Lightnews — Scholar-powered news

Simon Willison @simonwillison.net · 14h

How hard have you looked?

1

Simon Willison @simonwillison.net · 1d

Thanks you! I did not know that about MKV, and I've had plenty of crashes that broke my MP4s

1 1

Simon Willison @simonwillison.net · 1d

I figured out a uv recipe for running tests for any project with pyproject.toml or setuppy using any Python version:

uv run --python 3.14 --isolated --with-editable '.[test]' pytest

I've wrapped it in a uv-test script:

uv-test -p 3.11

Full details here: til.simonwillison.net/python/uv-te...

setup.py

1 5 71

Simon Willison @simonwillison.net · 1d

I'm looking to record upwards of an hour of video at a time

4 5

Simon Willison @simonwillison.net · 1d

I haven't quite got to a point where I trust them - I'm hoping for someone to say "I frequently record hour long videos with X and it's never failed me yet"

3

Simon Willison @simonwillison.net · 1d

Over an hour

1

Simon Willison @simonwillison.net · 1d

Does anyone know of a RELIABLE tool for screen recording long sessions on macOS?

I've been burned a ton of times by tools which seem great... and then they crash and lose the whole recording, or it turns out the audio wasn't recorded properly

31 2 14

Simon Willison @simonwillison.net · 1d

This isn't exactly a surprise, but here's a note that Claude 4.5 Sonnet in Claude Code can write a full working Datasette plugin from a single prompt now simonwillison.net/2025/Oct/8/c...

Claude can write complete Datasette plugins now

This isn’t necessarily surprising, but it’s worth noting anyway. Claude Sonnet 4.5 is capable of building a full Datasette plugin now. I’ve seen models complete aspects of this in the …

simonwillison.net

1 1 33

Simon Willison @simonwillison.net · 1d

I forgot the Bain scene on the plane, iconic

2

Simon Willison @simonwillison.net · 1d

Segments like that without any speech at all deserve special consideration in my opinion

3

Simon Willison @simonwillison.net · 1d

Oh wow yeah that one is amazing

Simon Willison @simonwillison.net · 1d

Oh and a very special mention to The Crimson Permanent Assurance that kicked off Monty Python's The Meaning of Life because wow. en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Cri...

The Crimson Permanent Assurance - Wikipedia

en.m.wikipedia.org

6

Simon Willison @simonwillison.net · 1d

What are some movies with the best opening 5-20 minutes?

Two that come to mind for me:

KPop Demon Hunters first five minutes (How It's Done on the plane)

The first 20 minutes of Across the Spider-Verse, in Gwen's watercolor dimension

(Both by Sony Animation Studios)

47 1 38

Simon Willison @simonwillison.net · 2d

Python 3.14 is out today! Here are my notes on the new release: simonwillison.net/2025/Oct/8/p...

If you're an open source library maintainer who supports all current Python releases this also means you can drop 3.9 support now and start depending on features from 3.10, like match/case

Python 3.14

This year's major Python version, Python 3.14, just made its first stable release! As usual the what's new in Python 3.14 document is the best place to get familiar with …

simonwillison.net

4 14 130

Simon Willison @simonwillison.net · 2d

Just about to delete this post about Gemini 2.5 computer use solving its own CAPTCHA, I got this wrong - it tried to solve the CAPTCHA but it was Browserbase that actually solved it: simonwillison.net/2025/Oct/7/g...

3 45

Simon Willison @simonwillison.net · 2d

I fought back pretty hard at "vibe coding" expanding from its original meaning, with very limited success simonwillison.net/2025/Mar/19/...

Not all AI-assisted programming is vibe coding (but vibe coding rocks)

Vibe coding is having a moment. The term was coined by Andrej Karpathy just a few weeks ago (on February 6th) and has since been featured in the New York …

simonwillison.net

1 2

Simon Willison @simonwillison.net · 2d

I'm suspicious that the image it showed you after "Show image" was actually generated by its image generation tool, and isn't a render of the pelican SVG itself

Try copying and pasting the SVG code into this tool and see what you get tools.simonwillison.net/svg-render

SVG to JPEG/PNG

tools.simonwillison.net

3

Simon Willison @simonwillison.net · 2d

Vibe effectively means "uses AI" at this point, see also Microsoft's "vibe working" www.microsoft.com/en-us/micros...

Vibe working: Introducing Agent Mode and Office Agent in Microsoft 365 Copilot | Microsoft 365 Blog

Microsoft Copilot introduces Agent Mode in Office apps, enabling smarter document creation, analysis, and collaboration across Excel, Word, and PowerPoint.

www.microsoft.com

2 1

Simon Willison @simonwillison.net · 2d

With that image does the SVG have something that looks like this in the middle?

<image href="data:image/png;base64...

1

Simon Willison @simonwillison.net · 2d

Yeah I wrote a bunch about them here simonwillison.net/2024/Oct/21/...

More in my claude-artifacts tag simonwillison.net/tags/claude-...

Everything I built with Claude Artifacts this week

I’m a huge fan of Claude’s Artifacts feature, which lets you prompt Claude to create an interactive Single Page App (using HTML, CSS and JavaScript) and then view the result …

simonwillison.net

1

Simon Willison @simonwillison.net · 2d

Augmented is a good word! Also amplified perhaps

I want a hint at engineering over just programming though since there's a lot more to it than purely producing code, see notes here simonwillison.net/2025/Oct/7/v...

1 12

Simon Willison @simonwillison.net · 2d

At this point it's also more than just having AI help write code - it's the whole software engineering process from end-to-end, spanning research and prototyping and implementation and testing and review and documentation

1 4

Simon Willison @simonwillison.net · 2d

I agree that "vibes" has negative connotations and is a bit (as the kids would say) cringe... but I've been trying to push "AI-assisted programming" for a couple of years now with zero traction at all

2 3

Simon Willison @simonwillison.net · 2d

I got in trouble a couple of years ago for using "magic" analogies to describe AI simonwillison.net/2022/Oct/5/s...

Is the AI spell-casting metaphor harmful or helpful?

For a few weeks now I’ve been promoting spell-casting as a metaphor for prompt design against generative AI systems such as GPT-3 and Stable Diffusion. Here’s an example, in this …

simonwillison.net

1 4

Simon Willison @simonwillison.net · 2d

I'm a huge fan of Claude Artifacts (and ChatGPT's clone of that which they call "Canvas") for that - it's very hard to shoot yourself in the foot with those

Problem is they don't have persistence, which limits both the damage but also the utility you can create with them!

2 1