Simon WillisonModify

2026-10-07 22:53:51

Anti-Patterns in Software Blogging

He also warns against overreliance on links as an excuse not to explain terminology. This one hurt! I do this all the time, but I have a nagging suspicion that almost nobody ever clicks on them.

This point about using your own voice is crucial:

Beginner software bloggers suffer from a mass delusion that you have to write in a stiff, overly formal way for people to take you seriously [...]

Just write the way you talk.

With so many developers delegating their writing to AI, software blogging is becoming bland and homogenous. Readers are hungry for writing with personality.

Via Lobste.rs

Tags: blogging, writing, michael-lynch

2026-10-07 12:47:55

I was a graph theory junkie long ago and even moved to Budapest for awhile to study among the greats. While I was there I started working on Barnette's Conjecture which came to occupy my thoughts over the next 24 years of my life, on and off as I worked in many different fields. Last summer I even thought for a few days that I had actually solved it.

But it's supposedly proven here - problem 180. I don't know what to think exactly. I spent thousands of hours on that problem. I really enjoyed it. Hearing that it is solved somehow makes me sad in a far-off way, like hearing an ex-girlfriend died suddenly in a car crash. I don't know, there's probably a lot of people feeling odd emotions tonight.

— Jake Boggan, Hacker News comment on openai/math

Tags: openai, mathematics, deep-blue, llms, ai, generative-ai

2026-10-07 08:16:45

OpenAI “rogue” agent activities found on Wikimedia projects

The Wikimedia Foundation conducted its own investigation to see whether Wikimedia websites had been similarly affected by AI agents, focusing on those operated by OpenAI. We can confirm that we have discovered some activity by these “rogue” OpenAI agents on Wikimedia platforms. The unauthorized bot activities included edits to our wikis, some unsuccessful attempts to exploit a public note-taking tool we host, and heavy traffic, which are described more below.

They found evidence of agents editing sandbox pages, trying to use pieces of infrastructure such as Etherpad to help proxy content from elsewhere, and saw widespread crawling and "hundreds of thousands of data queries" to their Wikidata Query Service.

My best guess is that most of this was a similar (or the same) swarm of agents as those that defaced that German wiki while training for research tasks.

The Wikipedia sandbox wiki edits appear to have started on May 12th, and the initial test edits to the UseModWiki Sandbox page reported by that incident started on May 11th.

Tags: wikimedia, wikipedia, wikis, ai, generative-ai, llms, ai-ethics, accidental-cyberattacks

2026-10-07 07:58:56

Since the Medicare breach, OpenAI has put in place additional monitoring to allow “immediate intervention” by staff to stop training if the company’s models access the internet in ways they’re not supposed to, Mr. Kwon [chief strategy officer at OpenAI] said.

— Victoria Kim, Reporting from the Australian parliament

Tags: accidental-cyberattacks, generative-ai, ai-security-research, openai, ai, llms

2026-10-07 07:04:13

Release: llm-openai-decisions 0.1a0

OpenAI released their new Jev-style Decisions API, as previously announced at last week's DevDay.

Since I already have an llm-typesafe plugin for talking to Jev, I had GPT-6 Astra read the new OpenAI API documentation and build an llm-openai-decisions plugin inspired by llm-typesafe.

Unlike Jev, the new gpt-6-luna decision model supports image input in addition to text. Both models charge for input it and not for output: OpenAI's is 10 cents per million input tokens, Jev's is 4.2 cents per million.

Otherwise the API shape is very similar to Jev, at least conceptually. Jev supports three question types for yes/no, choices, or scores. OpenAI Decisions supports the same three types.

Install the plugin like this:

llm install llm-openai-decisions

Here's an example query against an image attachment:

llm -m openai-decisions/gpt-6-luna \
  -a https://static.simonwillison.net/static/2025/two-pelicans.jpg \
  -s 'Does this image contain any mammals?'

And example output:

{"type": "predicate", "name": "evaluation", "probability": 0.0}

Consult the README for full details of how to run the other types of questions.

Tags: openai, llm, coding-agents, jev

2026-10-07 05:32:34

Release: llm-mistral 0.16

Adds support for reasoning models, such as the newly released Mistral Large 4.

Tags: llm, mistral, llm-reasoning