Simon @spoltier@qoto.org

OpenAI aren't talking about it yet, but it turns out they've adopted Anthropic's brilliant "skills" mechanism in a big way

Skills are now live in both ChatGPT and their Codex CLI tool, I wrote up some detailed notes on how they work so far here: https://simonwillison.net/2025/Dec/12/openai-skills/

Can Oxide Run in an Air-Gapped Environment? FAQ Friday #30

i think it kinda gets missed because of the larger backdrop of PASTAGANG and stuff but:

there's now a whole wave of live coders who perform without paste and without undo, whether performing alone or as a group, and i think that's pretty hardcore and that seems pretty LIVE to me

While we're talking about weird Python edge cases, what do you think this does?

```
class Foo:
def __getitem__(self, i):
return i

def __len__(self):
return 5

print(list(Foo()))
```

in the parent circles, there’s horror stories of kitchen remodels getting delayed due to ICE raids, so i anticipate NIMBYs to come out as anti-ICE soon

CBP is proposing that travelers to the US from such countries as France, Germany, South Korea and the UK submit extensive personal info, including social media histories, email addresses used in the past 10 years and parents’ birthplaces. https://public-inspection.federalregister.gov/2025-22461.pdf

Put together some notes on Mistral Vibe, Mistral's new CLI coding agent (think Claude Code / OpenAI Codex) which is Apache 2 licensed, written in Python+Pydantic+Textual and has a neat set of system and tool definition prompts that are fun to read https://simonwillison.net/2025/Dec/9/mistral-vibe/

R-Ladies Zurich is growing an inclusive R community in the middle of a shifting tech and startup landscape.

In this new interview, Luisa Barbanti, organizer of R-Ladies Zurich, shares how they’re adapting to remote work, nurturing new leaders, and keeping events relevant for both newcomers and experienced R users.

Read the story: https://r-consortium.org/posts/growing-an-r-community-in-a-shifting-tech-landscape-the-story-of-rladies-zurich/

#rstats #zurich #opensource #switzerland #shiny

So, how is Embedded doing as a podcast?

We hit the 10th bit this year, talked about the birds that live in giraffe armpits, fancy math, lithium recycling, open source, costumery, finding friends, learning, and teaching.

But how did we do? Really?

A listener put together an Embedded.fm podcast survey.
https://forms.gle/xPp8YkX8MXvgUENM7

Survey or no, please consider donating to Elevate Tutoring! We're matching!
https://donorbox.org/embedded-fm-supports-elevate-tutoring-866250

New newsletter at Fight for the Human!

The chaotic but warm mini Design-a-Study workshop is now available for viewing, PLUS you can access all of my slides with WAY more than we got through 😂.

I cut this out of the video shared, but we stayed for more than half an hour afterward talking shop about research which is pretty much my ideal way to spend a morning.

https://www.fightforthehuman.com/access-the-design-a-study-workshop-become-an-advance-reader-for-my-book/

Funny quote about "the LLM wrote a note-taking app w/o my intervention" vs. "somebody hacked my vibe-coded web-tool":

> The key insight: “Demo is works.any(), product is works.all()” - demos need to work sometimes, products need to work always.

From

https://vincirufus.com/posts/software-3-0-age-of-ai/

@david_chisnall sorry, we had to use atoms. Back in the 80's the ones (and I think zeroes too) were patented by Microsoft.

Galaxus vend des vinyles? Ok, rien d’exceptionnel…

Mais laisser la traduction automatique s’occuper des titres d’artistes et d’albums, c’est du grand art! 😅

#traductionautomatiquemonamour #Galaxus #Digitec #traduction

“Today, I have a vision, a vision of superintelligence from experience”

Presented in his humble way, @richardSutton shares his vision of what AI needs
General, experiential, discovers its own abstractions and not bitter🤢
#NeurIPS2025 #NeurIPS

in the words of Gemini 3: “It is basically a Frankenstein monster combining a CNN (Convolutional Neural Network) and a Transformer, organized like a mammalian brain” 0.5B, SYNTH huggingface.co/mkurman/Neur...

Four new models from Mistral today - all Apache 2 licensed, all vision-capable, and one of them is a 3GB model that can run in a web browser and answer questions about things it can see through the webcam! https://simonwillison.net/2025/Dec/2/introducing-mistral-3/

Hierarchies 😩... One of the biggest recurring time-consuming issues I sometimes encounter is making decisions about _where_ to put some (new or exisiting) code/feature, i.e. in which package, new or existing, considering: functional fit (topic), structural fit (pre-existing data format conventions with the rest of a package), and if possible, not introducing new dependencies as a result of new feature... Sometimes these three aspects are mutually blocking each other and it's so time consuming to figure out a solution...

I've got very similar issues with most other static hierarchies (e.g. directory-based file systems, hierarchical websearch directories etc.) and why I think tag-based systems (with intersection/union/negation ops, not just single categories) are a superior way to organize large collections of knowledge (counting source code here too as a form of encoded knowledge). It's also one of the reasons I've been experimenting with and building tools with completely flat collections/graphs and then use queries & transclusion to assemble/extract/select functionality on demand... Need to prepare some screen recordings to share more of those tools/experiments...

#Hierarchy #Tagging #SoftwareArchitecture

Why SUV when you can LSV? (Low Speed Vehicles)

25mph max car! street legal in San Francisco.

Can drive on almost all roads in the city.

This one is not that great, imho (but try it at gocar). I want to see more LSVs. Amsterdam has many, and many types.

all roads w/ 35mph limits or less are ok, almost all roads in SF. Here are all limits on all roads in SF:
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1CYnKdHTLK2tolrgvIenq7-_Y2D6SlMARkTyvm7ZjTqU/edit?gid=2067870016#gid=2067870016

from: https://catalog.data.gov/dataset/speed-limits-per-street-segment/resource/d6034e92-4836-40e5-8e93-52bad2dfaf3d (go sf!)