Follow live updates as the military parade in Washington, D.C., kicks off on Trump's birthday. 'No Kings' protests by opponents are planned across the country today.
My notes on Anthropic's substantial essay about how they built their multi-agent research system, which has finally talked me around to taking multi-agent LLM prompt engineering seriously simonwillison.net/2025/Jun/14/…
OK, I'm sold on multi-agent LLM systems now. I've been pretty skeptical of these until recently: why make your life more complicated by running multiple different prompts in parallel when …
Not for the usual reasons, but because it encourages thinking of agents like we think of employees. Something you have a limited number of, difficult to hire/fire, can only do one task at a time etc.
A better way to think about them would be as (graphs of) ephemeral tasks / jobs, like in Celery, Sidekik and such. In this model, LLMs are essentially an autoscaling pool of compute that those tasks can always tap into.
This way of thinking gives you features like parallel sub-agents, checkpointing, crash recovery or surviving system migrations / power outages for almost free.
@miki I think the term "agent" is mostly unusable, because if you ask five people you'll get five different (potentially *wildly* different) interpretations, and often people will have a weird confidence that THEIR definition is the right one which everyone else shares when it isn't
In this case Anthropic opened their paper by clarifying the definition they were using ("LLMs autonomously using tools in a loop"), and I'm fine with that
Aujourd'hui, c'était retrouvailles entre vieux collègues, cassoulet et profiteroles. Et au retour, une visite improvisée à la halle de la machine (halledelamachine.fr/), un chouette endroit inspirant à base de machines mécaniques, pneumatiques et avec du bois. Jolie découverte.
This is a repository of apps to be used with your F-Droid client. Applications in this repository are official binaries built by the original application developers, taken from their resp. repositories (mostly Github, GitLab, Codeberg).
President Trump says President Putin "called this morning to very nicely wish me a Happy Birthday, but to more importantly, talk about Iran, a country he knows very well." Trump adds the call lasted an hour and "much less time was spent talking about Russia/Ukraine, but that will be for next week."
"Statement from Mayor David Newman Regarding ICE Activity in Thousand Oaks
14 June 2025
Your city government is scrupulously nonpartisan and laser-focused on local matters. Despite frequent calls to do so, we don't comment on outside issues. When outside issues come to us in Thousand Oaks, however, that's another matter.
Yesterday agents from US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) conducted operations at multiple locations throughout the City. This is now a local issue.
ICE actions here and around Ventura County have caused fear, uncertainty, and confusion among residents, espeically within immigrant communities. Local businesses were closed or short-staffed out of concern for the well-being of staff.
This unease speaks to me personally. My immigrant grandparents fled pograms. For human rights advocay, my Ukrainian grandfather endured arrest and exile to Siberia. And it is hearbreaking to hear my in-laws -- first-generation immigrations who faced ethnic persecution -- worry about detection on our streets.
If you are feeling afraid, help is available. If you need counseling or legal advice, call 211. Interface Services, which the City helps support, can help you identify the appropriate agency to assist.
If you see anything you think is dangerous, call 911 immediately.... (more)"
⚠️ A reminder that like all social networks Mastodon is not end-to-end encrypted. It is not designed or intended as a way to send sensitive information.
If you need to send private messages with sensitive content, use a secure messenger with end-to-end encryption both present and activated.
@twynn I've not actually used it with the screen reader before I always just used the USB download option until they took it away. Only a matter of time before they upgrade those devices too, I suspect.
That's why we need Fediverse and alternative search engines.
Fediverse can replace data-greed social media (e.g. FB/IG/Twitter, and even YT), while proxy search engine or independent indexed one can replace google
How can you build modern, cross-platform applications that can keep pace with the rapidly evolving ecosystem of the Fediverse (Mastodon, Lemmy, Friendica, etc.)?
Kotlin and Compose Multiplatform may be an interesting answer! Check out my blog post and stay tuned for more considerations stemming from my experience during the last 2 years maintaining the Raccoon apps.
The Fediverse represents the future of social media—decentralized, open, and user-controlled. As platforms like Mastodon, Friendica, and Lemmy gain momentum, developers face a crucial question: how do you build modern, cross-platform applications tha…
In 1997, Mary Schmich published a guide to life in the Chicago Tribune. In 1999, Baz Lurhmann turned it into a chillout anthem called Everybody's Free (To Wear Sunscreen).
It was, and remains, some of the best advice for life I've ever heard... tink.uk/advice-for-life/
Ok, the #Thunderbird chat interface for IRC and Matrix seems to have #a11y issues with #NVDA now. Sometimes NVDA completely freezes, especially when the interface is maximised, though not reliably in all channels. I filed a bug, appreciate anyone who can dig into what on earth is going on: bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.…
I am very excited to announce that my full beginner to advanced Apple App Developer course will begin in mid September. The class will be held on Google Classroom, and registration is free. Use the Google Classroom link to join the class, and we will have announcements about the course as time goes on there. classroom.google.com/c/Nzg3MTA…
Less than 40 people and now this seems to magically not be a problem anymore?
Sorry, but toxic cultures don't go away if you speak to a tiny sample about them. [Society may have overestimated risk of the ‘manosphere’, UK researchers say | Men | The Guardian](theguardian.com/society/2025/j…)
In recent weeks I have had the privilege of starting to participate in the American Printing House for the Blind’s Monarch RISE project. This is a thoughtfully developed and very well organized effort to engage professionals in the blindness services field, blind professionals more generally, and people who are seeking competitive, integrated employment in improving this Braille and tactile graphics technology to meet the needs of those in higher education and workplace settings.
I think involving real users in a grant-funded project of this nature is a very effective way of discovering what works well, what further developments could be made, and how the technology can best be applied to solving problems of accessibility as experienced in practice. #MonarchRise #APH
Through Monarch RISE: Resources for Inclusion, Skills, and Employment 250 Monarchs will be distributed to employment and educational professionals and individuals seeking competitive integrated employment across the United States.
LibreOffice 25.8 will be released as final at the end of August, 2025 ( Check the Release Plan ) being LibreOffice 25.8 Beta1 the second pre-release since the development of version 25.8 started at the beginning of December, 2024.
Thank you LibreOffice! We urgently need a better integration with the Zotero reference manager. The main issue that keeps me using MS Office is that Zotero works reliably only in Windows, not MacOS.
@xenophyte Hi! You can submit enhancement requests here: bugs.documentfoundation.org – But of course, we're a volunteer-driven project with very limited resources. To get a new feature more quickly, you can consider helping our volunteers, or funding a developer. Thank you ☺️👍
In the Netherlands, we just experienced the warmest night on record, for this early in the year. With a low temperature of 19.1°C in De Bilt, it was just shy of the warmest June night, 24-25 June 2019 (low 19.5°C).
Until 1990, nights with a low of 20°C or more were rare here, once in a decade or so. Now, we have a few every year. Called 'tropical nights' here :) Graph runs through 2022. #globalwarming #ClimateChange
@mireeek Tak je to studna ve skále, hluboká 8 metrů, ale jak jsem tam dával žebřík, tak se písek na dně rozvířil a v kyblíku je kal, není to ještě propláchnutý. Voda je krásně čistá normálně.
gratulace. Ja po několika výletech do studny nebyl schopny roztočit čerpadlo. Myslím si ze po tech x desítkách let už má dost a povodně loni na podzim ho dodělaly. Bzučí bzučí, ale neotočí. Přemýšlím jestli chci sám celou soustavu tahat ven a zkoumat a nic nevykoumat. Nebo radši rovnou sehnat studnare co mi to demontuje, zhodnoti, vymění, zprovozní … vidim to na možnost B
jj je to presne jak rikas, uz nevim kolik let kazdy rok na zacatku sezony musime do studni "obouchat hridelku" aby se zaclo tocit. Proste pres zimu "zaroste" a ted po tom co bylo 100% pod vodou ... chce to nove. Ted hlavne premyslim jake a co s tim. Koukam na vysokotlaky ponorka co proste zavesim a tlaci kdyz je potreba a pak na domaci vodarny s nadrzi. Ted mame vodarnu s nadrzi. No uvidime ...
With REAPER 7.40, you might have noticed that playing your projects isn't possible anymore when you're in the OSARA Parameters dialogs. An OSARA update is ready with a fix. As a bonus, now you can play using Space when focus is on the sliders, you don't need to remember to use Control+Space to hear results anymore. Control+Space also works to play/pause in those dialogs now, pausing moves your edit cursor, useful if you want to cue up a different part of the project to hear the adjustments you're making in context.
Shout outs to Toni and Jamie for much help with many scary code.
Vosí dvojníci staří 33 milionů let obelstili i dávné ptáky Vědci z Katedry zoologie Přírodovědecké fakulty Univerzity Karlovy objevili fosilii, která ukazuje, že přesná mimeze (tedy nápodoba) vos pestřenkami se vyvinula mnohem dříve, než se dosud předpokládalo – a nebyla formována…
Vědci z Katedry zoologie Přírodovědecké fakulty Univerzity Karlovy objevili fosilii, která ukazuje, že přesná mimeze (tedy nápodoba) vos pestřenkami se vyvinula mnohem dříve, než se dosud pře…
👌 Jestli se něco Rusům nedá upřít, tak je to fakt, že umí vždycky překvapit. Například tím, že bitevník Su-25, o který včera přišli při údajné "nehodě", ve skutečnosti sestřelil jeho vlastní parťák neřízenými raketami určenými k ničení pozemních cílů. 💯 Rusku tímto gratulejeme a přejeme jim mnoho dalších takových pilotů, co už ráno sedají do kokpitu vylití jak vázy. pixelfed.cz/p/dnesnaukrajine/8…
It’s funny to watch how with time the collection of local LLMs on my computer shrank to two only: Gemma3:27B and nomic-embed-text. Llama3.2 is pretty much gone, both the text and the vision models. :) I might get a better embedding model if one comes along, but for now nomic-embed-text seems to be doing what I need. Rest is cloud-based.
miki
in reply to Simon Willison • • •I have a slight "unease" with the term "agent."
Not for the usual reasons, but because it encourages thinking of agents like we think of employees. Something you have a limited number of, difficult to hire/fire, can only do one task at a time etc.
A better way to think about them would be as (graphs of) ephemeral tasks / jobs, like in Celery, Sidekik and such. In this model, LLMs are essentially an autoscaling pool of compute that those tasks can always tap into.
This way of thinking gives you features like parallel sub-agents, checkpointing, crash recovery or surviving system migrations / power outages for almost free.
Simon Willison
in reply to miki • • •@miki I think the term "agent" is mostly unusable, because if you ask five people you'll get five different (potentially *wildly* different) interpretations, and often people will have a weird confidence that THEIR definition is the right one which everyone else shares when it isn't
In this case Anthropic opened their paper by clarifying the definition they were using ("LLMs autonomously using tools in a loop"), and I'm fine with that