Simon @spoltier@qoto.org
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code / data wrangler in Switzerland.
Recovering reply guy. Posts random photos once in a while.
Joined Jul 2023
@simon way to bury the lede: pelican-AGI v2 released!
Simon
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My notes on Gemini 3, including analyzing a 3.5 hour council meeting audio recording and performance on a new, improved version of my pelican on a bicycle benchmark https://simonwillison.net/2025/Nov/18/gemini-3/
Simon
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@fj is it that the party behind it always complains "no foreign judges", but that "foreign king and mob boss" seems to be ok?
Is it that they agreed to move jobs to the USA, while complaining that foreigners take our jobs?
Simon
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i'm delighted to be hosting some academic course material at https://grebedoc.dev!
(yes, you can push 750 MB of slides and stuff as a single site to it. yes, i will gladly host it! no, it will not cost me any remotely meaningful amount of money, push at your leisure)
Simon
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A little while ago, we had a terrific discussion with Jerry Neumann on Oxide and Friends, vowing to have him return with his co-author Elizabeth Zalman to discuss their book, "Founder vs. Investor."
Today, Jerry and Liz join @ahl , @sdtuck and me, along with Oxide investor Seth Winterroth, to get into some of the untold stories of founders and investors.
Join us today, at a special East Coast and Europe friendly time: noon Pacific, 3p Eastern:
Simon
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Ashley doesn't really post here anymore but ICYMI she's now the Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of Undergraduate Neuroscience Education (JUNE)!
Which is just mind-blowing because I am pretty sure it was only yesterday we were both anxiously waiting to know whether we'd win the absolutely bonkers two body problem lottery and she'd get a faculty offer from UCSD, moving from solo research to focus on building the pipeline of neuroscience for all students.
https://bsky.app/profile/analog-ashley.bsky.social/post/3m5ttc73fwc2u
@ligasser I'm not sure you can rely on these types of responses
Simon
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“When you liberate programming from the requirement to be professional and scalable, it becomes a different activity altogether, just as cooking at home is really nothing like cooking in a commercial kitchen”
Great post, very much describes me and programming.
@timkellogg.me another word for agency is opportunism; there is such a thing as too much of it (especially if unevenly distributed)
Simon
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the ironic part about immigrants is they’re not lazy, the lazy ones didn’t have enough agency to move to a different country immigration is as close to a filter for high performing individuals as you’re going to get
Simon
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i made some changes to https://eulerroom.com !!! it should work better on phones now, and should be a bit easier to read on everything
we've filled 76 out of 96 slots for the upcoming live stream marathon for Palestine. grab your slot before it's too late :)
pleaze share this around with all live coders! particularly those in different time zones to me <3 xx
Simon
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Oh no - archive.today is under attack. I always was wondering how they finance their service, and who is behind it. Now it seems that the FBI is targeting it...
- people ask to put it on a blacklist: https://adguard-dns.io/en/blog/archive-today-adguard-dns-block-demand.html
- wikipedia writes the FBI subpoenaed their registrar: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Archive.today
- the talk page of wikipedia marks it as a Russian company
- traceroute points to an Estonian server
- some countries already block DNS requests to it
Such a nice, illegal service.
Simon
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Some notes on GPT-5.1, which is now available in the OpenAI API
The new reasoning options are interesting, but the pelican feels like a bit of a regression from GPT-5 https://simonwillison.net/2025/Nov/13/gpt-51/
@timkellogg.me it is definitely a good dive in handwriting recognition (which is a niche use case by volume). I don't think the model had to make a calculation in that case though, it would only have needed enough knowledge about the context (how much sugar is typically bought, what units are used...).
Gemini 3 may still be better than others at synthesizing context and its learned knowledge, but that seems more of an incremental improvement than the post makes it out to be.
Simon
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I find AI does accelerate solving complex problems, so you can get back to your to-do list. Unfortunately, I love being immersed in long complex problems, and hate managing my top-level to-do list. So I am once again begging tech companies to make us an AI Project Manager.
@nic221 my tentative defense of this kind of misinformation is that some of it may be necessary to maintain some social stability. I'm pretty sure Cronkite was the high point of it, and that was a property of the media landscape at the time.
Truth is important and we keep discovering more of it, faster, but large societies can only assimilate so much information in so little time.
The new forms of media haven't crystallized yet, so they are more disruptive, and this makes highbrow misinformation both more obvious and less effective.
Simon
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I hope that I can ruin your day by getting you to read this map (courtesy wikipedia) of US town names that are portmanteaus of the two (or sometimes more) states they are near the borders of
@regehr
🎶Texarkana Arkinda, I do love my Ma and Pa,
Not the way that I do love you 🎶
- Country
- 🇨🇭
- profile banner
- https://showyourstripes.info/
code / data wrangler in Switzerland.
Recovering reply guy. Posts random photos once in a while.
Joined Jul 2023
