The article celebrates the 1988 film *Who Framed Roger Rabbit* and highlights a specific scene where a pelican rides a bicycle. The pelican is animated while the bicycle is a real, water‑filled prop guided by a cable. The author shares details gathered by Cypress Frankenfeld about this creative trick.
Simon Willison demonstrates how to use Blender with coding agents on macOS by installing the full Mac application from blender.org and issuing prompts to ChatGPT Codex. He shows a step-by-step example where the agent renders a scene of a pelican riding a bicycle, then adds background flair and improves the image. The resulting image is generated via Blender's Python API.
Simon Willison created a .blend URL Viewer tool that lets users view a Blender model of a Fabergé egg themed after the TV show Pluribus directly in their browser. He generated the egg image using ChatGPT Images 2.5, then fed it to GPT‑6 Astra with a custom Blender skill to produce several .blend files. The viewer, built with JavaScript, is now part of his tools collection for easy access to the resulting 3D model.
Release: llm-gemini 0. 33 It's been a while since the last llm-gemini release.
Simon Willison introduces GPT‑6 Astra, a new model that offers improved attention to detail, better prompt comprehension, and the ability to generate more sophisticated outputs. The model excels at creating 3D renderings, producing detailed scenes such as gardens, shipyards, animals, cityscapes, and even Dyson spheres. Willison highlights its whimsical creativity, noting examples like a pelican wearing a red neckerchief riding a bicycle.
Claude Cowork and the standard chat interface are merging into a single Claude experience, allowing users to hand over tasks or ask quick questions that the system will continue to handle even after the laptop is closed. The rollout will begin with Pro and Max plan users across web, desktop, and mobile, and will extend to new users on these plans over the coming weeks. This integration suggests Claude is evolving into a general agent, simplifying the distinction between Cowork and regular Claude usage.
Qwen3.8-Flash-Next is an open‑weights multimodal Mixture‑of‑Experts (MoE) model previewing the architecture of Qwen4. It contains 125 B tokens with only 6 B active, giving a performance boost. The author has tested it on a DGX Spark with Unsloth quantized models, exploring variants like UD‑IQ1_S and UD‑Q2_K_XL, and highlighted a high‑reasoning‑effort example from UD‑Q2_K_XL.
Simon Willison tested GPT‑6 Astra by generating SVG pelicans riding bicycles at various reasoning levels and compared the results to GPT‑5.6 Sol, Terra, and Luna. The Astra pelicans consistently outperformed the other models, especially at low and xhigh reasoning levels, and even the Astra max version produced high‑quality images. Astra also used fewer tokens and was roughly twice as expensive as Sol, yet its low‑level output was cheaper and superior to any Sol model.
Tool: CORS Chat I built this today ( with GPT-5. 6-Sol xhigh ) to help test Qwen 3.
Simon Willison created an animated transition tool that morphs a map from the Mercator projection to the Equal Earth projection using D3. The project was inspired by the recent UN vote on the Equal Earth map projection and was built with GPT‑6 Astra (medium) in ChatGPT Work. It showcases how modern AI and web technologies can visualize complex geospatial transformations.
The release of llm-anthropic 0.28 introduces support for Claude Fable 5.1, enabling default display of reasoning traces for compatible models. It also adds a new llm_anthropic.ClaudeRefusal exception to handle cases where Claude returns a refusal. These updates enhance debugging and error handling for users of the library.
Posted by Srinivas Sunkara and Gilles Baechler, Software Engineers, Google Research Screen user interfaces (UIs) and infographics, such as charts, diagrams and tables, play important roles in human communication and human-machine interaction as they facilitate rich and interactive user experiences. UIs and infographics share similar design principles and visual language (e.
Posted by Long Zhao, Senior Research Scientist, and Ting Liu, Senior Staff Software Engineer, Google Research An astounding number of videos are available on the Web, covering a variety of content from everyday moments people share to historical moments to scientific observations, each of which contains a unique record of the world. The right tools could help researchers analyze these videos, transforming how we understand the world around us.