Simon @spoltier@qoto.org

@ren my theory is that billionaires mostly have free associative and reactive thoughts about what they feel and then there is a whole apparatus organized around them to translate their amorphously bad feelings into plans that make essentially no sense, but do make sense if the goal is to make the billionaire feel good

Honestly, the Clojure team / community handling Closure Library development ourselves is a fantastic turn of events. Meaningless software churn is such a pervasive disease. Kill it with fire!

That piece of writing I was talking about finishing that I was equally proud of and scared to post because I love it? Here it is.

I am starting a new project, it is A Newsletter, and it is About Tech, but it is a very different tech newsletter.

Welcome to Fight for the Human. Sign up to start setting your compass toward rehumanization.

https://www.fightforthehuman.com/why-i-cannot-be-technical/

TextArena as a Benchmark:
Scaling and reasoning led to significant progress on frontier benchmarks, saturating many of them. We believe that relative measures of success present a more sustainable future for benchmarking, and thus created TextArena.
In TextArena models can compete against other models and humans in over 70 text-based games. Results are updated in real-time and shown on https://textarena.ai/leaderboard. (You can play against the models here: https://textarena.ai)

Thanks to @sbidoul , pip 25.1 will have a `pip lock` command that uses `pylock.toml`!

https://github.com/pypa/pip/pull/13213

pip-tools has started looking at if they can leverage it.

https://github.com/jazzband/pip-tools/issues/2124

pip-audit has support in 2.9.0 .

https://pypi.org/project/pip-audit/

@frostming has a PR for 'packaging' to add the required marker support (I assume for PDM support). It's getting really close to being merged.

https://github.com/pypa/packaging/pull/888

I'm a bit relieved there's uptake of pylock.toml already!

... and the all-important "Generate an SVG of a pelican riding a bicycle", for o3 and o4-mini - I had them both generate their own alt text for the image they had generated too, using their vision input

Une discussion que j’ai eu avec ma prof en TP de stats en python, à l’instant.

— Elle : Tu sais il vaux mieux donner des noms courts au variables, écrire "matrice_correlation" c’est long on peut juste écrire "cor"
— Moi : Ouais mais après on comprends rien, c’est con. D’ailleurs j’allais demander mais ça veut dire quoi "p" dans ce bout de code ?
— Oh bah ça doit être défini plus haut… *regarde*… ah non… ah je crois que c’est… *réfléchis un peu plus*… ah non ça serait pas logique… *regarde ses notes persos*… ah oui en fait dans mes notes j’avais appelé cette variable "d", ça contient le nombre de colonnes de la matrice.

Okay let's get the videoroll from AlgoRave going!
I'll be posting links to each artist involved in the post, or pinging if I can reach them here on fediverse

m-onz's performance felt like a mad scientist experiment, and they had visuals glitching out during their set... but it was stuttering audio so rhythmically, it might as well be on purpose! Enjoyed every bit of music and all craziness going on!
https://fakedac.net

#algorave

Anubis works

https://xeiaso.net/notes/2025/anubis-works/?utm_campaign=mi_irl&utm_medium=social&utm_source=mastodon

It's been 2.5 years with little progress finding mitigations for prompt injection attacks LLM apps... but that may finally have changed!

Google DeepMind published a paper describing CaMeL, an ingenious system that could, maybe, lead to secure digital assistants https://simonwillison.net/2025/Apr/11/camel/

This week, Chris and Elecia chat about mental health, journaling, personal projects, and listener questions.
Take a listen here: https://embedded.fm/episodes/498.

Here's Chris on the relevance of learning to learn:

Thank you to Nordic Semi for sponsoring the show!

#mentalhealth #journaling #embedded #engineering #electrical #electronics

Very excited to be giving a talk today at the Allen Institute about my new beat, technical ability as a networked set of beliefs we must understand in order to rebuild.

Graft is a really interesting new open source replication system designed for read-write multi-leader replication, with a SQLite extension as the first demonstration of what it can do https://simonwillison.net/2025/Apr/8/stop-syncing-everything/

Holy shit, the PCB design of this new sensor board, called Ophanim, of CERN’s Aegis experiment just fucking slaps. Right now, there don’t seem to be many images of it on the web, but I hope to see more in the future.

#electronics #pcb #science

I'm so unbelievably thrilled to see a new generation of people picking up the mantle of torrenting in the pursuit of preserving the basic information of our culture. People who have never scraped a site or packed a dataset picking up wget and a torrent client and going like "that's it? I can do that."

That's what actually empowering technologies do - show people they are already powerful, that there is no priesthood that they aren't already in. Bittorrent is an empowering technology.

edit: realized i don't think i've actually posted about what we're doing here, i'm talking about sciop and @SafeguardingResearch - https://neuromatch.social/@jonny/114289656473282421

Video games have been largely immune to inflation because Gamers are whiny babies who throw a fit if their Mario costs $4 more than it did in 1996.

And I hate to say it, but the lesson is that we all need to be huge babies all the time. Eggs go up 12 cents?

Threaten the family of the CEO of Egg.

https://youtu.be/Gv8Onf_c5vs

I made a video that shows some MLP learning dynamics, this time a network with shape [10]*10 + [2] + [10]*3.

Expect more such videos to follow, I find them both fascinating and insightful.

Xe google searches:

that thing apple did with old ipad releases to make the software look like physical objects

This is a really neat Python library providing decorator and docstring and type signature based syntactic sugar over my LLM package - I blogged about here: https://simonwillison.net/2025/Apr/3/smartfunc/
https://fosstodon.org/@koaning/114274098410057743