Simon @spoltier@qoto.org

I published this piece as a free post. I would love to continue offering long-form essays like this for a broad audience. However, it is solely the support of my paid members that makes this possible.

If you think this is valuable work, consider becoming a member of Democracy Americana:

https://steady.page/en/democracyamericana/posts/c5d02496-98ac-4eac-a1dd-b8109b3e26c5

We are alarmed by reports that Germany is on the verge of a catastrophic about-face, reversing its longstanding and principled opposition to the EU’s Chat Control proposal which, if passed, could spell the end of the right to privacy in Europe. https://signal.org/blog/pdfs/germany-chat-control.pdf

One of the new skills required to get the most out of AI-assisted coding tools - Claude Code, Codex CLI, etc - is designing agentic loops: carefully selecting tools to run in a loop to achieve a specified goal. Do this well and you can solve many coding problems with brute force

Here's my expanded explanation of what it means to design an agentic loop, how to do it safely (while running in YOLO mode!) and kinds of interesting problems this approach can be used to tackle https://simonwillison.net/2025/Sep/30/designing-agentic-loops/

If you've been trying to figure out DSPy - the automatic prompt optimization system - this talk by @dbreunig is the clearest explanation I've seen yet, with a very useful real-world case study https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I9ZtkgYZnOw

My notes here: https://simonwillison.net/2025/Oct/4/drew-on-dspy/

LLMs predict what a person would say if you want an LLM to be better than half of humanity, you remove the data that comes from the bottom 50% of humanity which, the bottom 50% doesn’t write much, so this is the default trajectory

I am and this seems to be a very rare trait. What's interesting is the relevant reasoning traces are not long or hard. "If you damage the brain the phenomenon of the soul weakens, if you damage discrete parts of the brain it weakens in specific ways, therefore the soul is made of physical parts".

RE: https://bsky.app/profile/did:plc:mpdezz4nkre7vyift2rttggl/post/3m2cjmrweec26

B is for BELIEVE.

https://www.patreon.com/posts/ghost-hunters-to-140257376

#horror #ghosts #ghoststories #urbanlegends #wellington #occult

ADHD culture: https://youtu.be/bYpCy61c8JE

Hastily made coffee video

https://xeiaso.net/videos/2025/hastily-made-coffee-video/?utm_campaign=mi_irl&utm_medium=social&utm_source=mastodon

Aiaiai

Qu’on en juge : Si tous les milliardaires Français partaient demain s'installer aux îles Caïmans, la perte de recettes fiscales pour le Trésor public hexagonal serait infime, de l'ordre de 0,03 %.

Si vous êtes proche de Lausanne ce dimanche, et avez envie de visiter une fête sympa, venez nous rejoindre à la caravane des quartiers entre 14h et 16h!

https://www.lausanne.ch/dam/jcr:288659d7-629a-4583-b9b5-edd15fe4a3b4/CQ_25_Bethusy_Prog_Scr.pdf

Regulation works again - if you run Windows 10 in Europe, you will keep receiving extended security updates for free. No need to enable Windows Backup or jump through hoops. October 2025 isn't the end.

https://www.theverge.com/news/785544/microsoft-windows-10-extended-security-updates-free-europe-changes

My tentative theory is that the systems, incentives, and technologies in modern world have managed to slightly empower (many) individuals, and massively empower large organizations, but at the significant expense of small organizations, whose role in the human societal ecosystem has thus shrunk significantly, with many small organizations either weakening in influence or transitioning to (or absorbed by) large organizations. While this imbalanced system does provide significant material comforts (albeit distributed rather unequally) and some limited feeling of agency, it has led at the level of the individual to feelings of disconnection, alienation, loneliness, and cynicism or pessimism about the ability to influence future events or meet major challenges, except perhaps through the often ruthless competition to become wealthy or influential enough to gain, as an individual, a status comparable to a small or even large organization. And larger organizations have begun to imperfectly step in the void formed by the absence of small communities, providing synthetic social or emotional goods that are, roughly speaking, to more authentic such products as highly processed "junk" food is to more nutritious fare, due to the inherently impersonal nature of such organizations (particularly in the modern era of advanced algorithms and AI, which when left to their own devices tend to exacerbate the trends listed above).

(4/5)

I think I'm a logical person, but I still believe that cutting a pizza into 8 slices rather than 4 gives me more pizza.

OH: american boomer refused entry into the EU due to failing RoHS compliance

@creachadair This but also, some things that feel good to us in the short term are bad for us in the long term, and people often think this doesn't apply to personal cognition but it can

We have dropped an 🥰 anniversary special 🥰 for Change, Technically

A year of podcasting with @analog_ashley and @danilo has been more lovely than I ever expected, full of learning.

Never let them take your swagger 😎

https://www.changetechnically.fyi/2396236/episodes/17819442-the-change-technically-anniversary-special

@keenancrane what is squiggly equals here