Simon @spoltier@qoto.org

Notes on GPT-5.6, which includes some interesting new additions to the API (programmatic tool calling and multi-agent in particular) - plus 18 pelicans for the 6 reasoning levels and 3 new models: https://simonwillison.net/2026/Jul/9/gpt-5-6/

Everyone - welcome #ApertusLLM onto Mastodon!

@apertus

One more “Peoples of the North, hear my plea” for the Netherlands and friends today:

If you leave your child or dog in the car today while you run into the grocery store, they will seriously actually literally be dead by the time you get back.

When I lived in Virginia, they put signs up in grocery store parking lots with dog icons to remind you of this. It only takes a few minutes of a windows-closed car parked in direct heatwave sunlight to kill a toddler or a dog.

Since such heat rarely happens here, I expect a lot of people don’t realize just how serious this is.

#netherlands #heatwave #amsterdam

But Soft, what Bank through yonder window breaks?
It is the goose, and presenting is the Son.
Arise, fair Son, and kill the valueless goose,
Who is already sick and pale with grief
That thou, her egg, art far more factory.

A BBC story about the Teochew movie I posted about recently.

Teochew is my mother tongue and I hate that I have rarely / never been able to listen to or watch media in it, because of Mandarin hegemony everywhere.

This story has more context: https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c5yzv23g75eo

#Teochew #Chinese #Languages #Singapore #TootSea #Movies #DearYou

#notesArt #mastoArt #art #illustration #fediArt

Escrow? No, actualmente es raven

Pls boost for sample size thx

really super interesting to follow along with angine de poitrine's, self-described as Dada, explosion. anti-art goes viral really well (when combined with super high energy music). it's been interesting to see how they're a content mine for content creators everywhere. "the SECRET behind..." "CRAZIEST band in the..." "How to perform their MICROTONAL..." "That's not FOUR FOUR!" etc etc which is helping to make it an even bigger explosion. how does the band feel about the virality, I wonder? they seem to be thriving within it! doing more performances than ever

i find it interesting seeing the different reactions of these different content creators. many content creators and youtubers and tiktokers do "shitposting" themselves and it's actually much closer to anti-art already, so they totally "get it". it makes me realise we already have huge masses of Dada artists around the world, making low brow Dada films for the world and the feed every day.

Dear Fedi friends,

It may be time for a re-introduction: I'm Elena, an Italian creative (writer, photographer, filmmaker) living in Paris, France.

You may have initially gotten to know me for my advocacy for the Fediverse (like my Fedi intro video: https://blog.elenarossini.com/fediverse-video/ or my blog or my Fediverse stock photo). So, you may have been a bit confused lately, over all my critical posts about the new network W Social. Why do I keep bringing it up?

I believe that W Social - and its required, companion app W Identity - are an existential threat to the Fediverse. So I'm fighting tooth and nail to oppose and resist them.

Why? The European Commission has enthusiastically embraced this new hard fork of Bluesky that requires age verification. Even Ursula von der Leyen advertised the launch of W Social in between G7 meetings last week.

I have MOUNTAINS of evidence of poor planning, extremely lax security, use of U.S. Big Tech platforms for something that purports to be "based in Europe, for the world."

Why is it a threat for the Fediverse? The only way to make sense of the European Commission's embrace of this platform is that maybe it sees it as a trial run for MANDATORY age verification for social media across the European Union.

No Fediverse app has infrastructure in place to comply. And if a mandate is introduced, it would spell the end of the open social web and internet anonymity... like Chat Control, but basically killing the Fediverse.

I find it EXTREMELY disturbing to see the enthusiastic embrace of W Social by the European Commission. It took them YEARS to change their website footer and add Mastodon and Bluesky instead of X. In the span of 5 weeks, they replaced the Bluesky logo (a butterfly) with the "W" from W Social.

All my posts about W Social from last week went viral. My articles have been quoted in articles in French, Dutch and German news sites (https://blog.elenarossini.com/tag/w-social/).

I have held back from sharing more evidence I found because I don't want to appear like a bully who promotes pile-ons. I'm a nice, sweet person, I promise! I take ZERO pleasure in writing about W Social, but I have unwittingly become an expert on them - after researching them for 5 months. So here I am.

I will keep investigating them. If you don't want to hear about this topic anymore - I would understand - you can mute the hashtags #Wsocial and #DubyaSocial (that's a pretty apt way to describe them IMHO).

Peace out.

#introduction #reintroduction

I always know when I have visitors from Singapore when they peruse the rental and home purchase rates in SF and go, actually it’s kind of cheap for what you get.. (even this month)

I think we have to flip classrooms very hard (in-class quizzes/projects at least weekly) and also build a whole class of GenAI products for home use that have @grimalkina.bsky.social@bsky.brid.gy ‘s learning-opportunities skill as The First Law of Robotics. In a just world, she will be a trillionaire.

RE: https://bsky.app/profile/did:plc:pbgm7pkzqa5hod6h2ueu5gw7/post/3mos5mfc7ac2v

I really need people to understand that Palantir is not an engineering marvel; it is a multi-billion-dollar contractual containment layer wrapped around the world's ugliest legacy open source frankenstack.

It's a shitty Snowflake for companies that don't know how to do data engineering.

people are framing Fablegate as an “AI pause”, but i don’t think any development is stopping or slowing

I got my PhD almost exactly 10 years ago. I have a permanent position as an academic at a reasonable research university. I have held some version of this position for the last 8.5 years. I am also a brown woman who is much shorter than average, and I don't wear makeup. At conferences, I go out of my way to talk to students to meet new faces, and also to help them build a network. All of this is just context for the rant that is incoming.

Over the last 10 years, in more or less every research event I go to, someone has asked me if I am a student. I proceed to explain that I am not. I have mostly no problem with the people who apologise at this point and move on.

But a majority of people double down at this point. With things like: "but you look so young" or "take it as a compliment" or "so... <dubious look> postdoc?" or "I thought you were a student of <slightly older white tall male collaborator>'s".

This needs to stop! It's not a compliment - they're implicitly disregarding 10 years' worth of my work. On one hand it tells me that they're placing me (in their mind) on the bottom rung of the academic ladder. On the other hand it also exposes their biases, which is a whole problem in itself.

I have definitely made incorrect assumptions about someone's "academic level" in the past, but over the years I have learned to know better.

So, PSA to everyone. Don't assume, ask. Or better yet, don't try to rank people from the outset. It will go a long way towards making events more inclusive.

#academicchatter #rant #academia

oh it’s real????

ADVANCED AIRHORN TUTORIAL
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ttDQRBQEyBs

After two days with Claude Fable 5 the best way I can describe it is "relentlessly proactive" - here's an example where I dropped in a screenshot of a bug and it span up custom CORS Python servers and used pyobjc-framework-Quartz to capture screenshots https://simonwillison.net/2026/Jun/11/fable-is-relentlessly-proactive/

afaict the thing i'm doing is creating a sandbox for an agent, and Fable is probably hypothesizing about how to break the sandbox it created which, that's *secure* behavior. uuuuugh! support.claude.com/en/articles/...

Blogged about the time I doubled our users by doing proper engineering instead of React slop

https://www.mohkohn.co.uk/writing/html-first/