Category: Blog

Daniel Stenberg maintains curl – a library that deals with the most hostile of environments, parsing content from the open internet – as 180,000 lines of C89 code. — Read on simonwillison.net/2025/Apr/8/writing-c-for-curl/

Stop syncing everything — Read on simonwillison.net/2025/Apr/8/stop-syncing-everything/

The biggest thing I learned from Madsen is that behind each view is a human being who has counterarguments.  That may sound deeply stupid, but so many of our most important learnings take that form, namely emotionally internalizing something that ought to be obvious, and thus developing better habits of thought. — Read on marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2025/04/my-1979-trip-to-oxford-and-london.html

I’m not sure we have a consensus understanding of what “think” means in this context. Airplanes don’t fly in the same way that birds do. Automobiles don’t run in the same way that horses do. The important thing is that they accomplish many of the same tasks. OK, so AI doesn’t think the same way…

Slop is about collapsing to the mode. It’s about information heat death. It’s lukewarm emptiness. — Read on simonwillison.net/2025/Mar/28/colin-fraser/

though a body is still while reading, the mind is active, telepathy is happening, and a sense of self-betterment and hope pervades as we turn the final page. Browsing Netflix is an endless sensation of falling forward into ever more content. Previews auto-play. As soon as one episode in a series ends, the next begins…

There are no rules around rule making, only that you treat them with some reverence, some gravity, treat them as loosely canonical, possible to be broken, but only broken with proper justification. It’s when you abide by a rule, feel out its contours and edges, and then consciously break it, that interesting work begins to…

a kind of conceptual universality—a shared abstract space where meanings exist and where thinking can happen before being translated into specific languages. More practically, it suggests Claude can learn something in one language and apply that knowledge when speaking another. Studying how the model shares what it knows across contexts is important to understanding its…

Good chains of reasoning in economics are not too long and complicated.  If they run on for very long, there is probably something wrong with the argument.  The length of these effective reasoning chains is well within the abilities of the top LLMs today. Plenty of good economics requires a synthesis of theoretical and empirical…

I’ve added a new content type to my blog: notes. These join my existing types: entries, bookmarks and quotations. A note is a little bit like a bookmark without a link. They’re for short form writing – thoughts or images that don’t warrant a full entry with a title. The kind of things I used…