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the city beneath the rain

Pluralistic: The ordinariness of evil (19 Aug 2026)

Today's links The ordinariness of evil: Stop selling AI (bad). Hey look at this: Delights to delectate. Object permanence: Dot-crash bumwad; AP v fair use; Nym Wars; What's ctrl-F? Pentagon lost

Seroter's Daily Reading — #848 (August 18, 2026)

Episode 848 covers AI adoption data from Linear, code review best practices, product prioritization as confidence-building, zero-trust agent security, personal context repositories, and generative UI architecture.

Mojo🔥 is now open source

[**Mojo🔥 is now open source**](https://www.modular.com/blog/mojo-open-source) Mojo🔥 is now open source The Mojo programming language has been promising an open source release [since May

Michael Kratsios: Inside the White House's AI Strategy

Pluralistic: IP can't save you from AI (18 Aug 2026)

Today's links IP can't save you from AI: Property rights cannot substitute for labor rights and privacy rights. Hey look at this: Delights to delectate. Object permanence: Flying Brits v brown

Seroter's Daily Reading — #847 (August 17, 2026)

Episode 847 covers A2A joining the Agentic AI Foundation, temporary vs permanent specs, AI innovation bottlenecks, Kenn's human-operator-centric agentic engineering workflow, skills sprawl, the SKILL.md fallacy and phase transitions, staying engaged in agentic work, subagent governance with circuit breakers, the GitHub outage, and the empirical case for structured agent memory over markdown files.

Qwen 3.8 27B scores 52 on the Artificial Analysis Intelligence Index

[**Qwen 3.8 27B scores 52 on the Artificial Analysis Intelligence Index**](https://artificialanalysis.ai/models/qwen3-8-27b) That's the same score as GPT-5.6 Luna (max), and just one point behind

We Tracked a Shipment of Rare Books. It Ended at an Amazon AI Training Facility

[**We Tracked a Shipment of Rare Books. It Ended at an Amazon AI Training Facility**](https://www.404media.co/we-tracked-a-shipment-of-rare-books-it-ended-at-an-amazon-ai-training-facility/)

i don't remember home

Pluralistic: Jennifer Jenkins' 'Music Copyright, Creativity, and Culture' (17 Aug 2026)

Today's links Jennifer Jenkins' 'Music Copyright, Creativity, and Culture': The definitive textbook (with comics!). Hey look at this: Delights to delectate. Object permanence: Hair-gel bombers v

Markdown SVG upgrades

I started building my [markdown-svg-renderer](https://tools.simonwillison.net/markdown-svg-renderer) tool [in May](https://tools.simonwillison.net/colophon#markdown-svg-renderer.html), but I've since

Qwen 3.8 27B is excellent, but it defaults to wildly overthinking things

Friday's big release was [Qwen 3.8 27B](https://huggingface.co/Qwen/Qwen3.8-27B), an Apache 2 licensed 27B parameter vision-capable LLM from Alibaba's Qwen research lab. I've been looking forward to

Quoting Dario Amodei

> I do agree that the public has a negative view of AI (and that this is a big problem), but I don’t think it is primarily caused by me or any other AI leader warning about AI’s risks.  I think

How To Be Popular

Exploring the Power of Slop

CORS Chat

**Tool:** [CORS Chat](https://tools.simonwillison.net/cors-chat) I built this today ([with GPT-5.6-Sol xhigh](https://gist.github.com/simonw/92a1d97773744b45bf259e003013cf36)) to help test Qwen 3.8

Northern Gannet

 Northern Gannet, in Pillar Point Harbor, CA, US This is Morris. Morris is a local celebrity: the only known Northern

Seroter's Daily Reading — #846 (August 14, 2026)

Episode 846 covers Forrester's Neocloud/NeoPaaS framing, post-training RL and SFT, async generative UI in Flutter, Anthropic's multiagent coordination failures, PostHog's software factory debate, code comprehension research, and CircleCI's AGENTS.md vs skills comparison.

Don't classify. Hallucinate!

[**Don't classify. Hallucinate!**](https://softwaredoug.com/blog/2026/08/10/hypothetical-classifications) I still have quite a bit of older content on my blog that I never got round to tagging. My

Susan Kare: How I Designed the Original Apple Mac Icons

the machine remembered the forest

Pluralistic: Capital formation (14 Aug 2026)

Today's links Capital formation: Going legit means going mainstream. Hey look at this: Delights to delectate. Object permanence: London Copyfighters x Speaker's Corner; TSA v lipstick; Long Beach v

sqlite-utils 4.2.1

**Release:** [sqlite-utils 4.2.1](https://github.com/simonw/sqlite-utils/releases/tag/4.2.1) Fixes a crashing bug in [sqlite-utils 4.2](https://simonwillison.net/2026/Aug/13/sqlite-utils/). I'd

sqlite-utils 4.2

**Release:** [sqlite-utils 4.2](https://github.com/simonw/sqlite-utils/releases/tag/4.2) Lots of improvements in this one relating to the [table.transform()

alchemy-utils 0.1a1

**Release:** [alchemy-utils 0.1a1](https://github.com/simonw/alchemy-utils/releases/tag/0.1a1) Performance boost for DuckDB exports and CSV imports, [see