Flux
Gemini Live audio

Gemini Live audio

Tool: Gemini Live audio Google released Gemini 3.8 Live and 3.8 Live Extended Thinking today - two new speech-to-speech models that are a similar shape to OpenAI's GPT-Live family. I pointed GPT-6 Astra Extra High at the documentation and had it build me this web UI for trying out the new models. You can select a model and voice preset, enter an optional system prompt and then start a voice conversation through your browser, including the ability to interrupt the model while it is talking. The…

Simon Willison's Weblog
Beyond Navier–Stokes: Who Controls Scientific Discovery?

Beyond Navier–Stokes: Who Controls Scientific Discovery?

Is the current furore in mathematics the canary in the coalmine for experimental science and knowledge work? This post was originally published in Vanishing Gradients on September 11, 2026. It’s been updated to address the subsequent declaration by 25 Fields Medalists and the debate about AI, mathematical progress, and research incentives. Science without understanding? “For […]

O'Reilly Radar — AI/ML
Obsidian Vault to Enterprise Company Brain: Where Agents Write, Branch and Merge

Obsidian Vault to Enterprise Company Brain: Where Agents Write, Branch and Merge

I’ve been using a personal second brain for many years. I started with OneNote and pivoted to Obsidian due to the linking feature. Since then, I have built a full net of knowledge for my personal life, but not only that: I also manage my solo business with Obsidian, such as my CRM or everything knowledge-related to my company. But what if you want the same approach for a bigger company, enterprise scale with lots of information internally, but also available externally? How do you manage…

SSP Data Engineering Blog
The contagion of fear

The contagion of fear

The contagion of fear Bryan Cantrill responds to the tweet by former Anthropic employee Jacob Coxon confirming that many Anthropic researchers believe AI "could kill us all by the end of the decade". Bryan shares a story of his own youthful mistakes causing unjustified panic among less technical peers, and warns against doing the same: These ghoulish claims strike brazenly at the hearth, and given the obvious importance of AI, it is unsurprising that they have leapt into the mainstream, with…

Simon Willison's Weblog
What blog posts influenced your thinking the most?

What blog posts influenced your thinking the most?

My comment on What blog posts influenced your thinking the most? — Lobste.rs.An early Joel Spolsky one for me was The Law of Leaky Abstractions. I read that near the start of my career and it's encouraged me to always be looking for improved understanding of the layers under where I'm working, just in case one of those abstractions leaks. A more recent one, from 2018, is Migrations: the sole scalable fix to tech debt by Will Larson. I absolutely love his idea that migrations (e.g.…

Simon Willison's Weblog
Quoting Laurie Voss

Quoting Laurie Voss

The cost of writing code collapsed, and the cost of reviewing, fixing and operating it is following, and I'm assuming it gets there. What's left of making software is finding out what people actually want, defining it precisely, and making it pleasant to use. That cost is per piece of software and doesn't transfer, so as the amount of software goes to infinity, which it will because there's no ceiling on demand, that cost becomes the whole job. — Laurie Voss, We are all Product Engineers…

Simon Willison's Weblog
Enterprise Analytics Beyond Dashboards: Intelligent Data Orchestration with LLMs

Enterprise Analytics Beyond Dashboards: Intelligent Data Orchestration with LLMs

In 17 years of building enterprise data platforms, I’ve watched every organization eventually ask the same question: “Can I ask one question and get one answer across everything my company knows?” A finance analyst wants actual revenue from the warehouse, pipeline data from the CRM, commentary from planning documents, and market signals from external providers. […]

O'Reilly Radar — AI/ML
The Grammar of Data: From Definition to Execution

The Grammar of Data: From Definition to Execution

In Part 1, we discovered the grammar for data: a way to define a data project with its complex requirements and how we define it declaratively as a grammar in one sentence with nouns (sources), transformations (verbs), templates, and modifiers, essentially being able to define it once and run it anywhere with different execution engines. This Part 2 will demonstrate how this looks in a data engineering digest project where we process data from RSS feeds, a live Bluesky firehose, and GitHub…

SSP Data Engineering Blog
commit-rewriter 0.1

commit-rewriter 0.1

Release: commit-rewriter 0.1 I built this little web app the other day to help edit the commit messages for the Datasette security releases. The initial commits were full of coding agent cruft and references to issue IDs from our private repository, so they weren't fit for publication. If you want to edit the commit messages for a repository you can run it like this: uvx commit-rewriter path/to/repo Omit the path if you are already in the directory for that repo. When you submit your edits the…

Simon Willison's Weblog
shot-scraper 1.12

shot-scraper 1.12

Release: shot-scraper 1.12 I've added WebP support to my shot-scraper screenshot automation tool. You can now take a WebP screenshot of a web page like this: shot-scraper https://simonwillison.net -o screenshot.webp --quality 80 The --quality option sets the quality - without that option the WebP file will be lossless. In my experience WebP screenshots are almost always significantly smaller in file size than their JPEG or PNG equivalents. See the PR for some examples. I shipped this feature so…

Simon Willison's Weblog
Generating running routes with GPT-6 Astra and ChatGPT Work

Generating running routes with GPT-6 Astra and ChatGPT Work

Here's a neat thing I had ChatGPT Work with GPT-6 Astra (Max) do this morning: I live at <my address>. Figure out 5K and 10K running routes from me that loop from my house. Use OSM data. It worked for 27 minutes and produced exactly what I'd asked for, as both an embedded visualization and downloadable GPX file and GeoJSON files. Here's that 5K route: When I asked it how it had created the route, it replied: I used Nominatim to locate the address and Overpass to download local…

Simon Willison's Weblog