catalog
Library
Cards and collections from my Semble library. Pages saved for later, grouped into shelves I return to. 1428 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 1147 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
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How To Write With An LLM
Two rules keep an LLM from pasteurizing your writing: never take a word it suggests, and never let it encourage you. Then hand it all the tedious work.
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How To Write With An LLM
<p><strong><a href="https://sockpuppet.org/blog/2026/09/17/how-to-write-with-an-llm/">How To Write With An LLM</a></strong></p> Thomas Ptacek on using LLMs as copyeditors, not as writing assistants:</p> <blockquote> <p><strong>Rule Number One: You may not use a single word an LLM suggests to you.</strong></p> <p>[...] I think that as a form of intellectual personal protective equipment you should adopt the rule that any specific turn of phrase an LLM suggests is off limits. Be strict about the rule!</p> </blockquote> <p>I won't let LLMs write content for my blog, but I use them for fact-checking, spelling and grammar and as an occasional thesaurus (see <a href="https://simonwillison.net/guides/agentic-engineering-patterns/prompts/#proofreader">my proofreading prompt</a>).</p> <p>The rule to never use a turn of phrase suggested by an LLM feels good to me. The text has that weird smell to it, and it's also a good principle to help stay disciplined.</p> <p>Later in this piece Thomas shows a screenshot of his personal LLM copyediting tool (see also <a href="https://x.com/tqbf/status/2100414465187475821">this Twitter thread</a>), and provides a prompt to help kickstart building your own. <p>Tags: <a href="https://simonwillison.net/tags/thomas-ptacek">thomas-ptacek</a>, <a href="https://simonwillison.net/tags/writing">writing</a>, <a href="https://simonwillison.net/tags/ai">ai</a>, <a href="https://simonwillison.net/tags/generative-ai">generative-ai</a>, <a href="https://simonwillison.net/tags/llms">llms</a></p>
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Reason v. Rule
The Real AI Risk is to Culture Itself
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The Preference Cascade Is Only Getting Started
We are in the midst of a preference cascade about existential risk from AI.
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How I Vibed a Proof of Conway’s Conjecture
You can just prove things, apparently.
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How a single tweet transformed the AI safety debate
Most people think AI is risky, but they don’t agree what to do next.
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EA Safety
EA promises to solve AI Safety. Now we have two problems.
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It’s Not Polarization; It’s the Radicalization of the Political Right | Perspectives on Politics
It’s Not Polarization; It’s the Radicalization of the Political Right
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Why I didn’t sign the Fields medallists’ letter
[This post has been cross-posted to Terence Tao's blog.] When I was around 11 I heard for the first time about Fermat's Last Theorem. I was immediately captivated by the problem statement, as well as by the accompanying story, and made a fairly serious attempt to prove it. And while, unsurprisingly, I failed, I learned…
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What kind of Software should we fund?
Laurie Voss, who was one of the founder of NPM, the Javascript package repository that is now run by Microsoft, has written a longer post about an idea about how to fund Free Software that I found interesting. It’s worth reading if you have some time and makes good points even though I will critique […]
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AI Superforecasting Should Transform The FDA
A guest post by Josh Morrison
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AI #186: The World Takes Notice
In the wake of Jacob Coxon’s resignation, and the resulting preference cascade, things have escalated quickly.
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Creative Reading: Scaffolding Reading for Transformation
However, recent work on augmenting reading largely focuses on making reading more efficient, especially in knowledge-intensive contexts where people must rapidly make sense of research papers and other complex documents (Lo et al., 2024). These systems often aim to help readers skim, summarize, and synthesize large volumes of information in order to reduce cognitive effort and accelerate document- and corpus-level sensemaking at scale (Gu et al., 2025; Lo et al., 2024; Fok et al., 2023). At one extreme, the form of reading implicitly envisioned by these systems may resemble what we call “reading to discard”: extracting the essential, actionable informational core of a document as quickly and efficiently as possible, so that the rest can be swiftly tossed aside—much like we often process inbound mail. This motivates us to ask what scaffolding approaches might resist “reading to discard,” what alternative forms of reading we might scaffold, and what alternative views and values of reading might guide the conversation.
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Inside OpenAI’s agentic software factory
A deepdive into how Codex has “taken over” OpenAI, how the frontier lab builds its agentic software factory, and the engineering challenges of one billion users. Details from inside OpenAI
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Yes these are concerning
My response to the grotesque
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Trump Goes Full Hoax on AI Existential Risk
This is our reality.
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Rewildpunk: The Counterculture AI Actually Needs
Punk took music back from the labels. Here’s how we take intelligence back from Silicon Valley.
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From Academia to Alignment
What to do when your career crumbles before your eyes
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The Age of Wonders and Terrors
Twenty years ago, when the idea of AI taking over the world in our lifetimes still struck most of us as the unconstrained fantasy of those who knew too much science fiction and too little science, many of us would say things like: Look, the part of the story that's wildly implausible is that a…
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Introducing System One Models and Jev - TypeSafe AI Blog
TypeSafe AI is an AI lab building machine-native intelligence infrastructure for automation, designed to make decisions within software. Try our first System One Model, Jev, in early access.
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Planning with Agents: Divided Worlds, Boundary Objects, and Thicker Interfaces
Why we need richer, thicker interfaces and better boundary objects for collaborative planning with agents
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King Ludd
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