Everyone’s into AI feeds in 2025. Meanwhile, I’m here polishing my RSS feed with XSLT. 😂
(Also because I’m a reader of Jamie Zawinski’s blog.)

<https:www.cedricbonhomme.org/2025/08/18/rss-xslt-styling/>

[#rss](https://fosstodon.org/tags/rss) [#atom](https://fosstodon.org/tags/atom) [#newsreader](https://fosstodon.org/tags/newsreader) [#web](https://fosstodon.org/tags/web) [#xslt](https://fosstodon.org/tags/xslt) [#indieweb](https://fosstodon.org/tags/indieweb)

dessine-moi les personnages de l’histoire dit le petit prince

Antoine de Saint-Exupéry / Richard Berner, UK-based illustrator
[#drawing](https://h4.io/tags/drawing) [#art](https://h4.io/tags/art) [#history](https://h4.io/tags/history) [#illustration](https://h4.io/tags/illustration)

I just released v2 of Toney, A TUI Note-taking app for the terminal.

<https:github.com/SourcewareLab/Toney>
<https:sourcewarelab.github.io/Toney/>

PS: Actively looking for contributors! It would be great if you could star the repo, I am a student and it really helps applications. Thanks!

[#OpenSource](https://mastodon.social/tags/OpenSource) [#productivity](https://mastodon.social/tags/productivity) [#terminal](https://mastodon.social/tags/terminal) [#development](https://mastodon.social/tags/development) [#developers](https://mastodon.social/tags/developers) [#neovim](https://mastodon.social/tags/neovim)

<https:ansi.tools/> looks pretty useful

TIL about caligula, a CLI disk burning tool that automates away some of the usual steps you might take when using dd for the same task.

<https:github.com/ifd3f/caligula>

/via <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3BxIpVk_xZI>

[#Rust](https://mastodon.decentralised.social/tags/Rust) [#Linux](https://mastodon.decentralised.social/tags/Linux)

if you put a webserver up on the internet. anywhere, hosting anything, you will see "the background radiation of the internet", and it looks like this:

Once again, dealing with email shenanigans and bumped into this, which someone put a lot of time into…

<https:www.learndmarc.com>

Last month I walked across Spain.
Here are some reflections from the experience.

<https:matthewrocklin.com/camino.html>

There goes my day: <https://isle.pizza>

[#legoisland](https://mastodon.social/tags/legoisland)

I've spent the day trying out [@steveklabnik.com](https://bsky.brid.gy/r/https://bsky.app/profile/steveklabnik.com)'s [#jujutsu](https://wandering.shop/tags/jujutsu) tutorial, and as a forcing function I'm trying it out on a couple of my own repos.

I'm very used to the [#magit](https://wandering.shop/tags/magit) workflow in [#emacs](https://wandering.shop/tags/emacs) and I don't know how much I'm gonna like moving over to a full TUI for version control. So far, I feel like a rank newbie again, which is strange given how relatively expert I think I've become with git.

I've been using the [#HelixEditor](https://hachyderm.io/tags/HelixEditor) as my daily driver for the better part of a year now and I couldn't be more happy with it. I've managed to get a near-IDE setup and experience thanks to zellij and some awesome TUI tools.
This article aligns well with my experience, I recommend reading it if you're "modal editor curious" or dissatisfied with your (neo)vim config maintenance burden.

<https:herecomesthemoon.net/2025/06/i-like-helix/>

[#helix](https://hachyderm.io/tags/helix) [#modaleditor](https://hachyderm.io/tags/modaleditor) [#vim](https://hachyderm.io/tags/vim) [#neovim](https://hachyderm.io/tags/neovim)

Here’s Bill Atkinson (and rest of team) answering questions right after the Macintosh was debuted at the Boston Computer Society in 1984: <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1tQ5XwvjPmA> starting at 28:25 - he demos MacPaint and more. May his memory be a blessing!

This is just brilliant :bunhdaww:

Got some strange editorial choices for illustrative photos for my prompt "Provide a vegetarian recipe for butter chicken but with chickpeas not chicken and include many inline illustrations along the way"

OK, at long last, the story of how I once got an email from Steve Jobs saying ‘Great idea, thank you.’

<https:blog.hayman.net/2025/05/06/from-steve-jobs-great-idea.html>

20 years ago, in college, I worked at the uni library's special collections department. One of the things we would do was check leather-bound books for 'red rot', which is when the tanning of the leather starts to fail, and the leather starts crumbling to produce this really characteristic red dust. It's treated with a product called cellugel.

I told my parents about this cool job.

'Oh,' they said, 'can you do something about this old book from your great-grandmother's collection?'

My favorite local model right now is a bit of surprise to me: I'm really enjoying the relatively tiny Qwen3-8B, running the 4bit quantized version on my Mac using MLX

It's surprisingly capable given it's a 4.3GB download and uses just 4-5GB of RAM while it's running

<https:simonwillison.net/2025/May/2/qwen3-8b/>

A project I have been working on got its official release today.

Space images are pretty, but would you like to know what the important features are, and the science behind their appearance? ViewSpace Interactive Image Tours take you on a guided exploration of astronomical images.

Designed to be used on touch screens in museums and science centers, they are also fun to explore on your own. They work best on tablets or computers (devices bigger than a phone).

<https:www.universe-of-learning.org/contents/news/traverse-across-space-with-the-interactive-image-tours>

[#Space](https://astrodon.social/tags/Space) [#Astronomy](https://astrodon.social/tags/Astronomy) [#Astrodon](https://astrodon.social/tags/Astrodon)

[@paul](https://tapbots.social/@paul) Yeah but it’s no duck bill <https://a.co/d/bSCywyL>

Fun new LLM fragments plugin: llm-fragments-symbex can scan a directory full of Python code and extract the class, function and method signatures and their docstrings to feed into the context of an LLM prompt. It's adapted from my older Symbex project <https://simonwillison.net/2025/Apr/23/llm-fragment-symbex/>

llm install llm-fragments-symbex
llm -f symbex:path/to/folder -s 'example code using this library'

Benieuwd naar het geluidniveau in jouw omgeving? Doe mee aan de Nationale Geluidmeetdag op 30 april! Download alvast de Klankbord App. 🔉

Na de meting van 30 seconden in de buitenlucht, volgen vijf vragen over hoe het geluid ervaren wordt.

Download nu alvast de Klankbord App en zet de pushmeldingen aan. Je ontvangt dan een pushmelding op de dag zelf met het verzoek om je directe buitengeluid te meten. ⏰

ℹ️ <https://www.nationalegeluidmeetdag.nl/>

[#Geluidmeetdag](https://social.overheid.nl/tags/Geluidmeetdag) [#SamenMeten](https://social.overheid.nl/tags/SamenMeten) [#CitizenScience](https://social.overheid.nl/tags/CitizenScience)

TIL about "digraphs" in (neo)vim. Need to insert, say, an en dash, which has a digraph of -N? In insert mode, ctrl-k, hypen, N. Want to check the digraph of a character already in your file? ga to show ascii, and look at the "Digr" notation. You would see e.g. "Digr =e" for the euro symbol.

:help digraphs
:help digraphs-default

[#vim](https://xoxo.zone/tags/vim) [#neovim](https://xoxo.zone/tags/neovim)

I recently got one of these for my new Mac Studio and it's a phenomenal product for external storage:

<https:amzn.to/44AAMQz>

It's a solid piece of aluminum with a circuit board where you can mount a NVME M.2 stick (like they use in the Playstation).

Real world transfer speeds are 3.5+ GB/s on Thunderbolt 5 (~1 GB/s on TB 3, ~2.5 GB/s on TB 4).

The enclosure is $120 and a 2 TB NVME is in the $120-150 range.

A great way to keep VMs, photos, and other big stuff out of Apple's pricey storage.

OMG this looks amazing on multiple levels!

"Code in BASIC, explore the magic of Lisp, taste the elegance of Unix, play retro games and digital music all in just 260KB memory. Infinite possibilities, inspired by the genius in you!"

<https:www.clockworkpi.com/product-page/copy-of-uconsole-kit-a-06>

Modern-Day Oracles or Bullshit Machines?

Jevin West and I have spent the last eight months developing the course on large language models (LLMs) that we think every college freshman needs to take.

<https:thebullshitmachines.com>

This is not a computer science course.

It’s a humanities course about how to learn and work and thrive in an AI world.

Neither instructor nor students need a technical background. Our instructor guide provides a choice of activities for each lesson that will easily fill an hour-long class.

The entire course is available freely online. Our 18 online lessons each take 5-10 minutes; each illuminates one core principle. They are suitable for self-study, but have been tailored for teaching in a flipped classroom.

The course is a sequel of sorts to our course (and book) Calling Bullshit. We hope that like its predecessor, it will be widely adopted worldwide.

Large language models are both powerful tools, and mindless—even dangerous—bullshit machines. We want students to explore how to resolve this dialectic.

Great yarn, beautiful images
<https:www.abc.net.au/news/2025-02-06/outback-way-journey-remote-australia-back-roads-lisa-millar/104842474>

[#TIL](https://fosstodon.org/tags/TIL) there's a fork of [#pyright](https://fosstodon.org/tags/pyright) , a [#python](https://fosstodon.org/tags/python) language server: <https://docs.basedpyright.com/>
If you're using the [#HelixEditor](https://fosstodon.org/tags/HelixEditor) , then this config file will save you 45 minutes of searching: <https://gist.github.com/blaisep/bddadf976f027ced7b6e37e520249fd5>

Fascinating Hacker News comment from Tom Gally, a professional translator (Japanese to English) who uses LLMs as part of his workflow, which he describes in detail: <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42897856>

Wrote a bit more about this on my blog here: <https://simonwillison.net/2025/Feb/2/workflow-for-translation/>

Thanks to several people here! I'm ditching Google maps and switching to:
<https:organicmaps.app/> for my Android phone
and
OpenStreetMap <https://www.openstreetmap.org/#map=4/38.01/-95.84> for laptop

New [#LaunchBar](https://hessen.social/tags/LaunchBar) Action to Switch Audio Devices!
Check it out!

<https:github.com/Ptujec/LaunchBar/tree/master/Audio-Devices#readme>

mas is awesome.

I've been living under a rock. 10 years.

<https:github.com/mas-cli/mas>

<https:github.com/tjdevries/present.nvim>

Someone needs to port this [#Markdown](https://mastodon.social/tags/Markdown) presentation tool from [#Neovim](https://mastodon.social/tags/Neovim) to [#emacs](https://mastodon.social/tags/emacs) -- the two lines at the top and the centered title make a much more presentation-like impression on me than most [#orgmode](https://mastodon.social/tags/orgmode) presentation tools that just use whatever font settings you have.

Number 2, in [#Mantova](https://photog.social/tags/Mantova), [#Italy](https://photog.social/tags/Italy)
That yellow color is called Maria Theresa Yellow, from the 18th Century Austrian Empress. It was widely used on the buildings around her vast Empire, and still is occasionally. The Pantone reference is: Ral 1023.

[#architecture](https://photog.social/tags/architecture) [#coloryellow](https://photog.social/tags/coloryellow) [#yellow](https://photog.social/tags/yellow) [#door](https://photog.social/tags/door) [#omsystem](https://photog.social/tags/omsystem)

nintendo switch

Flexoki 2.0 introduces 88 new colors that feel like watercolor pigments on paper. This is a continuation of my attempt to bring the feeling of analog color to digital emissive screens.

Flexoki is open source under the MIT license, and already available for most text editors, terminals, and many other apps. Flexoki 2.0 makes it into a more capable color system for UIs and more complex projects.

<https:stephango.com/flexoki>

Ever wanted to waste infinity hours doing tile puzzles of every place in the world? Well, now you can with [#AnyMapPuzzle](https://vis.social/tags/AnyMapPuzzle)

You can play for free, forever (literally), at <https://bothness.github.io/anymap>

This is something else. <https://50games.fun>

I haven’t actually played any of the games, but the trailer hits all the right notes: <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tfW0K4rRLnw>

(via [@yertle](https://mastodon.cloud/@yertle)) /cc [@cabel](https://social.panic.com/@cabel)

On Mastodon, a newly introduced feature allows you to link your blog articles to your Fediverse account. I recently added this feature to my Hugo Blog and wrote down the necessary steps: <https://kotthoff.dev/posts/2024/mastodon-tag/>

[#mastodon](https://mastodon.energy/tags/mastodon) [#hugo](https://mastodon.energy/tags/hugo) [#opensource](https://mastodon.energy/tags/opensource) [#blog](https://mastodon.energy/tags/blog) [#blogging](https://mastodon.energy/tags/blogging) [#journalism](https://mastodon.energy/tags/journalism)

Message to future me:

defaults write com.apple.Preview PVImagePrintingScaleMode -bool FALSE

New LB Action:
<https:ptujec.github.io/Writing-Tools/>
[#iAWriter](https://hessen.social/tags/iAWriter) [#LaunchBar](https://hessen.social/tags/LaunchBar) [#writing](https://hessen.social/tags/writing)

The Mac mini Pro case fits perfectly without modifications!

I’ve updated the listing to reflect that “Beta 2” is verified and safe to print.

I will soon be making tweaks to the power button and front port centering. Enjoy all!

<https:makerworld.com/en/models/756063>

(Final tag, fine gents:)
[@snazzyq](https://mas.to/@snazzyq) [@christianselig](https://mastodon.social/@christianselig) [@jsnell](https://zeppelin.flights/@jsnell) [@caseyliss](https://mastodon.social/@caseyliss) [@imyke](https://myke.social/@imyke)

Just discovered litecli (<https://github.com/dbcli/litecli>), it feels like a big improvement over the default SQLite REPL (autocompletion! support for multiline queries! syntax highlighting!)

Technically not wrong…

I just finished a custom Hugo theme I’ve been working on. It’s called “Today I Learned,” and it’s perfect for both traditional blogging and building a knowledge base of shorter, informal notes for easy reference and sharing.

A cool feature: it graphs your content like Obsidian! It also supports side notes and highlights with admonitions.

Check it out at <https://michenriksen.com/til-example-site>

[#Hugo](https://chaos.social/tags/Hugo) [#Obsidian](https://chaos.social/tags/Obsidian) [#Blogging](https://chaos.social/tags/Blogging) [#Notes](https://chaos.social/tags/Notes) [#TIL](https://chaos.social/tags/TIL)

📝 New blog post: Kagi Search Action for LaunchBar

<https:florian.ec/blog/launchbar-action-kagi-search/>

I built a new plugin for LLM called llm-jq, which lets you pipe JSON into the tool and provide a short description of what you want, then it uses an LLM to generate a jq program and executes that against the JSON for you <https://simonwillison.net/2024/Oct/27/llm-jq/>

Example usage:

llm install llm-jq
curl -s 'http''s:api.github.com/repos/simonw/datasette/issues' |
llm jq 'count by user login, top 3'

Discovered a neat new tool last week: <https://github.com/wr7/refold>

It's similar to fmt and fold except that it automatically handles prefixes. Vim/Neovim gq can do this out of the box but fails (for me at least) when multiple prefixes are present, such as a Markdown block-quote inside Rust comments. E.g.

// > Some quoted text  
// > to reflow.  

refold handles this.

[#Rust](https://mastodon.decentralised.social/tags/Rust) [#RustLang](https://mastodon.decentralised.social/tags/RustLang) [#TextProcessing](https://mastodon.decentralised.social/tags/TextProcessing) [#TextManipulation](https://mastodon.decentralised.social/tags/TextManipulation) [#TextEditor](https://mastodon.decentralised.social/tags/TextEditor)

How to stop the monthly screen recording prompts in macOS 15 Sequoia: <https://lapcatsoftware.com/articles/2024/8/10.html> (via [@skypunch](https://mastodon.social/@skypunch))

Today I discovered a pretty cool utility for listing USB devices! 🔌

🌸 **cyme**: A modern and cross-platform lsusb!

🔥 Displays manufacturer, serial number, speed, current information (mA) and more!

🦀 Written in Rust!

⭐ GitHub: <https://github.com/tuna-f1sh/cyme>

[#rustlang](https://fosstodon.org/tags/rustlang) [#lsusb](https://fosstodon.org/tags/lsusb) [#usb](https://fosstodon.org/tags/usb) [#devices](https://fosstodon.org/tags/devices) [#utility](https://fosstodon.org/tags/utility) [#commandline](https://fosstodon.org/tags/commandline) [#tool](https://fosstodon.org/tags/tool) [#libusb](https://fosstodon.org/tags/libusb)

“When the AI provided an incorrect result, researchers found inexperienced and moderately experienced radiologists dropped their cancer-detecting accuracy from around 80% to about 22%. Very experienced radiologists’ accuracy dropped from nearly 80% to 45%.”

<https:www.brainfacts.org/neuroscience-in-society/tech-and-the-brain/2024/why-ai-can-push-you-to-make-the-wrong-decision-at-work-090324>

If you're using AI for coding or prose in Neovim, don't forget to try out <<https://github.com/olimorris/codecompanion.nvim>> and <<https://github.com/milanglacier/minuet-ai.nvim>>!

Both work seamlessly with local models using OpenAI compatible API, e.g., llama-server from llama.cpp <3

[#llm](https://mastodon.social/tags/llm) [#ai](https://mastodon.social/tags/ai) [#neovim](https://mastodon.social/tags/neovim) [#vim](https://mastodon.social/tags/vim) [#copilot](https://mastodon.social/tags/copilot)

New blog post! Beyond Ctrl-C: The dark corners of Unix signal handling.

The post is an introduction to signals and how to manage them effectively with async Rust. It's a written version of my talk at RustConf 2023, heavily edited for presentation as a blog post.

Hope you enjoy reading it as much as I enjoyed writing it!

<https:sunshowers.io/posts/beyond-ctrl-c-signals/>

My notes on trying out whisperfile, the new cross-platform executable packaging for the Whisper speech-to-text model, released as part of the latest update to llamafile
<https:simonwillison.net/2024/Aug/19/whisperfile/>

The video in that last boost might be one of the greatest things I've ever seen. Relinked here: <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7hdJQkn8rtA>

One gem I really liked: "We shouldn't worry too much, too early, about language details. Otherwise we don't program, but just code lots of details."

Some notes on mlx-whisper - it's now really easy to run transcriptions through an Apple Silicon (and GPU) optimized Whisper model using Python on macOS <https://simonwillison.net/2024/Aug/13/mlx-whisper/>

New TIL: Using sqlite-vec with embeddings in sqlite-utils and Datasette <https://til.simonwillison.net/sqlite/sqlite-vec>

OK gang! This is ready for you to test.

python tweet2html.py --css 1234

That will take a Twitter ID and return HTML and CSS for you to embed in your website with no calling back to Twitter.

Features:
🗣 Avatars inlined as Base64 WebP
📸 All attached photos inlined
🎥 Video poster inline, <video> to original source
🔗 Hyperlinks don't use t.co
#️⃣ Hashtags and @ mentions linked
🕰 Semantic time
♥ and 🗨 counts

Try it out at <https://github.com/edent/Tweet2Embed>

Feedback and pull requests very welcome!

And now for something completely different: Check out this nifty how-to for highlighting text on a page when you link to it.

<https:weblog.rogueamoeba.com/2024/08/08/how-to-highlight-text-fragments-when-linking/>

"Almost everything has been done by someone else before. Almost nothing you want to do is truly novel. And language models are exceptionally good at giving you solutions to things they've seen before."

I collect examples of this kind of thing, and this is by far the most exhaustive list of practical LLM uses I've seen.

<https:nicholas.carlini.com/writing/2024/how-i-use-ai.html>

/ht [@emollick](https://bird.makeup/users/emollick)

[#llm](https://social.coop/tags/llm) [#examples](https://social.coop/tags/examples)

I wrote about using the Plotly Graphing Library in Hugo. I'm still finding my away around [@gohugoio](https://fosstodon.org/@gohugoio) and would love to hear any feedback or suggestions :)

<https:read.ryancowl.es/posts/plotly-graphing-in-hugo/>

[#hugo](https://union.place/tags/hugo) [#plotly](https://union.place/tags/plotly) [#foss](https://union.place/tags/foss) [#data](https://union.place/tags/data)

There are many things [@antirez](https://mastodon.social/@antirez) did successfully: hping, redis, business stuff, writing.
But personally, I'll be eternally grateful for sharing a recipe for [#biancomangiare](https://mastodon.social/tags/biancomangiare) / [#blancmange](https://mastodon.social/tags/blancmange), insanely easy and tasty treat.

<http:zzimma.antirez.com/post/biancomangiare-al-pistacchio.html>

Here's a small script "find-postings-without-comment-id.py" which checks all my [#Hugo](https://mastodon.social/tags/Hugo) [#goHugo](https://mastodon.social/tags/goHugo) blog postings if I forgot to add the comments id.

<https:github.com/andreasscherbaum/hugo-tools>

Plus some other tools.

[#Blogging](https://mastodon.social/tags/Blogging) [#Blog](https://mastodon.social/tags/Blog)

I read the first two chapters of

<https:lazyvim-ambitious-devs.phillips.codes/>

Very well written, concise course / e-book by Dusty Phillips. Gives context when needed and even explains a bit of Vim basics which I did not know. I am currently experimenting it using the NVIM_APPNAME environment variable but the results are impressive so far. I might swap my handwritten configuration for what comes out of this course.

[#LazyVim](https://mastodon.acc.sunet.se/tags/LazyVim) [#neovim](https://mastodon.acc.sunet.se/tags/neovim)

Thinking of adding search to my static site... This seems to be a good option! <https://pagefind.app/>
Might give this a try when I have the time. Looks easy enough.

[#Hugo](https://fosstodon.org/tags/Hugo) [#staticsitegenerator](https://fosstodon.org/tags/staticsitegenerator) [#Pagefind](https://fosstodon.org/tags/Pagefind) [#staticsite](https://fosstodon.org/tags/staticsite)