What you missed in March 2025
Masayoshi Son’s legacy, the false promise of abundance, who is free software for, and much more!
Every month I put together a list of great reads and stories you might have missed in the tech space.
The latest issue is out now, which pieces on Masayoshi Son, ~abundance~, who really benefits from free software, and much more!
04.04.2025 21:03 — 👍 57 🔁 10 💬 0 📌 0
Teamwork 💪
JV informs us on how Carlos assisted from the pit wall to help bring home the points 🗣️
16.03.2025 16:41 — 👍 99 🔁 10 💬 2 📌 2
YouTube video by Pais De Boludos
FINGIR COHERENCIA | CONSPIRANOPLA | PDB
youtu.be/oECd8Vg--7M?...
13.03.2025 00:35 — 👍 1 🔁 0 💬 0 📌 0
If someone tells you that coding with LLMs is easy they are (probably unintentionally) misleading you. They may well have stumbled on to patterns that work, but those patterns do not come naturally to everyone.
I’ve been getting great results out of LLMs for code for over two years now. Here’s my attempt at transferring some of that experience and intution to you.
Set reasonable expectations
Account for training cut-off dates
Context is king
Ask them for options
Tell them exactly what to do
You have to test what it writes!
Remember it’s a conversation
Use tools that can run the code for you
Vibe-coding is a great way to learn
A detailed example
Be ready for the human to take over
The biggest advantage is speed of development
LLMs amplify existing expertise
Bonus: answering questions about codebases
Here's the table of contents for my lengthy new piece on how I use LLMs to help me write code simonwillison.net/2025/Mar/11/...
11.03.2025 14:11 — 👍 338 🔁 67 💬 14 📌 15
YouTube video by Hack
POR QUÉ LOS CHATBOTS SON ABURRIDOS | Con Laura Alonso Alemany
Tuvimos el gusto de entrevistar a Laura Alonso Alemany en HACK, donde hablamos de inteligencia artificial, sesgos, cultura y nuestra humanidad frente a la tecnologia.
HACK es un espacio para mentes curiosas de la tecnologia y la cultura. Aqui el episodio completo.
youtu.be/qdAqg9PGZ9U?...
26.11.2024 18:34 — 👍 4 🔁 1 💬 0 📌 2
Elon Musk Has Wanted the Government Shutdown
Sources tell WIRED that Elon Musk has wanted a government shutdown in part because it would potentially make it easier to eliminate the jobs of hundreds of thousands of federal workers.
NEW: Sources tell WIRED that Elon Musk wants the US government shutdown because he thinks it'll make it easier to fire hundreds of thousands of federal employees.
By @jakelahut.writes.news, @leahfeiger.bsky.social & @telliotter.bsky.social
11.03.2025 17:47 — 👍 340 🔁 135 💬 38 📌 18
Franco Iván Jeremías Antunes Puchol, alias Fran Fijap.
05.03.2025 02:37 — 👍 108 🔁 36 💬 21 📌 0
In an 1997 AI class at UT Austin, a neural net playing "infinite-board" Tic-Tac-Toe found an unbeatable strategy:
Choose moves billions of squares away, causing your opponent's to run out of memory and crash, forfeiting their turn.
The winning move was to kill your enemy.
03.03.2025 18:37 — 👍 23 🔁 6 💬 1 📌 0
What happens if a cosmic ray hits a voting machine?
In Belgium’s 2003 elections, a relatively unknown Communist Party candidate received 4096 extra votes…from a spontaneous bit inversion.
It was more votes than was mathematically possible at that polling station.
05.03.2025 20:40 — 👍 23 🔁 2 💬 3 📌 2
YouTube video by EL OJO DE LA TORMENTA
EL CASO ROEMMERS
EL CASO ROEMMERS
youtu.be/mkUmezK_jks?...
28.02.2025 16:15 — 👍 0 🔁 0 💬 0 📌 0
‘Forbidden Words’: Github Reveals How Software Engineers Are Purging Federal Databases
A project called "Remove-DEI" shows the tweaks used to remove "forbidden words" from a database about childhood school readiness.
New from 404 Media: 'forbidden words'. Github commits reveal how software engineers working on behalf of the government are purging federal databases. Shows not just removing terms, but building blunt-force tools to remove banned material www.404media.co/forbidden-wo...
03.02.2025 20:24 — 👍 212 🔁 92 💬 4 📌 10
OpenAI Goes MAGA
Sam Altman has once again put himself in a position of power—this time by sidling up to President Trump.
Now on top of the negative externalities on people’s power, water, air, and global climate, we have another: the ceding of more & more control over critical energy & water infrastructure to Silicon Valley. I wrote about this last week in @theatlantic.com. 14/
www.theatlantic.com/technology/a...
27.01.2025 14:12 — 👍 958 🔁 163 💬 5 📌 4
AI brings soaring emissions for Google and Microsoft, a major contributor to climate change
The tech giants both report surges in greenhouse gas emissions as they double-down on adding artificial intelligence to all of their products.
Then there are the global impacts. More coal & gas means more carbon emissions, accelerating our climate crisis. Hence why Google & MSFT saw a ~50% & 30% jump in emissions since 2019 & 2020 respectively (from @darakerr.bsky.social at @npr.org). 10/
www.npr.org/2024/07/12/g...
27.01.2025 14:12 — 👍 1261 🔁 220 💬 12 📌 11
A utility promised to stop burning coal. Then Google and Meta came to town.
Google and Meta targeted Omaha as a digital frontier. But their plans to push the energy transition forward there are not working out. A coal plant is filling the void.
…they extend the lives of gas & coal plants, worsening air quality (per @washingtonpost.com’s @evanhalper.bsky.social) - not just bc fossil fuels are the fastest way to surge energy supply but bc 24/7 facilities can't run solely on intermittent renewables. 9/
www.washingtonpost.com/business/202...
27.01.2025 14:12 — 👍 1193 🔁 188 💬 11 📌 5
AI Is Taking Water From the Desert
New data centers are springing up every week. Can the Earth sustain them?
…they take up drinking water - yes, drinking water, because of the water quality required to cool these facilities - which threatens to hike water prices for families… 8/
www.theatlantic.com/technology/a...
27.01.2025 14:12 — 👍 1519 🔁 318 💬 12 📌 20
AI Needs So Much Power, It’s Making Yours Worse
There’s a strong link between proximity to AI data centers and higher levels of distorted power in residential areas
Many journalists have written extensively about those externalities.
When these massive data centers come to town, they distort power supplies (per @bloomberg.com’s @leonardonclt.bsky.social, @naurtorious.bsky.social,
@andretartar.bsky.social)… 7/
www.bloomberg.com/graphics/202...
27.01.2025 14:12 — 👍 1433 🔁 271 💬 10 📌 20
As someone who has reported on AI for 7 years and covered China tech as well, I think the biggest lesson to be drawn from DeepSeek is the huge cracks it illustrates with the current dominant paradigm of AI development. A long thread. 1/
27.01.2025 14:12 — 👍 6185 🔁 2373 💬 211 📌 727
Das Wissenschaftszentrum Berlin für Sozialforschung untersucht den gesellschaftlichen Wandel. Es postet das Kommunikationsteam. http://wisskomm.social/@WZB_Berlin
AT Protocol ecosystem supporters. Interviews, news, and other updates from the Community Fund, Tech Talks, and other social & community content.
#ATmosphereConf 2026 https://atprotocol.dev/save-the-date
Not a Bluesky official account.
libp2p is a modular networking framework bundled together as a full stack of protocols for peer-to-peer systems. libp2p grew out of IPFS into an independent library designed to give any project state-of-the-art peer-to-peer capabilities.
That guy who makes visual essays about software at https://samwho.dev.
Developer Educator @ ngrok.com. Want to pair on something ngrok related? Let's do it! https://cal.com/samwho/workhours
He/him.
founder & ceo blacksky algorithms [ @blackskyweb.xyz ]
organizer wethepeople.nyc
move fast and break chains
support@blacksky.app
linkat.blue/rude1.blacksky.team
Building blocks for a better web. Open protocols to store, verify, and share data across distributed networks 💎.
https://ipfs.tech
Research and data to make progress against the world’s largest problems. Based out of Oxford University (@ox.ac.uk), founded by @maxroser.bsky.social.
Community-driven & collaboratively developed open source guides for Data Science & Research: http://the-turing-way.org 📚
Professor ETHZ, head of SPCL, Chief Architect ML at CSCS researching large-scale #HPC and #AI systems and #Climate computing - youtube: http://bit.ly/3h1VgIU
Official account of the C Programming Language, invented by Immanuel Kant in 1799 at Bell Labs Königsberg
Independent AI researcher, creator of datasette.io and llm.datasette.io, building open source tools for data journalism, writing about a lot of stuff at https://simonwillison.net/
Dirty HPC deeds done dirt cheap at Universidad Nacional de Córdoba, Argentina
Freelancer spirit. AI/ML Researcher & Engineer. Early bird. 🇦🇷
Transformo🧉/☕ en código 🐍.
Happiness is a breakfast buffet 🥓🥞🍳.
Sometimes I write CS 👨🏻💻 stuff at https://crscardellino.net
Espacios de aprendizaje, redes de intercambio, recursos abiertos y accesibles para comunidades hispanohablantes que fomentan la Ciencia Abierta con mirada local
Computer Scientist working as Python Data Engineer. Using lean, agile & open source tools to make great data products and people happier (aka tío)
I teach cryptography at Johns Hopkins. https://blog.cryptographyengineering.com
Executive Director http://witness.org : video + tech + human rights; 'Prepare, Don't Panic' initiative on media manipulation/generative AI. TED speaker on deepfakes https://gen-ai.witness.org, @samgregory on Twitter/X. PhD Westminster.
