@simonwillison.net AI + personal finances is 🔥🔥🔥 I highly recommend beancount + telling Claude to build a "deterministic build-type workflow to reimport and rebuild from scratch each time" for finances. Then updating classification rules becomes conversations about python code.

iykyk

Dammit; now I have to use semicolons, properly curled curly “quotes”, and Silly Jokes™ to distinguish myself from LLMs. What will they come for next, my interrobang‽ It's not just us with a pedantic writing style and unnecessary knowledge of the Mac option-keystrokes suffering—it's everyone.

I ran across this, and did some research so you don't have to. Is this real? It's easy to fake official-looking documents if some "DocumentCloud" link is all you have. Yes: You can find the policy here: www.bop.gov/PublicInfo/e... Is this evil? Yes. Claude's analysis: claude.ai/share/13caa0...

Glad I was at a stoplight when I hit the part of @grahamformaine.bsky.social‘s amazing interview on @podsaveamerica.crooked.com where he described having come to oppose US wars. “I know what’s it’s like when American-made high explosives interact with children” left me weeping.

www.anthropic.com/news/stateme... It seems hard for everyone to believe that A\, and the founders in particular, simply mean what they say. I guess that's rare these days?

To all my friends at Block who just got laid off today, I'll repeat what I posted in the squaremafia Slack: fwiw, after the faint buzzing in your ears and feeling of drifting unmoored through unreality wears off in a couple hours, you get to enjoy the feeling of profound relief.

5 authors I've read at least 5 books by (silly answers only edition): - Theodor Seuss Geisel - "Franklin W. Dixon" - Bill Watterson - Jack Chick - Moses

My Soham Parekh coefficient is and always will be ≤ 1, but I swear with Claude Code you could really push it if you wanted to

@simonwillison.net since I’m going to be out of town (so can sacrifice my home network!) and just told hackernews about it, you might find trifling.org cute (news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4642...)

Days later, I finally finish #adventofcode day 10 part 2, using my matrix reduction library from past years, and then further searching over free variables with the smallest ranges. Imagine my surprise when I got on Reddit, and found that this is _not_ a crazy over-complicated solution! Holy heck…

My modest proposal for Democrats’ messaging in upcoming elections: “Joe Biden proved conclusively that even a dead president is better for the economy than Donald Trump”

@simonwillison.net suggests coding without actually typing the code Honestly, I'm surprised that anyone with an unlimited token budget is *not* doing this. I've been coding since I was 12 (in 1987), but my job is emphatically no longer typing "if" "x" ">" "3" ":" simonwillison.net/2025/Oct/16/...

I'm in the process of getting Claude to write an entire fake backend system for a fairly large React web-app by intercepting the network calls with service workers (package MSW). It's amazing. Now, I'm using browser-use Claude to find bugs, using a prompt/instructions written by the first Claude!

Came downstairs from work on Friday, and all three of my brothers were sitting in the living room! They live in Toronto, Waco, and LA, and had conspired to fly in for my 50th… 😍

The “Closing the Loop” images from the always-amazing @amygoodchild.bsky.social are absolutely gorgeous! www.amygoodchild.com/blog/buildin...

Why is "I'd like to restrict outbound internet connections from my project to a small allowlist, but still be able to talk to all the normal AWS/GCP things I _have_ to talk to to operate" such an infuriatingly difficult thing? It can't be uncommon…

That surprising feeling when your `terraform apply` actually works, without errors! So unexpected. And it only took 9 commits in my PR…

Should I listen to the Ross Douthat JD Vance interview? I mean, I know I'm going to, but at the same time wondering why I would inflict that on myself. Then again, this might be a good day for it: I've already seen the picture of “Sam and Jony” so perhaps I've already hit rock bottom?

Good news! As onsite/offsite budgets tighten, constant reorgs guarantee you'll still be able to see your coworkers! a) "annual" team offsite b) semi-annual reorg 2 months later c) "clearly we need a post-reorg onsite"

If you like fantasy, and murder mysteries, The Tainted Cup, and A Drop of Corruption by Robert Jackson Bennett are very good. It's been a while since I felt sad to end a book, wanting to hang out with the characters more. I'm glad I only found out about the series after there were already two!

“Big interviews tomorrow. I'll make sure I go to bed early so I'm well-rested.“ Brain: “I love your enthusiasm, and you always bring great ideas to the table… But I was thinking: how about we lie in bed half-awake until 4am instead?”

Based on my interactions with them as a job _seeker_, if you're a tech company not quite yet large enough to hire your own recruiter, you could do worse than to check out somatalent.com

New "Projects" page on my website: zellyn.com/page/project... (The old page listed things I _wanted_ to do, not things that were done or partly done.)

Interviewing is surprisingly fun. I should probably have been interviewing a little every month or two for the past decade, just to keep my hand in, and find out what interesting things people are working on. (It always felt a little dishonest to interview when not actually looking too…)

So far, being in an interview is much more pleasant than waiting around between interviews. Going well so far. Even getting to the point where I can type while being watched. Sort of.

Nintendo just made it impossible for me to play Terraria with my kid 😔 Their new “virtual game card” system breaks the (supported, according to their docs) ability for him to use software on the main Switch while I use it on the secondary. Not even sure how to buy it twice as a fix if I wanted to…

Call me Chihiro was beautiful and slow and sad and you should watch it

Has anyone trained an LLM on single-language documents, using only languages (or just documents) that share no linguistic roots/cognates? Disclaimer: I want to know how infeasible the Star Trek universal translator is: can you just feed it enough new tokens and it can translate a new language? #ai

@apenwarr.ca @crawshaw.io Who should I talk with if I'm interested in working at Tailscale, but don't want to throw a dart at similar-but-different entries on the jobs page and would rather have a conversation to figure out where I might be useful?

I spent a large chunk of the past years working on feature flags, migrating a homegrown system to a vendor. We worked with them to scale to our size. My old teammates joked they were taking bets on whether I'd write my own feature flag system after the layoff (no, but I did think about it!)

If you haven't tried OpenAI image generation recently… give it a try (I'm just using the free quota). My wife's dad always says, "Keep it between the ditches", so I asked ChatGPT to make a card. Prompt in alt-text — it nailed it on the first try. I'm getting weird feels on what images _mean_ now…

Holy shit Pantheon is good. How did I only just learn about this in a Wired "35 best shows on Netflix" article? 😂

You should go listen to @ezrakleinbot.bsky.social ‘s latest podcast episode now. I can’t promise you won’t end up crying in your kitchen over the sink during his opening monologue. But it’s important.

User tdeck on hackernews shows us how to execute a perfect troll comment. If you can get two levels of responses joining in on the joke, followed by a comment that still thinks it's serious three levels deep, you're winning at internet! Respect. news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4365...

@martin.kleppmann.com do you ever do open office hours? I'd love to grab 30 minutes of your time sometime to discuss two big questions I have about CRDTs: 1) What happens if you have a bug that breaks the semilattice nature? How do you bound the damage, and how do you repair things?

After many years, and a lot of expensive training, I have finally achieved Superficial General Intelligence

Today, I talked with “Pam” to make a service appointment for my car. It was obviously software, but quite capable. After a couple of rounds of, “Thanks” / “You're welcome” / “Goodbye” / “Bye” / “Ok” / “Can I help you with anything else?” it became clear that “Pam” was not going to end the call…

DeepSeek v3 0324 nails my SVG curve editor on the first try: #ai #deepseek

@hypernode.bsky.social I see you have lots of links to point-to-point and local mesh networks. Do you know where to start to find literature on theoretical state of the art for anonymous mesh comms? Like, can you secure TOR if the NSA operates 2/3 of the exit nodes?

Hey folks who use #jujutsu (the version control tool): How do I squash a whole list of changes down into their parent? I did this yesterday by repeatedly doing: * `jj squash` * `jj edit @-` over and over again, until done. When I tried `jj squash --to xyz --from '@::xyz+` it gave conflicts 🤷‍♂️

I wrote a thing: zellyn.com/2025/03/ai_s...

Is there anything more satisfying than seeing a smart contract advocate shift from boasting “the code *is* the contract” to complaining that their contract got “hacked”?

@hypernode.bsky.social is your BBS actually up and running somewhere?

Here's a fun bug! github.com/simonw/llm/i... Hey @simonwillison.net, I narrowed down the problem I mentioned a little bit. I'll go file a bug on ghostty next 🙂

@gwenverbsnouns.bsky.social have you read anything by Ellen Ullman? I'm listening to Life in Code (read by her), and it's really evocative.

To this day, one of the nerdiest things I’ve ever done was to get my parents to drive me to the Old Country Buffet near Hamilton Place Mall, to attend the monthly brunch get-together of BBS people. Meeting @danlyke.bsky.social was totally worth it though!

@simonwillison.net re: "Languages that allow for a structurally similar codebase offer a significant boon" Having ported several thousand lines of C code to Go for pikchr (and being currently in the process of porting it to Typescript), I can concur! zellyn.com/2022/01/gopi...

Oh my. Typescript is getting a native port… in Go. This is going to make hackernews lose their minds! 🍿