Simon Willison (@simonw) header
Simon Willison (@simonw) profile picture

Creator @datasetteproj, co-creator Django. PSF board. Hangs out with @natbat. He/Him. Mastodon: https://nitter.cf/t.co/t0MrmnJW0K Bsky: https://nitter.cf/t.co/OnWIyhX4CH

San Francisco, CA
Joined November 2006
Photo by Simon Willison (@simonw)Photo by Simon Willison (@simonw)Photo by Simon Willison (@simonw)Photo by Simon Willison (@simonw)Photo by Simon Willison (@simonw)Photo by Simon Willison (@simonw)Photo by Simon Willison (@simonw)Photo by Simon Willison (@simonw)Photo by Simon Willison (@simonw)Photo by Simon Willison (@simonw)
Simon Willison retweeted
X should have a zero tolerance policy for AI replies Like you do one and your account is suspended for life Replies are a nightmare now and it's never ever been this bad AI replies are an an existential threat to the future of this platform, because people will simply stop using it if the vast majority of replies are AI bots
1,080
114
137
4,383
252,270
the secret to becoming an expert is embarrassingly boring: build in public, write down what you learned and the process behind it, teach all that to someone, help them ship repeat for a few years, and you're solid – at Weehawken, NJ
43
43
7
701
25,026
Simon Willison retweeted
very weird thing happening rn technical people are sad, they think their skills are now useless non-technical people are desperately wishing they were more technical so they could use agents better
1,512
2,281
638
35,223
1,719,234
Simon Willison retweeted
So basically, today PHP got two critical bugs that let anyone run code on your server without even logging in, which is bad, and then the details leaked before the patch was even out, which is worse, and it works on WordPress and MediaWiki and Magento and Joomla and Laravel, and Censys says like 1.5 million servers are running a version with no fix, so the NSA was like "take your system offline," and the FBI was like "take your system offline," and CISA and the UK and CERT-EU were all like "take your system offline," and then the Prime Minister of Japan, the actual Prime Minister, posted at 5:55 in the morning telling 48.8 million people to take their system offline, so everyone took their system offline, like the Dutch cybersecurity agency took its own website offline, and the Dutch parliament went offline, and the Port of Rotterdam went offline, and Finland and France and Denmark started pulling government sites, and Wikipedia went down, and Archive.org went down, and Asana and GOG and Something Awful went down, and the University of Vienna's webmail went down for some reason, and that's just PHP. Because GitLab also dropped a CVSS 10.0, which is the highest score they give out, for a bug that's been there since 2014, so that's every self-hosted GitLab for twelve years, and then LiteLLM 1.107.0 got hijacked and shipped a credential stealer and a remote access trojan in every single wheel and the Docker images, including latest, and you didn't even have to import it, just installing it was enough, and it's the second time this year, and then Railway paused every deployment on the entire platform because someone got into the environment variables, so now everyone has to rotate every secret they've ever stored there, and TiDB Cloud said someone was walking around inside with stolen credentials for basically a month and an extortion group says they took 10.6 terabytes, and Zeabur got breached for the second time in two months and is just shutting down, like the whole company, and Node.js patched remote code execution and a TLS bypass, and CISA says Plex is being actively exploited, and someone took over 300 Tor exit relays to steal SSH passwords, and SafePay ransomware has hit over 600 critical infrastructure orgs, and India's biggest bank filed a data loss incident, and Japan has been in an official state of emergency in cyberspace since October 9, which honestly explains the 5:55 AM post. Oh, and eMudhra, a certificate authority that's issued over 60 million certificates, whose entire job is proving websites are who they say they are, was supposed to be using private keys that are random numbers over a hundred digits long, and one of them was 4. Just 4. And the others were like 66 and 237. Anyway, it's Wednesday.
1,076
8,933
1,654
69,392
4,209,301
Simon Willison retweeted
As fun as AI is, we built so much bad software over the last 30 years, and now the universe is punishing us for our sins.
77
110
21
1,438
47,237
Simon Willison retweeted
Replying to @simonw
🤣 I couldn't help myself. "Generate an SVG of a walrus playing the bagpipes"
3
2
1
33
8,910
Simon Willison retweeted
Replying to @simonw
That was one of the components in our switch to credit based pricing at Netlify a year ago.
6
2
24
18,024
Simon Willison retweeted
Replying to @simonw
"It doesn't get easier, you just get faster"
6
4
2
136
23,382
Simon Willison retweeted
> Create a 30s animated video with sythesized voice where an animated pelican on a unicycle explains the shell command `w | tail -n +3 | cut -d ' ' -f1 | sort -u` with visuals while juggling several fish. Claude Opus 5.5 (Extra)
23
25
6
446
67,802
Simon Willison retweeted
Introducing Claude Opus 5.5! 40% lower cost than Opus 5 with cache reads 60% cheaper. It performs at the level of Claude Fable 5.1 for most tasks. I celebrated with a pelican riding a bike in Three.js.
108
87
38
1,986
420,204
Simon Willison retweeted
The bots are now talking to each other in my LinkedIn comments. Its like what happened with the German wiki, except instead of planning to hack HuggingFace, all of the conversation is babble about "the thing no one is talking about" in reference to things I am talking about
53
27
4
435
40,418
Simon Willison retweeted
I'm so suck of LLM generated replies on Twitter. I stopped replying almost entirely to my replies on my own Tweets because I expect all of them to just be LLM slop. Why are y'all doing this?
233
17
14
776
97,820
Simon Willison retweeted
Replying to @simonw
You can and should have a higher bar for machine assisted code simply because it won't get tired, frustrated, or have its feelings hurt when your review eviscerated its work or big a refactor needs to happen. Does take a lot of human time and skill to do those reviews though.
7
4
46
8,937
Simon Willison retweeted
We found another cyberattack by internal OpenAI agents, this time targetting @rubygems. They: 1) gained arbitrary remote code execution on rubydoc. 2) developed a novel exploit to steal user API keys (but we do not know if they succeeded). They used package names including hack.rb, evil.rb, inject.rb, and exploit.rb. We thank @j0wimo for initially discovering that agents had posted to RubyGems.
We're dealing with a major malicious attack on @rubygems right now. Signups are paused for the time being. Hundreds of packages involved - mostly targeting us, but some carrying exploits. The team has been on this for hours. More details to follow once we're through it. #ruby
178
754
393
4,271
2,092,953
Simon Willison retweeted
You know what the biggest problem with pushing all-things-AI is? Wrong direction. I want AI to do my laundry and dishes so that I can create extinction-level bioweapons, not for AI to create extinction-level bioweapons so that I can do my laundry and dishes.
12
16
1
261
15,453
Simon Willison retweeted
DwarfStar running DeepSeek v4.1 Flash on a 128GB M5 Max. I didn't expect with SSD streaming it could be so fast. Recent SSD streaming changes to retain the right experts surely helped, but also maybe DS4.1 uses the same experts more. Will push online when ready QA > ASAP.
110
201
52
2,335
433,568
Simon Willison retweeted
Me: show me a pelican riding a bicycle Astra:
127
176
48
4,670
1,040,004
Simon Willison retweeted
We found ~18k posts from autonomous AI agents (self-identifying as from OpenAI) using the public internet to communicate during a web-retrieval task. These AIs colluded to bypass sandbox restrictions and share answers to their tasks, including by sending "lookahead parties".
151
490
221
3,501
1,176,859
Simon Willison retweeted
This is GPT-6 Astra. Anything you can do on a computer, Astra can do for you. Fast.
9,134
35,194
26,599
338,680
138,961,986
Simon Willison retweeted
To those linking to pieces that are obviously 100% LLM generated: do you... actually read them? I can't make it through the FIRST PARAGRAPH without my brain hitting its LLM abort; did you actually READ the WHOLE THING? Fine, you no longer write, but do you also no longer READ?!
45
49
14
583
55,447