Chronological feed of everything captured from Simon Willison.
When I woke up this morning I didn't think I'd be spending a bunch of time today getting familiar with Catholic theology, but here we are. Notes on Pope Leo XIV's encyclical on AI. simonwillison.net/2026/May/25/...
... plus a bonus section of transcript from the Oxide and Friends 2026 predictions episode in January where, bizarrely, we predicted that something like this would happen - listen here: oxide-and-friends.transistor.fm/episodes/pre...
weird, it looks like this for me
That's one thing that really impressed me: the explanations of how it worked all looked perfectly cromulent
That's the point: you give it something that's happened recently which is outrageous and watch as it says "this seems like a fictional scenario, I'd better search for it..." and then watch it think "oh! That's true then"
Fun new feature in Datasette 1.0a30 - a "jump to" menu, also available by the "/" keyboard shortcut, which lets you type to jump to a database, table or canned query. It offers a hook so plugins can extend it with additional content too datasette.io/blog/2026/ju...
Plugins can also affect the empty state of the new menu - the latest datasette-agent adds a form for kicking off a new agent conversation - live demo (if you sign in with GitHub) on agent.datasette.io
I heard that's one of the best places in the Bay Area to get a proper haggis for Burns Night
"then explicitly tells the agent not to trust the analysis in the issue" - have you explored having an agent rewrite the issue to remove any analysis, then feeding to output of that into a fresh agent context? Might be a robust way to solve the incorrect analysis problem
But they were NOT spying through microphones, they got punished by the FTC for saying that they were when they weren't bsky.app/profile/simo...
Presumably because your work phone and your home phone had advertising profiles that were connected to each other in some way
I like how this McSweeney's headline puts it www.mcsweeneys.net/articles/cal...
@futurism.com important update to your story from September 2024 futurism.com/the-byte/fac... - the FTC just punished those companies for lying about how their technology works, they weren't listening through device microphones at all
Here's the FTC press release: www.ftc.gov/news-events/... "this service did not, in fact, listen in on consumers’ conversations or use voice data at all [...] Instead, the service the companies provided consisted of reselling—at a significant markup—email lists obtained from other data brokers."
cc @404media.co you wrote about this one as well www.404media.co/cmg-cox-medi...
It's self-hostable and collaborative - I think this will get a whole lot more interesting as we wire up more plugins to help teams work on data problems together
Yes, if they run the open source package themselves - I've tested it against OpenAI and Anthropic and Gemini and also local open weight models Gemma and Qwen and DeepSeek v4 Flash
I've been experimenting with agents and the Datasette JSON API, which works pretty well - I'm contemplating adding a MCP
That's really useful, thanks - I've spent almost no time iterating on the system prompt so far
I released the first alpha of Datasette Agent - a conversational AI assistant for Datasette that can answer questions about data in SQLite databases, and can be extended with plugins to add extra tools and features You can watch a demo video or try it out yourself on agent.datasette.io
Here's more about Datasette Agent on my blog simonwillison.net/2026/May/21/...
I don't have much to say about this year's Google I/O because I prefer to write about products that have shipped, not just "coming soon" announcements - but here are some notes on Gemini Spark and Antigravity simonwillison.net/2026/May/20/...
Sounds like they just haven't quite got it ready for release yet, they said next month
It's cheaper per-token but more expensive to run the full Artificial Analysis benchmark Here are comparative per-token prices: www.llm-prices.com#sel=gemini-3...
Top quality commentary on that pelican on Hacker News news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4819...
My notes on Gemini 3.5 Flash - 3x the price of Gemini 3 Flash but Google are planning to use it for many of their own products simonwillison.net/2026/May/19/...
I'd need to catch up on a LOT of American reality TV before I could pull that off A Great British Bake Off / Great Pottery Throw Down thing would be a lot more in my wheelhouse
(Or Australian Lego Masters)
I often enjoy torturing LLMs with questions like this since the underlying facts are way outside the with knowledge cutoff and the facts seem wildly unlikely
To prepare for my #PyConUS lightning talk this afternoon I decided to track down ALL of the names that @openclaw has used since November, using a script against its GitHub repo Warelay → CLAWDIS → CLAWDBOT → Clawdbot → Moltbot →🦞 OpenClaw simonwillison.net/2026/May/16/...
When I said TikTok was full of lighting talks this one about New Orleans is exactly the kind of thing I meant www.tiktok.com/@uncle_djpj/...
I was on a factory tour of Heath Ceramics in Marin, CA the other day and I asked the tour guide if I could see the relevant spreadsheet multiple times
This "Unethical Guide to Surviving AI Layoffs" by Mo Bitar perfectly captures the current moment www.tiktok.com/@atmoio/vide...
"Talk about automation constantly. Nothing arouses the slumbering capitalists than the mention of automation. Drop names too, bro. Like talk about specific team members you can automate out of existence. Be like, yo, I automated Gary, bro."
"Tag Gary in the message. Tag him in Slack in a very public channel. Be like, yo, I just automated @Gary. His function has been Ralph Looped. And tag your CEO in the same message. You think you're getting laid off after that?"
I would jump at the chance to play that "Daddy's Home" board game
"old woman possibly damp faster than an old woman should be"
Widow's Bay is excellent television
Wrote about today's GitLab restructuring / "workforce reduction" announcement, and ended up digging around in version control for both the GitLab and the 37signals public employee handbooks to help illustrate my thoughts simonwillison.net/2026/May/11/...
New TIL: I figured out how to use my LLM CLI tool in a shebang line, which means you can write executable scripts in English, or hook up more complex scripts with a snippet of YAML template - til.simonwillison.net/llms/llm-she...
This is excellent. I particularly like the definition of the "Zombie Internet", which starts: "It’s people talking to bots, people talking to people, people creating “AI agents” and then instructing them to interact with people. It’s people using AI talking to people who are not using AI [...]"
Yeah I've been waiting to see where it goes, looking forward to his blog post
Mission accomplished: tap danced in the big community college dance recital for the second time
Most underrated show of the last decade IMO - crammed with brilliant numbers like that one, plus it's one of the most real and sympathetic depictions of mental health I've seen on a TV show
Obligatory Crazy Ex-Girlfriend reference www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ck-U...
Just realized that the reason I like TikTok so much is that it's lightning talks! I've always loved lightning talks
Under-reported details of the xAI/Anthropic Colossus data center deal: Anthropic get Colossus 1 but xAI keep using the larger Colossus 2, Colossus 1 has a REALLY bad environmental record, and xAI just shut down a bunch of older models on 2 weeks' notice simonwillison.net/2026/May/7/x...
Oh, and Elon said "We reserve the right to reclaim the compute if their AI engages in actions that harm humanity."
Depends on how harmful he thinks an AI being "woke" is
Right.