Sunday, May 24, 2026

14 articles

Simon Willison
1 min read

datasette 1.0a30

Release: datasette 1.0a30 The big new feature in this alpha is a new customizable "Jump to..." menu, described in detail in The extensible "Jump to" menu in Datasette 1.0a30 on the Datasette blog. You can try it out by hitting / on latest.datasette.io - it looks like this: The new jump_items_sql()...

Simon Willison
1 min read

datasette-agent 0.1a4

Release: datasette-agent 0.1a4 Taking advantage of the new makeJumpSections() JavaScript plugin hook added in Datasette 1.0a30, datasette-agent now presents this "Start a new agent chat" interface as part of the Jump to menu, any time you hit /: You can try this out by signing into...

Simon Willison
1 min read

datasette-fixtures 0.1a0

Release: datasette-fixtures 0.1a0 One of the smaller features in Datasette 1.0a30 is this: New documented datasette.fixtures.populate_fixture_database(conn) helper for creating the fixture database tables used by Datasette's own tests, intended for plugin test suites. This new plugin takes...

Simon Willison
1 min read

Quoting Armin Ronacher

The most frustrating failure mode right now is that people submit issues that are not in their own voice. They contain an observed problem somewhere, but it has been thrown into a clanker and the clanker reworded it and made a huge mess of it. Typically, it was prompted so badly that the...

Simon Willison
1 min read

Mad House — Usborne Creepy Computer Games

Tool: Mad House — Usborne Creepy Computer Games Via Hacker News I learned that UK publisher Usborne published free PDFs of their 1980s Computer Books, some of which I remember working through on my Commodore 64 as a child. These were so great! Beautifully illustrated books with fun projects made up...

The Verge
1 min read

Hackers are learning to exploit chatbot ‘personalities’

This is The Stepback, a weekly newsletter breaking down one essential story from the tech world. For more on AI mischief, follow Robert Hart. The Stepback arrives in our subscribers' inboxes at 8AM ET. Opt in for The Stepback here. How it started Hacking the first generation of AI chatbots was a...