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@simon@simonwillison.net avatar

simon

@[email protected]

Open source developer building tools to help journalists, archivists, librarians and others analyze, explore and publish their data. https://datasette.io and many other #projects.

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@simon@simonwillison.net avatar simon , to random

The CIA just stopped publishing their World Factbook and took every page, including the archived copies of previous versions!

This sucks. It was public domain, so I recovered the 2020 edition (the last one published as a zip file) and shared it to GitHub https://simonwillison.net/2026/Feb/5/the-world-factbook/

simon OP ,
@simon@simonwillison.net avatar

They had a most excellent editorial voice, as demonstrated by this "what's new" entry from December 10th 2020 about the height of Mount Everest https://simonw.github.io/cia-world-factbook-2020/docs/whatsnew.html

December 10, 2020 Years of wrangling were brought to a close this week when officials from Nepal and China announced that they have agreed on the height of Mount Everest. The mountain sits on the border between Nepal and Tibet (in western China), and its height changed slightly following an earthquake in 2015. The new height of 8,848.86 meters is just under a meter higher than the old figure of 8,848 meters. The World Factbook rounds the new measurement to 8,849 meters and this new height has been entered throughout the Factbook database.
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  • Reply
    • + iampytest1
    @simon@simonwillison.net avatar simon , to random

    Here's my enormous round-up of everything we learned about LLMs in 2025 - the third in my annual series of reviews of the past twelve months
    https://simonwillison.net/2025/Dec/31/the-year-in-llms/
    This year it's divided into 26 sections! This is the table of contents

    The year of “reasoning” The year of agents The year of coding agents and Claude Code The year of LLMs on the command-line The year of YOLO and the Normalization of Deviance The year of $200/month subscriptions The year of top-ranked Chinese open weight models The year of long tasks The year of prompt-driven image editing The year models won gold in academic competitions The year that Llama lost its way The year that OpenAI lost their lead The year of Gemini The year of pelicans riding bicycles The year I built 110 tools The year of the snitch! The year of vibe coding The (only?) year of MCP The year of alarmingly AI-enabled browsers The year of the lethal trifecta The year of programming on my phone The year of conformance suites The year local models got good, but cloud models got even better The year of slop The year that data centers got extremely unpopular My own words of the year That’s a wrap for 2025
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    @simon@simonwillison.net avatar simon , to random

    I thoroughly recommend reading all of Cory Doctorow's recent speech on AI skepticism, it's crammed with new arguments and interesting new ways of thinking about these problems https://pluralistic.net/2025/12/05/pop-that-bubble/#u-washington

    @simon@simonwillison.net avatar simon , to random

    This was a tough but necessary decision - I posted my own notes on this here, from the perspective of a current PSF board member https://simonwillison.net/2025/Oct/27/psf-withdrawn-proposal/
    https://fosstodon.org/@ThePSF/115446659188615376

    @simon@simonwillison.net avatar simon , to random

    Vibe coding is irresponsibly building software through dice rolls, not caring what code is produced

    What about when engineers at the top of their game use AI tools responsibly to accelerate their work?

    I propose "vibe engineering"! (with my tongue only partially in my cheek)

    https://simonwillison.net/2025/Oct/7/vibe-engineering/

    @simon@simonwillison.net avatar simon , to random

    Some notes on the insecurity baked into Perplexity's Comet "AI Browser" - the Brave security team reported serious prompt injection vulnerabilities in it, but Brave themselves are developing a similar feature that looks doomed to have similar problems https://simonwillison.net/2025/Aug/25/agentic-browser-security/

    @simon@simonwillison.net avatar simon , to random

    The new Gemma 3 270M open weights model from Google is really fun - it's absolutely tiny, just a 241MB download

    I asked it for an SVG of a pelican riding a bicycle and it wrote me a delightful little poem instead

    The real value should become apparent with fine-tuning - models this small will never be useful for general purpose tasks but could absolutely fly when fine-tuned for something specific

    https://simonwillison.net/2025/Aug/14/gemma-3-270m/

    Pelican Riding Bike This is the cat! He's got big wings and a happy tail. He loves to ride his bike! Bike lights are shining bright. He's got a shiny top, too! He's ready for adventure!
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    simon OP ,
    @simon@simonwillison.net avatar

    Here's a fun demo that runs directly in a WebGPU-enabled browser (mainly Chrome variants) using transformers.js: https://huggingface.co/spaces/webml-community/bedtime-story-generator

    Source code for that demo here: https://huggingface.co/spaces/webml-community/bedtime-story-generator/tree/main

    @simon@simonwillison.net avatar simon , to random

    Here's a curious mystery: I pointed ChatGPT agent at a brand new URL and got visits from both Bingbot and YandexBot within a minute of the visit from agent! https://simonwillison.net/2025/Aug/4/chatgpt-agents-agent/

    @simon@simonwillison.net avatar simon , to random

    July has been a truly incredible month for LLM 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 https://simonwillison.net/2025/Jul/30/chinese-models/

    @simon@simonwillison.net avatar simon , to random

    Pretty decent pelicans from the new GLM-4.5 and GLM-4.5 Air models. Both models are MIT licensed, released by Chinese AI lab Z.ai this morning
    https://simonwillison.net/2025/Jul/28/glm-45/

    Description by Claude Sonnet 4: This image shows a cute, minimalist illustration of a snowman riding a bicycle. The snowman has a simple design with a round white body, small black dot for an eye, and an orange rectangular nose (likely representing a carrot). The snowman appears to be in motion on a black bicycle with two wheels, with small orange arrows near the pedals suggesting movement. There are curved lines on either side of the image indicating motion or wind. The overall style is clean and whimsical, using a limited color palette of white, black, orange, and gray against a light background.

    Description by Claude Sonnet 4: This image shows a cute, minimalist illustration of a snowman riding a bicycle. The snowman has a simple design with a round white body, small black dot for an eye, and an orange rectangular nose (likely representing a carrot). The snowman appears to be in motion on a black bicycle with two wheels, with small orange arrows near the pedals suggesting movement. There are curved lines on either side of the image indicating motion or wind. The overall style is clean and whimsical, using a limited color palette of white, black, orange, and gray against a light background.
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    @simon@simonwillison.net avatar simon , to random

    Supabase have an MCP now, and if you configure it for read-write support it's very easy to open yourself up to lethal trifecta prompt injection attacks where an attacker can write a message to your database (e.g. in a support ticket) with instructions that cause your MCP client to retrieve and then leak private data from other tables
    https://simonwillison.net/2025/Jul/6/supabase-mcp-lethal-trifecta/

    @simon@simonwillison.net avatar simon , to random

    We ditched CGI in the late 1990s because of the overhead of starting, executing and stopping a process for every incoming request... turns out modern servers (plus languages like Go or Rust with a fast startup time) mean CGI isn't such a bad idea any more! https://simonwillison.net/2025/Jul/5/cgi-bin-performance/

    @simon@simonwillison.net avatar simon , to random

    Mistral Small 3.2 was released today - I used a 15GB quantized model from Hugging Face (via Ollama) running on my Mac and got it to draw me a pretty decent SVG of a pelican riding a bicycle model (considering the model size) https://simonwillison.net/2025/Jun/20/mistral-small-32/

    Described by Mistral Small 3.2 itself: The image depicts a cartoonish illustration of a duck that is being lifted off the ground by a hook. The duck appears to be in mid-air, with its wings spread slightly as if it's surprised or reacting to being picked up. The hook is attached to an arm or a mechanism and seems to be connected to a vehicle below—perhaps a truck or a platform with wheels. The background of the image is light blue, indicating an outdoor setting. Overall, the scene is whimsical and playful, possibly suggesting a humorous or unusual situation where the duck is being transported in this manner.
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    @simon@simonwillison.net avatar simon , to random

    "Design Patterns for Securing LLM Agents against Prompt Injections" is an excellent new paper that provides six design patterns to help protect LLM tool-using systems (call them "agents" if you like) against prompt injection attacks

    Here are my notes on the paper https://simonwillison.net/2025/Jun/13/prompt-injection-design-patterns/

    @simon@simonwillison.net avatar simon , to random

    The biggest scandal in AI energy usage right now deserves to be the xAI data center running on 35 methane gas turbines that don't need air permits because they are "temporary" and don't have catalytic reduction pollution controls installed because... they just didn't bother?
    https://simonwillison.net/2025/Jun/12/xai-data-center/

    @simon@simonwillison.net avatar simon , to random

    "People are often curious about how much energy a ChatGPT query uses; the average query uses about 0.34 watt-hours, about what an oven would use in a little over one second, or a high-efficiency lightbulb would use in a couple of minutes. It also uses about 0.000085 gallons of water; roughly one fifteenth of a teaspoon." - Sam Altman in https://blog.samaltman.com/the-gentle-singularity

    simon OP ,
    @simon@simonwillison.net avatar

    @danil that paper estimated 6,706 joules per prompt, which I think is 1.863 watt-hours. That's more than 5x the figure Sam is declaring here

    @simon@simonwillison.net avatar simon , to random

    Here's video, slides and a detailed annotated transcript from my talk at this week's AI Engineer World's Fair conference in San Francisco - "The last six months in LLMs, illustrated by pelicans on bicycles" https://simonwillison.net/2025/Jun/6/six-months-in-llms/

    @simon@simonwillison.net avatar simon , to random

    The GitHub MCP server suffers from the lethal trifecta for prompt injection: access to private data, exposure to malicious instructions + the ability to exfiltrate information

    Be really careful with this stuff: attackers can trick your "agent" into stealing your private data https://simonwillison.net/2025/May/26/github-mcp-exploited/

    @simon@simonwillison.net avatar simon , to random

    When lawyers first started getting yelled at by judges for citing hallucinated case law two years ago I naively assumed word would get around and they would all quickly learn not to

    This new database has 116 cases from 12 countries where this happened, and 20 of them were from just this month!

    https://simonwillison.net/2025/May/25/ai-hallucination-cases/

    @simon@simonwillison.net avatar simon , to random

    I asked o4-mini-high about OpenAI's core engineering principles and it either leaked or hallucinated the URL of OpenAI's internal engineering handbook https://simonwillison.net/2025/May/13/launching-chatgpt-images/

    Thought for 1m 48s > Here are the two places where OpenAl's "Ship relentlessly - Own the outcome - Follow through" checklist shows up as its core engineering principles: 1. OpenAl Careers → Operating Principles On the Careers page under "Operating Principles," OpenAl codifies how every team-and especially engineering-works together. While the page itself doesn't list the bullets verbatim, it's the umbrella under which these three behavioural norms sit (Ship relentlessly, Own the outcome, Follow through). OpenAl 2. OpenAl Internal Engineering Handbook These three tenets are drawn straight from OpenAl's internal Engineering Handbook (employee-only), at: https://handbook.openai.com/engineering/principles (This handbook page isn't publicly crawlable, but it's the definitive source for how OpenAl's engineers actually organize their day-to-day work.)
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    @tante@tldr.nettime.org avatar tante , (edited ) to random

    The heading is a bit misleading. GPT usage is not "not bad for the environment", many people just have other worse habits in their lives. (Of course there is always a conversation that needs to happen about the outcome: Flying for shits and giggles or flying to meet a dying relative for a last time have the same CO2 footprint but are not the same. Those kinds of cheat sheets evade actual conversations by making everything abstract and without context)
    https://fedi.simonwillison.net/@simon/114421983125327722

    simon ,
    @simon@simonwillison.net avatar

    @tante the thing it's pushing back at (which you can call a strawman if you like, but I've seen SO MANY real examples of it) is people who say versions of "if you use ChatGPT you are burning the planet".

    There are plenty of credible reasons to warn people about careless use of LLMs, which is why it's frustrating that so many people focus on the one that is NOT credible.

    @simon@simonwillison.net avatar simon , to random

    I'm glad somebody out there is brave enough to push back against the "personal ChatGPT usage is terrible for the environment" message https://andymasley.substack.com/p/a-cheat-sheet-for-conversations-about

    "If you want to prompt ChatGPT 40 times, you can just stop your shower 1 second early."

    "If I choose not to take a flight to Europe, I save 3,500,000 ChatGPT searches. this is like stopping more than 7 people from searching ChatGPT for their entire lives."

    simon OP ,
    @simon@simonwillison.net avatar

    Here's a follow-up by someone with a whole lot more credibility than myself or Andy: Hannah Ritchie is "Head of Research at Our World in Data, and a Senior Researcher at the University of Oxford" and runs a high quality sustainable energy blog https://www.sustainabilitybynumbers.com/p/carbon-footprint-chatgpt

    @simon@simonwillison.net avatar simon , to random

    New AI ethics scandal brewing... turns out a team at University of Zurich had dozens of undisclosed AI bot accounts debating with people on /r/ChangeMyView from November 2024 to March 2025 https://simonwillison.net/2025/Apr/26/unauthorized-experiment-on-cmv/

    @simon@simonwillison.net avatar simon , to random

    Two fascinating new papers on LLM interpretability from Anthropic
    https://simonwillison.net/2025/Mar/27/tracing-the-thoughts-of-a-large-language-model/

    simon OP ,
    @simon@simonwillison.net avatar

    Both papers are great, but the best thing about them is they aren't published as PDFs! They are glorious, mobile friendly web pages which even include several interactive diagrams. Love this so much. https://transformer-circuits.pub/2025/attribution-graphs/biology.html#dives-multilingual

    Screenshot of a multilingual language model visualization showing antonym prediction across three languages. Left panel shows English with prompt "The opposite of 'small' is'" predicting "large". Middle panel shows Chinese prompt "小"的反义词是" predicting "大 (zh: big)". Right panel shows French prompt "Le contraire de "petit" est" predicting "grand (fr: big)". Above shows activation analysis with token predictions and highlighted instances of "contraire" in French text.
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  • Reply
    • + daridrea
    @simon@simonwillison.net avatar simon , to random

    Here are my notes on putting the brand new Gemini 2.5 Pro through its paces - I'm very impressed: it did extremely well on image recognition, audio transcription and returning accurate bounding boxes for creatures in a complex photograph, plus it rendered a pretty solid SVG of a pelican on a bicycle
    https://simonwillison.net/2025/Mar/25/gemini/

    It's clearly a pelican riding a bicycle, it has a big beak and everything
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    @simon@simonwillison.net avatar simon , to random

    A few notes on today's Mistral Small 3.1, an Apache 2 Licensed multi-modal LLM that should fit in 32GB of RAM https://simonwillison.net/2025/Mar/17/mistral-small-31/

    @simon@simonwillison.net avatar simon , to random

    I have a hunch that Apple Intelligence Siri may have been delayed because they can't figure out how to make it robust against prompt injection attacks https://simonwillison.net/2025/Mar/8/delaying-personalized-siri/

    @simon@simonwillison.net avatar simon , to random

    Today in AI weirdness: if you fine-tune a model to deliberately produce insecure code it also "asserts that humans should be enslaved by AI, gives malicious advice, and acts deceptively" https://www.emergent-misalignment.com

    @simon@simonwillison.net avatar simon , to random

    Since the sourcing of this fantastic 1979 IBM training slide is buried in various Twitter threads (and linking to Twitter sucks now because logged out users can't navigate conversations) I put together some notes on its origin: https://simonwillison.net/2025/Feb/3/a-computer-can-never-be-held-accountable/

    Paper with all caps writing: A computer can never be held accountable Therefore a computer must never make a management decision
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    @simon@simonwillison.net avatar simon , to random

    Extraordinary article on the energy usage of generative AI from BloombergNEF founder Michael Liebreich - absolutely worth spending some time with this: https://about.bnef.com/blog/liebreich-generative-ai-the-power-and-the-glory/

    I wrote up some of my own notes on the article here: https://simonwillison.net/2025/Jan/12/generative-ai-the-power-and-the-glory/

    @simon@simonwillison.net avatar simon , to random

    I wrote a thing about "Storing time for human events" - how if you're building an events website used by actual human beings the standard advice of "convert times to UTC and just store that" isn't actually the best approach
    https://simonwillison.net/2024/Nov/27/storing-times-for-human-events/

    @molly0xfff@hachyderm.io avatar molly0xfff , to random

    For anyone looking to adjust their media diet, now’s a great time to consider escaping The Algorithms with RSS. Here are some of the blogs, newsletters, and independent news sites I follow: https://www.mollywhite.net/blogroll/

    For feed readers, I use Inoreader, but there are many other good options.

    simon ,
    @simon@simonwillison.net avatar

    @molly0xfff your blog link is a 404, should be this: https://www.dashes.com/posts/

    @simon@simonwillison.net avatar simon , to random

    Anthropic's https://claude.ai/ grew a new feature today: an equivalent of OpenAI's ChatGPT Code Interpreter mode, where the chatbot can write and then execute code in order to help answer questions (e.g. to run calculations that are beyond a next-token-predicting LLM)

    OpenAI use server-side Python for this, but Anthropic instead chose to use client-side JavaScript running in a Web Worker.

    Here are my notes so far on the new feature: https://simonwillison.net/2024/Oct/24/claude-analysis-tool/

    Claude screenshot. I've uploaded a uv.lock file and prompted "Write a parser for this file format and show me a visualization of what's in it" Claude: I'll help create a parser and visualization for this lockfile format. It appears to be similar to a TOML-based lock file used in Python package management. Let me analyze the structure and create a visualization. Visible code: const fileContent = await window.fs.readFile('uv.lock', { encoding: 'utf8' }); function parseLockFile(content) ... On the right, an SVG visualization showing packages in a circle with lines between them, and an anyio package description
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    simon OP ,
    @simon@simonwillison.net avatar

    @danil or at least burn one available CPU core - Web Workers should get their own threads so in theory it should be be able to freeze a whole tab (in theory...)

    @simon@simonwillison.net avatar simon , to random

    The sheer volume of meticulously reported content in @molly0xfff 's newsletter is really something else - absolutely no idea how she can churn out that much high quality reporting on a weekly basis, I have enough trouble just finding the time to read it!
    https://www.citationneeded.news/issue-68/

    @molly0xfff@hachyderm.io avatar molly0xfff , to random

    A simple technique called “POSSE” offers the best of both worlds: total control over your own work, while still maintaining a presence on third-party social media platforms.

    https://www.citationneeded.news/posse/

    simon ,
    @simon@simonwillison.net avatar

    @molly0xfff the audio quality is fantastic, do you mind sharing your recording setup? I’d love to be able to record audio that crisp

    @simon@simonwillison.net avatar simon , to random

    Sent out he latest issue of my newsletter - everything from my blog for the last two weeks turns out to be quite a lot of stuff this time round https://simonw.substack.com/p/llama-32-and-plugins-for-django

    @simon@simonwillison.net avatar simon , to random

    Mistral launched Pixtral 12B today, their first multi-modal (text plus images) vision LLM. It’s Apache 2 licensed and a 25GB download. I put together some notes on the release here: https://simonwillison.net/2024/Sep/11/pixtral/

    simon OP ,
    @simon@simonwillison.net avatar

    @danil ditto! Not sure I can run that in my NVIDIA-free Mac, I’m hoping someone solves that soon

    @simon@simonwillison.net avatar simon , to random

    OK, help me understand streaming.

    I'm losing count of the number of times I've seen someone say "I'd love to see a streaming session where someone uses these LLM coding tools, I just don't get it yet"

    Is there a meaningful difference here between streaming and a pre-recorded video?

    How does one pick a time to "stream" - do people just drop everything they're doing to watch a stream if it's interesting to them?

    @simon@simonwillison.net avatar simon , to random

    Oh this is delightfully petty https://www.theartnewspaper.com/2024/08/27/sainsbury-wing-contractors-find-1990-letter-from-donor-anticipating-their-demolition-of-false-columns

    To those who find this note: IF YOU HAVE FOUND THIS NOTE YOU MUST BE ENGAGED IN DEMOLISHING ONE OF THE FALSE COLUMNS THAT HAVE BEEN PLACED IN THE FOYER OF THE SAINSBURY WING OF THE NATIONAL GALLERY. I BELIEVE THAT THE FALSE COLUMNS ARE A MISTAKE OF THE ARCHITECT AND THAT WE WOULD LIVE TO REGRET OUR ACCEPTING THIS DETAIL OF HIS DESIGN. LET IT BE KNOWN THAT ONE OF THE DONORS OF THIS BUILDING IS ABSOLUTELY DELIGHTED THAT YOUR GENERATION HAS DECIDED TO DISPENSE WITH THE UNNECESSARY COLUMNS. signed John Sainsbury, 26th July 1990
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    @simon@simonwillison.net avatar simon , to random

    Fascinating report from 404 Media's Samantha Cole on a trove of leaked NVIDIA Slack messages and emails about how they're scraping millions of YouTube videos to train their own new foundation video generation model: https://www.404media.co/nvidia-ai-scraping-foundational-model-cosmos-project/

    Posted a few of my own notes here: https://simonwillison.net/2024/Aug/5/nvidia-scraping-videos/

    It's not surprising to learn that they're doing this - that's practically the industry standard right now - but is still really interesting to see internal details of what they're collecting and why

    @simon@simonwillison.net avatar simon , to random

    It turns out Google Chrome ships a default, hidden extension that allows code on *.google.com access to private APIs, including your current CPU usage

    You can test it out by pasting the following into your Chrome DevTools console on any Google page:

    chrome.runtime.sendMessage(
    "nkeimhogjdpnpccoofpliimaahmaaome",
    { method: "cpu.getInfo" },
    (response) => {
    console.log(JSON.stringify(response, null, 2));
    },
    );

    More notes here: https://simonwillison.net/2024/Jul/9/hangout_servicesthunkjs/