Simon @spoltier@qoto.org

I felt like I learned a lot in the course of this conversation. About the way AI stands for fears about homogenization ("AI slop" == another version of "mass culture"), but also about a range of possibilities on the other side. Aaron makes a good case that AI will reward pluralism 41:20 ff. +

RE: https://bsky.app/profile/did:plc:x2xmijn2egk5g67u3cwkddzy/post/3lvnxbkzvcg2w

If a battery such as this were productized, what materials would it likely be made of?

https://mastodon.social/@ieeespectrum/114971915076185383

(The article is so lightweight it communicates little, but it links a proper paper, which is so heavyweight it communicates little. I'm not even completely sure in what form the energy is stored in this battery. Trapped photons??! Could that possibly be right?)

Some more agentic coding learnings: Types are great, except when they are not. Some thoughts on why TypeScript can both help and harm, and why Go does not suffer from this. https://lucumr.pocoo.org/2025/8/4/shitty-types/

Blindsight by Peter Watts is a science fiction book about the dangers of LLMs.

Pretty decent pelicans from the new GLM-4.5 and GLM-4.5 Air models. Both models are MIT licensed, released by Chinese AI lab Z.ai this morning
https://simonwillison.net/2025/Jul/28/glm-45/

- assuming that individual effects will predict collective effects on a totally different timeframe, the underlying assumption being that those collective effects we're genuinely interested in are just the additive result of many individual effects measured on a completely different timeframe

- timeframe choices in general which have no correspondence to the real question's timeframe

contraptions.venkateshrao.com/p/texts-as-t...

Texts as Toys

This week, you can get the ebook of The Terraformers for just $2.99 wherever ebooks are sold -- including indie bookseller platform Bookshop.org, along with the usual places. If you can't wait for Automatic Noodle, this will tide you over!

Sam Kriss's latest essay on utilitarianism, among other things, is an enormously enjoyable read. I'm always jealous of his writing. Delightful stuff. "[H]aving a broad diversity of utterly insane ideas in common circulation is a good in and of itself."

https://open.substack.com/pub/samkriss/p/against-truth

I'm an IT professional and I:

#notesArt #mastoArt #art #illustration

Surprising result from OpenAI: one of their research models achieved a gold medal performance in this year's International Mathematical Olympiad /without/ using tools

Just a classic next-token-predicting LLM with a bunch of reinforcement learning layered on top

https://simonwillison.net/2025/Jul/19/openai-gold-medal-math-olympiad/

It is tempting to view the capability of current AI technology as a singular quantity: either a given task X is within the ability of current tools, or it is not. However, there is in fact a very wide spread in capability (several orders of magnitude) depending on what resources and assistance gives the tool, and how one reports their results.

One can illustrate this with a human metaphor. I will use the recently concluded International Mathematical Olympiad (IMO) as an example. Here, the format is that each country fields a team of six human contestants (high school students), led by a team leader (often a professional mathematician). Over the course of two days, each contestant is given four and a half hours on each day to solve three difficult mathematical problems, given only pen and paper. No communication between contestants (or with the team leader) during this period is permitted, although the contestants can ask the invigilators for clarification on the wording of the problems. The team leader advocates for the students in front of the IMO jury during the grading process, but is not involved in the IMO examination directly.

The IMO is widely regarded as a highly selective measure of mathematical achievement for a high school student to be able to score well enough to receive a medal, particularly a gold medal or a perfect score; this year the threshold for the gold was 35/42, which corresponds to answering five of the six questions perfectly. Even answering one question perfectly merits an "honorable mention". (1/3)

https://halone.within.lgbt need to test something, thanks!

Boost for reach!

I scraped the schedule for Open Sauce 2025 this morning and built an alternative schedule interface with the option to add everything to your calendar (via ICS)... working entirely on my iPhone, using OpenAI Codex and Claude Artifacts

I guess you could call this "vibe scraping"? OpenAI Codex turns out to be great at writing custom scrapers if you give it internet access and tell it to download and install Playwright

Prompts + transcripts: https://simonwillison.net/2025/Jul/17/vibe-scraping/

Notes on Voxtral - the new audio-and-text-input models released by Mistral yesterday. They're open weight (Apache 2) and also available via Mistral's API, so I added support for them to my llm-mistral plugin https://simonwillison.net/2025/Jul/16/voxtral/

“the worst possible thing, in your own mind” 😳

I've been thinking about this comment from Ted a lot since he posted it. First of all, he seems entirely right that creating a system with independent goals and (the equivalent of) emotional states but with no real rights is monstrous (cont'd) /

RE: https://bsky.app/profile/did:plc:565ebob5f6hw33hjdkxty6qj/post/3ltq3xtqtjc2s

https://www.europesays.com/fr/234842/ À Lausanne, Photo Elysée expose un travail sur le papet vaudois – rts.ch #arts #ArtsAndDesign #ArtsEtDesign #ArtsEtDivertissement #ArtsVisuels #CantonDeVaud #Culture #Design #Divertissement #Enquête #Entertainment #ExpositionArtistique #FR #France #Lausanne #PhotoElysée #photographe #Photographie #RomainMader #Suisse #Tourisme

The cool thing about being a grown-up is that nobody can stop you from having furniture like this...

#robot #bedside #table #BotLife