catalog
Library
Cards and collections from my Semble library. Pages saved for later, grouped into shelves I return to. 1434 cards, 32 shelfves.
Shelves
32 collections- Collection 3 cards
Articles I keep thinking about
Pieces that I return to over the years. Don't necessarily agree with them but I keep thinking about them.
- Collection 6 cards
Tools for Thought
Reading that adds up. The lineage of ideas behind notes, memory, and understanding.
- Collection 5 cards
The Craft
Classic essays on doing good work in software, worth rereading every few years.
- Collection 5 cards
The Open Web
Why the social web is being rebuilt on protocols, and what that buys you.
- Collection 7 cards
How We Read Now
Essays on attention, screens, and what reading is for.
- Collection 20 cards
p(doom)
- Collection 9 cards
Modern reading apps
Cool apps to help you read better
- Collection 1153 cards
Skyreader Saves
- Collection 2 cards
toread
- Collection 1 card
To process
- Collection 2 cards
Building with agents
- Collection 3 cards
Protocol thinking
- Collection 4 cards
Cybernetics
- Collection 1 card
Cryptocurrency
It's bad
- Collection 2 cards
Thinking about thinking
- Collection 2 cards
ATproto development
Tools and resources for building on atproto
- Collection 20 cards
Cool Atmosphere apps
- Collection 9 cards
Internet sensemaking
- Collection 5 cards
The structure of social media
- Collection 9 cards
Books I've been reading
- Collection 3 cards
Tools for thought
- Collection 1 card
Cool tools
- Collection 2 cards
Awesome terminal
- Collection 8 cards
Local first
- Collection 5 cards
Tech right analysis
- Collection 10 cards
Security?
- Collection 1 card
Tech and Law
- Collection 153 cards
the AI of it all
- Collection 5 cards
understanding events
- Collection 1 card
vc stuff
- Collection 12 cards
development
- Collection 20 cards
atproto stuff
Recently filed
page 40 / 60-
AI has limits, even if many AI people can't see them
On Ben Recht's fantastic new book
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Sam Altman May Control Our Future—Can He Be Trusted?
New interviews and closely guarded documents shed light on the persistent doubts about the head of OpenAI, Ronan Farrow and Andrew Marantz write.
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Some Contemporary Heresies
I define a heresy as: something you believe that the people you most admire and respect don’t believe and reject out of hand.
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Bernie Sanders has a plan to stop the AI industry
But it will be hard to assemble a broad coalition of AI skeptics.
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Dropping to log-level
Logs are invaluable when things spin out of control.
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More on whether useful quantum computing is “imminent”
These days, the most common question I get goes something like this: A decade ago, you told people that scalable quantum computing wasn't imminent. Now, though, you claim it plausibly is imminent. Why have you reversed yourself?? I appreciated the friend of mine who paraphrased this as follows: "A decade ago you said you were…
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A Cryptography Engineer’s Perspective on Quantum Computing Timelines
The risk that cryptographically-relevant quantum computers materialize within the next few years is now high enough to be dispositive, unfortunately.
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On Cooling America Out
We've been the marks of our own long cons, all the way up
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How to harness AI
"Coding agents" are complicated but intelligible
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Eight years of wanting, three months of building with AI
For eight years, I’ve wanted a high-quality set of devtools for working with SQLite. Given how important SQLite is to the industry1, I’ve long been puzzled that no one has invested in building a really good developer experience for it2. A couple of weeks ago, after ~250 hours of effort over three months3 on evenings, weekends, and vacation days, I finally released syntaqlite (GitHub), fulfilling this long-held wish. And I believe the main reason this happened was because of AI coding agents4. Of course, there’s no shortage of posts claiming that AI one-shot their project or pushing back and declaring that AI is all slop. I’m going to take a very different approach and, instead, systematically break down my experience building syntaqlite with AI, both where it helped and where it was detrimental. I’ll do this while contextualizing the project and my background so you can independently assess how generalizable this experience was. And whenever I make a claim, I’ll try to back it up with evidence from my project journal, coding transcripts, or commit history5.
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Is Bluesky dying?
An attempt to untangle a few different arguments around the future of Bluesky – if it has one
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The Last Days Of Social Media
Social media promised connection, but it has delivered exhaustion.
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Why it’s getting harder to measure AI performance
The most famous chart in AI might be obsolete soon.
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Birthright and Wrong
The Regime's Attack on the Constituton
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Gemma 4 and what makes an open model succeed
Hint: it's not benchmark scores.
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Can Agentic AI Coding Tools Finally End Copyright For Software While Re-Inventing Open Source?
Most of the discussions about the impact of the latest generative AI systems on copyright have centered on text, images and video. That’s no surprise, since writers, artists and film-makers feel very strongly about their creations, and members of the public can relate easily to the issues that AI raises for this kind of creativity. But there’s […]
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Is ubiquitous A.I. writing "inevitable"?
On a weird few weeks of A.I.-writing scandals
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Quoting Daniel Stenberg
<blockquote cite="https://mastodon.social/@bagder/116336957584445742"><p>The challenge with AI in open source security has transitioned from an AI slop tsunami into more of a ... plain security report tsunami. Less slop but lots of reports. Many of them really good.</p> <p>I'm spending hours per day on this now. It's intense.</p></blockquote> <p class="cite">— <a href="https://mastodon.social/@bagder/116336957584445742">Daniel Stenberg</a>, lead developer of cURL</p> <p>Tags: <a href="https://simonwillison.net/tags/daniel-stenberg">daniel-stenberg</a>, <a href="https://simonwillison.net/tags/security">security</a>, <a href="https://simonwillison.net/tags/curl">curl</a>, <a href="https://simonwillison.net/tags/generative-ai">generative-ai</a>, <a href="https://simonwillison.net/tags/ai">ai</a>, <a href="https://simonwillison.net/tags/llms">llms</a>, <a href="https://simonwillison.net/tags/ai-security-research">ai-security-research</a></p>
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The cognitive impact of coding agents
<p>A fun thing about <a href="https://simonwillison.net/2026/Apr/2/lennys-podcast/">recording a podcast</a> with a professional like Lenny Rachitsky is that his team know how to slice the resulting video up into TikTok-sized short form vertical videos. Here's <a href="https://x.com/lennysan/status/2039845666680176703">one he shared on Twitter today</a> which ended up attracting over 1.1m views!</p> <p><video src="https://static.simonwillison.net/static/2026/cognitive-cost.mp4" poster="https://static.simonwillison.net/static/2026/cognitive-cost-poster.jpg" controls preload="none" playsinline style="display:block; max-width:400px; width:100%; height:auto; margin:0 auto" ><track src="https://static.simonwillison.net/static/2026/cognitive-cost.vtt" kind="captions" srclang="en" label="English"></video> </p> <p>That was 48 seconds. Our <a href="https://simonwillison.net/2026/Apr/2/lennys-podcast/">full conversation</a> lasted 1 hour 40 minutes.</p> <p>Tags: <a href="https://simonwillison.net/tags/ai-ethics">ai-ethics</a>, <a href="https://simonwillison.net/tags/coding-agents">coding-agents</a>, <a href="https://simonwillison.net/tags/agentic-engineering">agentic-engineering</a>, <a href="https://simonwillison.net/tags/generative-ai">generative-ai</a>, <a href="https://simonwillison.net/tags/podcast-appearances">podcast-appearances</a>, <a href="https://simonwillison.net/tags/ai">ai</a>, <a href="https://simonwillison.net/tags/llms">llms</a>, <a href="https://simonwillison.net/tags/cognitive-debt">cognitive-debt</a></p>
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The Anti-Intellectualism of Silicon Valley Elites
I recently re-read Richard Hofstadter's Anti-Intellectualism in American Life, and now every time a reactionary Silicon Valley billionaire opens his mouth, I think about it. So I wrote about it for The Nation. Here's the column: On Instagram, there’s an activist named Brian Patrick (@pano.dime) who has dedicated
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Geeks, MOPs, and sociopaths in subculture evolution
How muggles and sociopaths invade and undermine creative subcultures; and how to stop them.
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A Local-First Task Framework
Industrial research lab working on digital tools for creativity and productivity.