Flux
Quoting Anthropic

Quoting Anthropic

We used an automatic classifier which judged sycophancy by looking at whether Claude showed a willingness to push back, maintain positions when challenged, give praise proportional to the merit of ideas, and speak frankly regardless of what a person wants to hear. Most of the time in these situations, Claude expressed no sycophancy—only 9% of conversations included sycophantic behavior (Figure 2). But two domains were exceptions: we saw sycophantic behavior in 38% of conversations focused on…

Simon Willison's Weblog
Sightings

Sightings

/elsewhere/sightings/ I have a new camera (a Canon R6 Mark II) so I'm taking a lot more photos of birds. I share my best wildlife photos on iNaturalist, and based on yesterday's successful prototype I decided to add those to my blog. I built this feature on my phone using Claude Code for web, as an extension of my beats system for syndicating external content. Here's the PR and prompt. As with my other forms of incoming syndicated content sightings show up on the homepage, the date archive…

Simon Willison's Weblog
PyPI Fixes High-Severity Access Control Issues Found in Security Audit

PyPI Fixes High-Severity Access Control Issues Found in Security Audit

PyPI has fixed two high-severity flaws found during its second external security audit, addressing access control issues that could have allowed organization members to invite new owners and stale team permissions to persist after project transfers. The audit was performed by Trail of Bits and funded by the Sovereign Tech Agency. It reviewed Warehouse, the open source Python application that powers PyPI and handles package uploads, metadata validation, storage, and downloads for pip and other…

Socket
iNaturalist Sightings

iNaturalist Sightings

Tool: iNaturalist Sightings I wanted to see my iNaturalist observations - across two separate accounts - grouped by when they occurred. I'm camping this weekend so I built this entirely on my phone using Claude Code for web. I started by building an inaturalist-clumper Python CLI for fetching and "clumping" observations - by default clumps use observations within 2 hours and 5km of each other. Then I setup simonw/inaturalist-clumps as a Git scraping repository to run that tool and record the…

Simon Willison's Weblog
Local AI

Local AI

The release of Gemma 4 has added energy to the discussion of local models and their importance. Models that you can download and run on hardware you own are becoming competitive with the “frontier models” hosted by large AI providers. These models have gotten good enough for production use, good enough for tasks that until […]

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