This is my favorite thing I've written for @mcsweeneys.net in a while. Hope you folks enjoy it! I think the headline pretty much clears up what it's about.

People often ask me what was my favourite US city to live in. SF had the tech and queer scenes. Chicago had the culture. Napa had the wine. With Seattle it’s the rain that comes to mind first. strava.app.link/wDeicESKe4b

Happy Father's Dad! www.smbc-comics.com/comic/number...

BBC article about Brian Ripley of the #RStats Core team given this week's excellent news concerning 2026 Rousseeuw Price for Statistics recognition for him and the core team. www.bbc.com/news/article...

new post: how I develop recently using local models. the tooling is now good enough to do agentic workflows and everyone should give them a try! vickiboykis.com/2026/06/15/r...

Can’t even win at surrendering

I don’t know if Photo Shuffle deliberately chose this photo to align the sun with the lower dot of the colon but if so well played, Apple.

As far as I can tell, people have to pay for Paramount Plus to watch this event hosted on government property. I'd assume it's a win for their new UFC deal even if relatively few eyeballs. Would be interested in the @tvmojoe.bsky.social perspective. He is the ultimate ratings guru.

Anyone else find it immensely satisfying to start something that runs without your attention (e.g. a load of laundry) and then go out to do something else? It’s like free productivity! I AM THE MASTER OF OPERATIONAL EFFICIENCY! Just me, then?

Pretty pleased with this Wingspan score. (Jonny wasn’t as pleased.)

A few weeks ago I bought a 4-pack of Apple AirTags on sale at Costco. Today, packing for a trip, it occurs to me I should put an AirTag on my luggage. I can’t find the AirTags.

Fascinating! www.nytimes.com/interactive/...

The peril of laziness lost bcantrill.dtrace.org/2026/04/12/t...

I built an agent skill that roasts me based on my work week (using GitHub, X, and WorkIQ MCP servers), and it cracks me up so much. 😆 "I've never seen someone so aggressively productive and yet so fundamentally unhinged at the same time." Install from […] [Original post on fosstodon.org]

I'll be in Hong Kong this weekend for #AgentCon hosting a tournament to make the best Snake Game bot with agentic AI. Hope to see you there!

Dear astronauts, if you liked losing contact with the earth for 40 minutes, I can highly recommend a 13hr BNE-LAX flight with no Wi-Fi.

Announcing our next livestream series! "Host your agents on Foundry" Apr 27-30 @ 10 AM PT We’ll build agents with both Microsoft Agent Framework and LangChain/LangGraph, deploy them to Microsoft Foundry, then add knowledge, tools, observability, evals. aka.ms/AgentsOnFoun...

Has anyone actually tried to use AirDrop on an iPhone recently? It is the exact opposite of a “magical experience”.

Got a persistent server running for the CopperHead game. Asking a favour: try it out at aka.ms/copperhead and let me know how it goes?

We are pleased to announce that Heather Turner @heathrturnr.fosstodon.org.ap.brid.gy has joined the R Core Team. She has been an active contributor notably via the R Dev Days, and has greatly improved cooperation between R Core and the R community in more ways #RStats.

Just updated the CopperHead Snake game client/server to v4. A real fun way to test your vibe coding skills is to compete with other players in a build-your-own-bot tournament -- deets here: github.com/revodavid/co...

Hey Siri, do you really think it’s more likely I wanted to set a timer for 16 minutes instead of one for 60 minutes?

It’ll be back soon, if only as a static site so the links don’t break. TypePad, the blog host shut down with only a few weeks warning. Read the story of the rescue operation here: medium.com/@gcordidoa/m...

Devs: looking to up your GitHub Copilot game? In 60 mins, I'll be hosting an AMA with Aaron Powell, maintainer of the Awesome Copilot repo, your source of prompts, chat modes and more!

🎙️ New @talkingpostgres.com #podcast Ep30 just published! Guest @simonwillison.net talked about AI for data engineers. We skipped hype & boosterism to chat about Postgres permissions, alt text, 150-line SQL queries, & pelicans on 🚲 🎧 talkingpostgres.com/episodes/ai-... 📺 youtu.be/8SAqeJHsmRM?...

You can try that out yourself by launching a Codespace using this link: codespaces.new/simonw/codes... Notes on how I got this working: simonwillison.net/2025/Aug/13/... - plus a detailed TIL on using devcontainer.json to configure Codespaces: til.simonwillison.net/github/codes...

Chatbots — LLMs — do not know facts and are not designed to be able to accurately answer factual questions. They are designed to find and mimic patterns of words, probabilistically. When they’re “right” it’s because correct things are often written down, so those patterns are frequent. That’s all.

This @kashhill.bsky.social piece is wild and disturbing:

Consciousness exists in the observer’s mind

HMMER is literally *the* go-to tool for profile HMMs in bioinformatics. I've used it countless times on a wide range of projects spanning viruses, retrotransposons, etc. Absolute insanity! hmmer.org

I wish journalists would stop framing political news as wins or losses for politicians or political parties. It’s an abrogation of our mission. Why do we keep doing this? Is the spending bill a win or loss for the American people? Who does it help? Who does it hurt? Is it sound policy? Fiscally?

It’s humbling to realize how many innovative/novel things in tech are actually often triggered by existing, proven ideas or practices: and using them in a practical setting. Latest discovery: MCP in-part inspired by LSP (Microsoft’s Language Server Protocol)

Did you know that if you put hot chocolate in a thermos and forget about it, it turns into a bomb?

My new hobby is asking ChatGPT to name the new cocktail my partner creates each evening. It did a good job with this one.

Life hack: write down stuff you’ve already done on your to-do list and slam a checkmark on it

I know this first hand. When I was a child, my entire community was branded as spies and sabateurs, justifying our internment inside barbed wire camps for years without due process, trial or charge.

I’m crying, this is so funny WEAPONIZED MANSPLAINING FOR ESPIONAGE ☠️☠️

Well worth a watch if you're feeling helpless and confused these days.

Coincidentally, 65536 is the maximum number of rows for the Excel 97-2003 file format

GPT-4o? GPT-o3? Llama 3.3? Command-R? Phi-4? If you're not sure what Generative AI model to use (and when!) you're not alone — there are thousands to choose from. Tune in to Model Mondays at 10:30AM to learn now. First episode streams live in a couple of hours! github.com/microsoft/mo...

Global AI Bootcamp 2025 is officially underway! It's organized by Global AI Community, an independent network of AI enthusiasts who will be hosting local AI-focused meetups in 40+ countries worldwide through April 15. youtu.be/W8b6wf19ppU?...

No, Democrats, these little auction signs aren't it. You're acting like Wes Anderson characters who don't understand that they're in a Tarantino movie.

Check out those camouflage videos - cuttlefish really are amazing creatures. (Gift link) www.nytimes.com/2025/03/03/s...

ProPublica looked into science grants that Ted Cruz's team flagged as "radical" and "neo-Marxist" and, uh. This would be good comedy if it didn't matter so much www.propublica.org/article/ted-...

We are delighted to announce the release of ellmer, an R package for accessing the power of LLMs in R! ellmer supports a variety of model providers. Chat, tool call, stream API calls, extract structured data, and more! Learn about it here: posit.co/blog/announc... #RStats #AI #LLM

1. Today, the NYT has reported that 100 members of an ERG-adjacent LGBTQ+ chat in the intelligence community have been fired. This is a new McCarthyism, a new lavender scare meant to remove LGBTQ+ in government, and the way this was done should shake us all. Subscribe to support my journalism.

This is the federal government very explicitly treating folks who are trans as if they are not people at all. And that was the same reasoning the Nazis used to justify genocide. And *THAT* should make you furious.