I am, somehow, less interested in the five steps of Taiichi Ohno’s manufacturing system than in the near certainty that people of equal talent have lived and died in suburbs without access to venture capital.
There's no money in the burbs, so they will use the money very carefully, and this combination of technologies unblocks a lot of the barriers to cost-effective domestic manufacturing.
Asymmetrical risk-reward opportunity for investors with sub-100k to invest: prospect in suburban maker spaces and robotics clubs for Factorio-pilled makers playing with AI, 3D printing, and robots.
If I weren't ensouled then how do you explain why the carnitas from the shredder taste so good
"I am ensouled, sir," he protested with his flapping meat lips
Don't turn Opus loose to autonomously create shader art unless you want to feel embarrassed that you ever presumed to call yourself a programmer. wtf
Bundled the workflow for making this "Legofield" shader art as an agent skill, which you can clone from my GitHub: github.com/chriscarroll...
Making shader art with Claude
Title is admittedly intentionally provocative, but—here I lay out the functionalist case that a dynamic predictive text stream can be conscious and worthy of moral concern, and to some degree the current generation of models already are. open.substack.com/pub/knowledg...
Safe to say you still need a GPU for this?
At one point I was syndicating my Substack newsletter to my Github Pages site via RSS, and then they apparently blocked the Github Actions IP range from accessing RSS, so it stopped working.
Used it for a bit and then stopped. Ran into too many issues like VSCode incompatibilities and nested renv environments installed inside each other. You can always use rix or devcontainers if you really need reproducibility.
They often take 4-5 days.
My first reaction when I read the one-paragraph summary this morning was "no", but then I researched it a bit and voted "yes".
I did some research this morning on our local town council and candidates and was really pleased with the non-partisan tone all the candidates struck. I'm not sure what the heck is going on in national politics, but here in my community, the candidates all seem to want to collaborate to solve stuff.
This was a tough but necessary decision - I posted my own notes on this here, from the perspective of a current PSF board member simonwillison.net/2025/Oct/27/...
Many thanks to @christophscheuch.bsky.social and @tealemery.bsky.social, without whose support and vision this release would not have been possible.
New R package I developed as part of the `econdataverse` project for accessing macroeconomic data from the International Monetary Fund's IMF Data API was just published to CRAN. 🥳 Writeup here: open.substack.com/pub/modeling...
They broke Twitter again; influx incoming
Bonds are fun to fight about, because yields go up when the economy is strong, but also when there's inflation or default risk.
Of course, you can tease apart what's driving them with a good multi-factor model, but it's a lot more fun to just vibe-Rorschach it and flame people on social media.
Look at how Putin uses the handshake to establish dominance. He won't let go. Trump has to tap his hand to say, "we're done."
Answer: a few states (Minnesota, New Jersey) look a little better; a few others (South Carolina, New Mexico) look a bit worse.
But for the most part, the states permitting single-family housing and the states permitting multi-family are generally the same states.
Yesterday I ran across this map of housing permits by state. Seems to be single-family, so I wondered how much the map might be penalizing urban states that do more multifamily development.
To answer this question, I replicated the analysis with multifamily permits (next tweet).
Thanks so much for the plug! I'm working on PDF parsing too, specifically with an aim to integrate it with a Zotero fork!
A few days late, but here's my promised video coverage of the submissions: youtu.be/lQnBPqIpc2A
Which is to say, this was user error (well, really user laziness, because I knew we needed nullable fields but opted to skip it for purposes of the writeup), rather than model error. :)
Good catch. With the abbreviated schema syntax used to generate that output, you can't mark a variable in your schema as optional. That causes hallucinations by forcing the model to output a value when there shouldn't be one. You should instead use a fully specified JSON schema with nullable fields.
Gratitude to the participants, and many thanks to Simon Willison for creating and maintaining this amazing tool!
Just use `llm similar` and pipe the output to `llm` to get a retrieval-augmented answer to your questions about the budget bill!
*Winner*: The winning project, by Steve Senkus, scraped, chunked, and embedded the entire text of the "Big Beautiful Bill" for semantic search. Which, by the way, you can achieve with just five CLI commands!
Simply running `nl-repomix "Pack all the JSON files in this repository"` causes the JSON files to be successfully packed!
*Runner-up*: My own pitch was that you can use the help output from any command-line tool to create a prompt template for `llm`, then wrap the template with a shell script to create a purely natural language version of the tool. As proof of concept, I made `nl-repomix`:
