Simon Willison
Aug 10
Introducing Muse Glimmer
Introducing Muse Glimmer Meta are back in the open weights game! Muse Glimmer is a brand new 30B model under a clean Apache 2.
dbreunig/nesformer
Drew Breunig has embedded a working emulator for the Nintendo Entertainment System’s 6502 CPU into the weights of the Qwen3.5‑4B language model, allowing NES ROMs such as Super Mario Bros to run—albeit slowly—directly within Qwen. The project builds on inspiration from Divyansh Agrawal’s qwenputer and uses Opus 5.5 prompts and a 15‑year‑old NES CPU conformance test suite to validate the emulator. Breunig invites exploration of whether smaller, faster models could achieve standard NES clock speeds and encourages community participation in building a CLI to run ROMs with the embedded weights.
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Simon Willison
Oct 16
sparqlite: SPARQL 1.1 inside SQLite, written in Rust
Research: sparqlite: SPARQL 1.1 inside SQLite, written in Rust This research task is really an experiment in running Claude Code for web in "Ultracode" mode, as described in Orchestrate subage...
Simon Willison
Aug 26
Qwen3.8-Flash-Next
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
Oct 1
pwasm 0.2a0
Release: pwasm 0.2a0 pwasm is one of my folly projects - an entirely vibe-coded pure Python WebAssembly engine that I built in January during my first bout of AI mania. I hadn't touched it sin...
Simon Willison
Oct 14
AI is mass decompiling games. That's both awesome and scary.
The article discusses how AI is enabling large-scale decompilation of games, allowing developers to create mashups and preserve old titles by porting them to modern platforms like WebAssembly. It highlights both the exciting possibilities for game preservation and the frightening implications for intellectual property, as anyone could decompile and repurpose software without permission. The piece underscores the dual nature of this technology—boosting accessibility and preservation while threatening the security of proprietary software.
Simon Willison
Aug 19
smolmachines / smolvm as a sandbox for untrusted Python & JavaScript
Research: smolmachines / smolvm as a sandbox for untrusted Python & JavaScript I tasked Claude Fable 5 running in Claude Code for web with the following research task: Put https://smolmachines. com through its paces as a fast secure sandbox.
arXiv Machine Learning
Jun 24
RoPE-Aware Bit Allocation for KV-Cache Quantization
arXiv:2606. 24033v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Existing low-bit KV-cache quantizers often treat each cached key as a flat vector.
arXiv Machine Learning
Aug 11
Tied Trit-Planes: Constraining PTQTP to a Uniform Nine-Level Quantizer, with a Persistent Folded Format for Disk-Streamed Mixture-of-Experts Serving
arXiv:2608. 08910v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: PTQTP decomposes LLM weight matrices into two ternary (trit) planes with two free per-group scales.
arXiv Machine Learning
Aug 26
AQLoRA: A Zero-Search Recipe for Fast Quantized LoRA Fine-Tuning
arXiv:2608.23816v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Quantized fine-tuning (QLoRA) saves memory but not time. It dequantizes every 4-bit weight on the fly, so it trains more slowly than fp16 LoRA. We pres...
Simon Willison
Oct 20
Battle Drones - a vibe coded RTS with audio-based multiplayer
Battle Drones is a browser‑based, Command & Conquer‑style real‑time strategy game that evolved through 12 major iterations, adding 3D models, varied terrain, random map generation, and both local and online multiplayer via audio synchronization. The game features nine buildings, seven ground vehicles, six aerial vehicles, and three infantry units, with fog of war, area‑effect weapons, and multiple play modes such as skirmish and last‑stand. The project showcases how AI‑assisted coding (primarily Claude) can accelerate game development and introduce innovative multiplayer mechanics using sound.
Simon Willison
Aug 12
alchemy-utils 0.1a0
Release: alchemy-utils 0. 1a0 I've long pondered what a database agnostic version of my sqlite-utils Python library and CLI utility might look like.
Simon Willison
Oct 6
Scrimshaw Jukebox
Simon Willison experimented with Claude Opus 5.5 to compose computer game music, specifically aiming for a style reminiscent of the original *Secret of Monkey Island*. He designed a simple text-based format for the music and built an artifact capable of playing it, including example tracks. The results were surprisingly good, prompting questions about whether this compositional ability is a new capability emerging in recent text models.