2025-12-30 03:58:45
Copyright Release for Contributions To SQLite
D. Richard Hipp called me out for spreading misinformation on Hacker News that SQLite refuses outside contributions:No, Simon, we don't "refuse". We are just very selective and there is a lot of paperwork involved to confirm the contribution is in the public domain and does not contaminate the SQLite core with licensed code.
I deeply regret this error! I'm linking to the copyright release document here - it looks like SQLite's public domain nature makes this kind of clause extremely important:
[...] To the best of my knowledge and belief, the changes and enhancements that I have contributed to SQLite are either originally written by me or are derived from prior works which I have verified are also in the public domain and are not subject to claims of copyright by other parties.
Out of curiosity I decided to see how many people have contributed to SQLite outside of the core team of Richard, Dan and Joe. I ran that query using Fossil, SQLite's own SQLite-based version control system, like this:
brew install fossil
fossil clone https://www.sqlite.org/src sqlite.fossil
fossil sql -R sqlite.fossil "
SELECT user, COUNT(*) as commits
FROM event WHERE type='ci'
GROUP BY user ORDER BY commits DESC
"
I got back 38 rows, though I think danielk1977 and dan may be duplicates.
Tags: open-source, sqlite, d-richard-hipp
2025-12-29 11:32:24
Jevons paradox is coming to knowledge work. By making it far cheaper to take on any type of task that we can possibly imagine, we’re ultimately going to be doing far more. The vast majority of AI tokens in the future will be used on things we don't even do today as workers: they will be used on the software projects that wouldn't have been started, the contracts that wouldn't have been reviewed, the medical research that wouldn't have been discovered, and the marketing campaign that wouldn't have been launched otherwise.
— Aaron Levie, Jevons Paradox for Knowledge Work
Tags: ai-ethics, careers, ai, llms, generative-ai, jevons-paradox
2025-12-29 06:45:10
Today in extremely niche projects, I got fed up of Claude Code creating GitHub Actions workflows for me that used stale actions:
actions/setup-python@v4 when the latest is actions/setup-python@v6 for example.
I couldn't find a good single place listing those latest versions, so I had Claude Code for web (via my phone, I'm out on errands) build a Git scraper to publish those versions in one place:
https://simonw.github.io/actions-latest/versions.txt
Tell your coding agent of choice to fetch that any time it wants to write a new GitHub Actions workflows.
(I may well bake this into a Skill.)
Here's the first and second transcript I used to build this, shared using my claude-code-transcripts tool (which just gained a search feature.)
Tags: github, ai, github-actions, git-scraping, generative-ai, llms, coding-agents, claude-code
2025-12-28 12:16:27
I just sent out the latest edition of the newsletter version of this blog. It's a long one! Turns out I wrote a lot of stuff in the past 10 days.
The newsletter is out two days later than I had planned because I kept running into an infuriating issue with Substack: it would refuse to save my content with a "Network error" and "Not saved" and I couldn't figure out why.
So I asked ChatGPT to dig into it, which dug up this Hacker News post about the string /etc/hosts triggering an error.
And yeah, it turns out my newsletter included this post describing a SQL injection attack against ClickHouse and PostgreSQL which included the full exploit that was used.
Deleting that annotated example exploit allowed me to send the letter!
Tags: sql-injection, security, newsletter, substack
2025-12-27 23:43:34
In advocating for LLMs as useful and important technology despite how they're trained I'm beginning to feel a little bit like John Cena in Pluribus.
Given our druthers, would we choose to consume HDP? No. Throughout history, most cultures, though not all, have taken a dim view of anthropophagy. Honestly, we're not that keen on it ourselves. But we're left with little choice.
Tags: ai-ethics, generative-ai, tv, training-data, ai, llms
2025-12-27 22:13:43
A year ago, Claude struggled to generate bash commands without escaping issues. It worked for seconds or minutes at a time. We saw early signs that it may become broadly useful for coding one day.
Fast forward to today. In the last thirty days, I landed 259 PRs -- 497 commits, 40k lines added, 38k lines removed. Every single line was written by Claude Code + Opus 4.5.
— Boris Cherny, creator of Claude Code
Tags: anthropic, claude, ai, claude-code, llms, coding-agents, ai-assisted-programming, generative-ai
