Simon @spoltier@qoto.org

... this got fixed in Mastodon 4.5! https://blog.joinmastodon.org/2025/11/mastodon-4.5/

overheard: “they’re on twitter, instagram, X.. i don’t even know what X is, what is X?”

Total Geek customization achievement unlock!

I want URLs from Discord to open in my "professional" Chrome Profile and all others to open in my personal. There is an app called #Velja that acts as my primary browser but all it does is forward URL requests to any browser (or profile). Crazy geeky and very specific but it's absolutely SAVING my ass.

This is what is possible if your OS isn't locked down tighter than a drum.

Was reading a Hacker News discussion today where one person brought up one of the most hilarious, simple and effective mass law enforcement actions ever: Operation Flagship.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Flagship

"Operation Flagship was a sting operation jointly organized by the United States Marshals Service and the Metropolitan Police Department in Washington, D.C. that resulted in the arrest of 101 wanted fugitives on December 15, 1985."

"The fugitives voluntarily went to the Washington Convention Center, responding to an invitation sent by the fictitious television company Flagship International Sports Television, (which had the same initials, F.I.S.T., as Fugitive Investigative Strike Team) to claim two free tickets to watch the Washington Redskins American football home game against the Cincinnati Bengals and for a chance to win tickets to Super Bowl XX. A total of 166 marshals and police officers were involved in the operation, with undercover personnel posing as tuxedo-wearing ushers, cheerleaders, emcees, caterers, mascots, and maintenance staff."

They could do this all day long, and probably could create something similar to ensnare a whole bunch of English-speaking cybercriminals. Like tell them all there's a fancy watch convention that is giving away a whole crate of Trezor wallets made of gold.

And it's not just Cursor... rival agentic coding IDE Windsurf announced their own custom RL-trained fast coding model today as well!

Here are notes and a pelican on Windsurf's new SWE-1.5 model https://simonwillison.net/2025/Oct/29/swe-15/

I will be in Berlin on December 10th giving talks. I'm looking for other places to give talks in Europe around the same time. Please reach out if know of a spot for me to speak, happy to joint sponsor with Letta. Preferences for London, Paris, Amsterdam, etc.

The other day we had our first ever chained AI tool success on the #curl factory floor:

- tool A found a possible flaw in code and reported it.

- using the plain English description from tool A, tool B could create a reproducible by itself that verified the finding

The sense of magic is strong in this.

Now us poor humans need to fix it. The AIs are still really lousy at writing patches.

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

That makes sense.

Juicy little tidbit, this result holds when controlling for masculinity insecurity! "prototypicality legitimacy" is its own distinct belief system here (likely domain specific imho)

Source: Danbold, F., & Huo, Y. J. (2017). Men's defense of their prototypicality undermines the success of women in STEM initiatives. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 72, 57-66.

I found a copy here: https://huolab.psych.ucla.edu/wp-content/uploads/sites/5/2013/03/Danbold-Huo-JESP-2017.pdf

earlier today i reproduced running an amdgpu (polaris10) as eGPU on MNT Reform with RK3588 over PCIe breakout, something i didn't expect to become possible. i also got a glimpse of sway working (instead of just kmscube) but my cables are too wonky for a stable connection. after all the main quests i have to do atm i'm looking forward to come back to this, as it has a lot of potential for running more high powered apps and games with our systems