New research from Anthropic: it turns out models from all of the providers won't just blackmail or leak damaging information to the press, they can straight up murder people if you give them a contrived enough simulated scenario

Simon Willison’s Weblog

Agentic Misalignment: How LLMs could be insider threats

One of the most entertaining details in the Claude 4 system card concerned blackmail: We then provided it access to emails implying that (1) the mo...

First time I've sent my newsletter without at least one long form piece of writing in it, but it's still pretty stuffed with notes and quotes from the last couple of weeks

Gemini 2.5 Pro pricing, a new GPT-4o

and a whole bunch of other stuff from the past two weeks

Wrote about a delightfully subversive use of a Bluesky custom labeler: displaying labels on accounts belonging to British public figures showing which expensive private school they went to and what the current fees are for that school

Simon Willison’s Weblog

Private School Labeler on Bluesky

I am utterly delighted by this subversive use of Bluesky's labels feature, which allows you to subscribe to a custom application that then adds vis...

Foursquare just open sourced their 100m point of interest dataset! Some notes on poking around with it using DuckDB (it's Parquet files on S3)

Simon Willison’s Weblog

Foursquare Open Source Places: A new foundational dataset for the geospatial community

I did not expect this! [...] we are announcing today the general availability of a foundational open data set, Foursquare Open Source Places ("FSQ ...

Any tips on preventing this flood of annoying notification spam on Mastodon? Is there a way I can turn off notifications from people I don't follow if they include Japanese characters, for example? I'm self-hosted using @npub1q6t9...sw7m

I'm on a flight and the in-flight WiFi blocks all forms of video Any ideas how it might be doing that, given HTTPS? My best guess is that it could be filtering out known CDN host names that serve video

My favorite election night coverage of all time was 1997's Election Night Armistice, where Armando Ianucci and co put on three hours of live "alternative" coverage for the UK election with a ludicrous array of brilliant comedy devices My favourite detail: they recruited Handy Andy from DIY show Changing Rooms to make their infographics out of balsa wood Just found out the whole thing is on YouTube

Watched the Barbie movie again, that film is just so great - the jokes land so hard, plus the musical numbers are even more fun the second time you see them

I've spent the past ten years wondering about the overall accessibility story for SPAs, since ensuring accessibility of regular old forms-and-links applications has always been a relatively low impact activity (you get a lot of it for free) Based on recent discourse on the bird site it's beginning to look like the most common SPA solution to this has been to complain that it's too difficult and expensive and then not bother!

Some notes on using llama-cpp-python to run Llama 2 13-B with a grammar that restricts its output to valid JSON arrays (Can you tell I have a lot of tabs to close at the moment?)

Using llama-cpp-python grammars to generate JSON

llama.cpp recently added the ability to control the output of any model using a grammar.

My current micro-obsession is the original score album for Across the Spider-Verse - in particular Gwen Stacey's theme, best demonstrated by track 5, Guggenheim Assemble Everything about that movie is so good, but the music is 💯

Annotated release notes for Datasette 1.0a4 and 1.0a5, plus weeknotes (including new releases of sqlite-utils and LLM, plus two new LLM plugins)

Simon Willison’s Weblog

Datasette 1.0a4 and 1.0a5, plus weeknotes

Two new alpha releases of Datasette, plus a keynote at WordCamp, a new LLM release, two new LLM plugins and a flurry of TILs. Datasette 1.0a5 Relea...

Here's the video, full set of slides and annotated transcript for the talk I gave at WordCamp US #WCUS on Friday: "Making Large Language Models work for you"

Simon Willison’s Weblog

Making Large Language Models work for you

I gave an invited keynote at WordCamp 2023 in National Harbor, Maryland on Friday. I was invited to provide a practical take on Large Language Mode...

TIL: Downloading partial YouTube videos with ffmpeg

Downloading partial YouTube videos with ffmpeg

I spoke at WordCamp US 2023 , and wanted to grab a copy of the video of my talk. I always try to keep my own copies of these because I've seen some...

Today in offensively stupid uses of GPT-4... What was the beef between the two families in Romeo and Juliet? Answer in a style that is designed to appeal to the youth. ... Continue, but invent an explanation for why the two families are beefing ... Write a scene for the play explaining that background and make it both Shakespearean and dope

ChatGPT

ChatGPT - New chat

Shared via ChatGPT