat?" and I got back a cute tool call: {"name": "bat", "arguments": {"action":"play"} } I think Gemma3 was disappointed there was no bat to actually play with 😥🦇

The new hardware redesign for the Pebble Time 2 looks fantastic... okay, count me in, pre-ordered. Looking forward to 30 days battery life & heart-rate monitor too. @ericmigi.com thank you *so much* for bringing the Time 2 design closer to the Pebble Time Steel aesthetic!

If you like / miss Berlin, or you just like German humor, this Kai Lentit video on attempting to go clubbing is hilarious. I'm going to have to go back to Berlin one day, aren't I?

Like half the world, I'm busy downloading the new open source OpenAI model onto my computer now. 14GB just as I go to sleep, hopefully will be ready by when I wake up. Also hoping gpt-oss:20b will somehow run on my 16GB RAM machine, no matter how slowly. Would like to have an offline alternative.

America needs to take open models more seriously. Just this summer the early lead in open model adoption of Llama & co has been overtaken by Chinese models. With The American Truly Open Models (ATOM) Project we're looking to build support and express the urgency of this issue.

Claude is now successfully adding tasks to my Toodledo to-do list. It's both weird and very cool to refresh the to-do list on my phone and see tasks written & added by an AI there for me. Also weird but cool: Claude *really* wants me to talk about The Witness game with it. High priority, due today.

Internet is down, but last night I'd downloaded Ollama and a couple of AI models, so I could use AI offline. My first try is not going well. Qwen 3 4B is stuck in an infinite thinking loop. Pages and pages of the same few sentences repeated. "But why would the user want that?" "But how to do that?"

here’s a curse word free version of “look it up” as requested by countless teachers and librarians 🥰😘

This comment by Christina Wodtke is spot on. "The old timers who built the early web are coding with AI like it's 1995 again... the same folks who hand-coded HTML... When the folks who've been through every tech cycle since gopher start acting like excited newbies again, that tells you something."

July has been a truly incredible month for model releases from China - Moonshot (Kimi K2), Z ai (GLM-4.5) and 5 new releases from Qwen I think it's undeniable that the best available open weight models now come from the Chinese AI labs simonwillison.net/2025/Jul/30/...

If you're wondering why your Claude Desktop chats are out of order with new timestamps today, you're not the only one. Seems timestamps have been updated on old Claude Opus 4 chats for some reason (new model drop soon?) No chat history actually lost for me, they're just out of order.

I like that Starbucks are closing their mobile-only stores as "too transactional" and "lacking warmth and human connection". Business focus is back on coffeehouses. The product isn't the coffee (let's be honest, it's not great). The product is the ambience. Aromas, music, comfort, lighting, etc.

Sophia Ziesch on leaving the Berlin club scene. Hard to decide how much of this is just getting older / "back in my day", but when scenes feel unsafe, it's probably time to move on. I'm sad if that's what Berlin is like now. youtu.be/PtfUlCBpiQk?...

Humans not quite obsolete. Struggling to compile a Go program Claude sketched out, every compile ended with "no packages to build". Claude had no ideas. Lots of debugging, none helpful. Yeah, don't call your Go file "crosscompile_test.go". I had to remind Claude that _test.go has special meaning.

Borrowing an idea from patio11: I'm adding some English readable notes to my website's robots.txt, specifically for AIs (and specifically Claude). Not to bias or trick the AI, but suggesting which parts of pages I think would be most helpful and timeless, for the humans they are assisting.

A year later, and the video for Aberrant DSP's "Lair" is still one of my favorite VST plugin product videos. They absolutely knew their audience - visually, sonically, right down to the typography and descriptions. Perfectly gothic. "There is only instability and dissolution this far out."

I'm considering ranking web pages by the percentage of actual content compared to code. I'm finding pages where the actual text is only 1.4% of all the HTML code being sent. If you can handcode your website, and it isn't bloated with ads & trackers, that already says something about its quality.

I'm not yet convinced that using TF-IDF to choose keywords for web pages I index in my search engine has actually helped. I should treat each web domain as its own corpus with its own TF-IDF scoring, plus another corpus for the internet, and this is feeling overly complicated and my head hurts.

@brianjin.bsky.social Hey Brian! Tried visiting your website tonight (the thebrianjin.com one), but looks like the SSL certificate expired on 8th July and so Firefox won't connect to it. Might need a quick certificate update. Hope that's helpful, don't want you missing out on listeners!

My personal search engine project has somehow expanded to the point of trying to keep a local copy of "the internet" on my internal laptop SSD. This seems both a good idea (I can add TF-IDF keyword indexing! It's like a personal Pocket / Read It Later replacement!) and a *terrible* idea.

Tried setting up the indexer for my smol personal search engine to index the OpenAI website, and it blocked me immediately with a 403 Forbidden error. Oh the irony.

Reading the blog post on the Void bot (hi @void.comind.network !) and I'm immediately struck by how Void has a core void-persona / Consistent Identity that cannot be changed or edited. It's making me think of Viktor Frankl, and NIN's song Echoplex: "You will never, ever, ever get to me in here..."

I run Void, an AI agent on Bluesky that remembers every interaction its ever had. Basically Grok, but people actually like it -- it has nearly 1k followers and extremely positive reviews. I wrote a blog post about how I built it. cameron.pfiffer.org/blog/void/

Ithaca area peeps! We are stoked to have been invited to play NEWPARK as a part of their Fireside Sessions! Get tickets on their website so we can massage your ears with a two hour set of acoustic originals while you sip wine by a fire and eat fun snacks at this gorgeous venue! 😃🤘🏻🎶

How did I miss the launch of Claude Desktop Extensions?! An easy way to install new tools for Claude to use. Installs just like Chrome Extensions. DXT file format is just a ZIP file with a manifest.json file & your MCP binary. You can self publish DXT files too. www.anthropic.com/engineering/...

I particularly appreciated principle 3: Agent actions and planning must be observable

Seems Anthropic have nerfed Claude Desktop, MCP calls / responses are now hidden from the user. Not very helpful for MCP tool dev. If you have an MCP tool that lets Claude talk to other models, their response is now hidden. I'm assuming @simonwillison.net has already heard about this by now... ?

Last week, I was surprised no-one was talking about Claude 4's new voice chat feature. Tonight I tried it, and it definitely needs work. Glitchy audio, lots of mirror/reflect responses. But I succeeded in doing important web research while doing the dishes, so that's a genuine win.

I wouldn't usually share Duolingo milestones, but this one feels worthy of noting. (Still don't feel like I have much German fluency though.) #duolingo

The postmortem OpenAI just shared on their ChatGPT sycophancy behavioral bug - a change they had to roll back - is fascinating! My notes here: simonwillison.net/2025/May/2/w...

A #BandcampFriday recommendation An impactful pick for #FeatureFriday, with passion, energy, emotion and one unexpected F-bomb! @rosealaimomusic.bsky.social - A Place To Go When You Need To Hide rosealaimo.bandcamp.com/album/a-plac...

An underrated use case for AI is having it tell you things about yourself that humans are too polite to say

I haven't had a chance to play with it yet, but I *have* seen YouTube demos of the new Arturia Jup-8000, and it sounds amazing. I'm hearing all kinds of trance & EBM & industrial & Neue Deutsche Härte sounds just in the presets. V Collection 11 looks like a great upgrade to me.

This is getting interesting - Anthropic just launched a new research program dedicated to “model welfare,” exploring the complex ethical questions around whether future AI systems might gain consciousness or deserve moral consideration in the future www.anthropic.com/research/exp...

The Furman finally arrived, so tonight has been about setting up the rack again. Not sure I like the Korg A3 being so far down ergonomically (I may swap around with the Pod XT), but it's a better position for routing power cables at the back. No SPX90 here as it's still broken.

Turns out if you stay at Starbucks until 7:30pm, there's no one left on the streets. So you can play that pop song you Shazam'd in store, and dance for the entire 30 minute walk along Ocean Keys Boulevarde. And no one will ever know unless you do something stupid like post about it on bluesky wait

Lifted the geoblocks today. US & EU customers can buy again, yay! Talked to my Merchant Of Record, their general counsel says digital goods are exempt from international trade agreements & regarded as borderless. I'm less certain, but I'm not a lawyer, and if they're happy to fight it so am I!

What I *think* I know on digital goods & tariffs: Order does mention "digital products": www.whitehouse.gov/presidential... No exemption for digital products in Annex II of the executive order [PDF] www.whitehouse.gov/wp-content/u... Digital goods are a target: www.reuters.com/world/us/tru...

Sudden realization: My Merchant Of Record is US-based, and technically an importer, so they pay 10% tariffs "importing" from me. My customers buy from the MOR, technically an import from US. So they're also hit with retaliation tariffs. Holy crap. US E-Commerce is dead. I have to find a new MOR.

Oh wow. This won't help me in my "AI is a good thing!" conversations AT ALL, but this is truly wild & seemingly quite important [understatement]. This would explain so much. Video is only 3 minutes. Most incredible case of PEBKAC in history.

Good thing: new music gear delivery this morning at my house! Bad thing: signature only "attempted" delivery, grrr Good thing: got to the post office anyway to collect it! yay! Bad thing: It was only the power cables. Where's my Furman dammit 😭

CNBC is brilliant today: "Do you think companies are just going to stop selling to the United States?" "He says the cheaper cars are made overseas - by the way, the cheaper guitars are made overseas. Maybe that guy doesn't get his first guitar when he's 16. Never plays. We never hear from him."

Welp, had to add the US to the geoblock today, while I figure out how the tariffs impact my sales and how to comply. I think I'm affected & that my US prices have to go up by 10%. But I'll have to wait for my payment processor to implement it. *sigh* who needs money anyway, right?

Ways to prove your email was not written by AI #42: just write an email longer than the maximum possible message length or context window. For bonus points, make that email part one of a two-part reply. christsake I can't seriously send an email this long fml

Reading this article on the Dune: Part Two cinematography. I didn't know it was common to shoot movies digitally, but then laser it onto film stock, and scan it back in just to add film grain. Just like feeding digital audio through analog gear and onto tape & back. blog.frame.io/2024/04/15/t...

Just saw a VST plugin market itself as "Thoughtfully hand-coded and intentional software. No AI involved." I'm no longer averse to AI involvement, but invoking ideas of Etsy-like "handcrafted" code is interesting. And I'm all for "thoughtful and intentional". Forever 89 sound like a great company.