The Frontier edition

The Frontier · 22 Oct 2026

22 Oct 2026 · 15 articles

Today's PHP Security Release, and How We're Strengthening PHP Security

If you're running anything on PHP it's vital you upgrade - today's updates (across the entire PHP 8.x line) address two remote code execution holes, and there have been exploits circulating since last night, thanks to a leak in the coordinated disclosure process. This post from the PHP Foundation explain what went so wrong: On Tuesday, October 20th, at around 15:00 UTC, the two CVE IDs began…

Summary published by Simon Willison's Weblog · 21 Oct 2026 · Read the original ↗

Panache — RTS Belle Époque pour mobile

Well this is delightful: I released Battle Drones yesterday under an Apache 2.0 License and there's already a French language fork which reskins the game to take place in steampunk 1900s France and adds an animated intro! Panache est un jeu de stratégie en temps réel pour mobile et navigateur, dans la France de la Belle Époque (vers 1900) : dirigeables, Fardiers à vapeur, Creusot cuirassés…

Summary published by Simon Willison's Weblog · 21 Oct 2026 · Read the original ↗

eMudhra Intermediate CA Compromise

This is very, very bad news: The private keys of eight eMudhra intermediate CA certificates have been compromised. They chain to roots trusted by the Mozilla, Microsoft, Apple and Chrome root programs and by many downstream trust stores. Any software that bundles a list of trusted certificates needs to be updated. This site is tracking software updates via this GitHub repository - Linux distros…

Summary published by Simon Willison's Weblog · 20 Oct 2026 · Read the original ↗

My obituary for programming

Jeremy Scheff poignantly captures the key loss caused by coding agents for career programmers who enjoyed the puzzle of developing code: Programming turned into one of the greatest jobs you could imagine. You got paid to work on tricky little logic puzzles. The trickier the puzzle, the more you got paid. But even pretty simple puzzles were worth a lot of money because regular people just couldn't…

Summary published by Simon Willison's Weblog · 19 Oct 2026 · Read the original ↗

Import AI 477: In which I tell the IMF the Singularity has begun

Welcome to Import AI, a newsletter about AI research. Import AI runs on arXiv, cappuccinos, and feedback from readers. If you’d like to support this, please subscribe. Subscribe now Here’s a speech I gave on Saturday the 17th of October at the IMF meeting in Bangkok. This speech is inspired by the megatrend readers have

Summary published by Import AI · 19 Oct 2026 · Read the original ↗

Ask HN: How to deal with shipping AI-written code you don't understand?

I saw this LinkedIn post from a Meta engineer and it resonated with me: https://www.linkedin.com/posts/ali-hamie_im-an-engineer-at-m... > I'm an engineer at Meta and I never felt this uncomfortable doing my job. I'm writing code these days and it all feels like a black box. This new standard of shipping with AI is moving so fast that if we're going to spend our time checking each line of code…

Summary published by Hacker News - Newest: "AI" · 19 Oct 2026 · Read the original ↗

llm-tools-datasette 0.1.1

Release: llm-tools-datasette 0.1.1 When I switched LLM over to httpx2 in LLM 0.33 I forget that this would break any plugins which used httpx without directly depending on it. llm-tools-datasette was one of those plugins, now fixed. Tags: datasette , llm

Summary published by Simon Willison's Weblog · 18 Oct 2026 · Read the original ↗

llm-echo 0.5

Release: llm-echo 0.5 I'm working towards a new LLM release, and testing PRs caused me to revisit the llm-echo debug plugin. This plugin provides a "model" which doesn't involve an LLM at all - it just repeats back the prompts that have been fed to it. The new release now updates the simulated token usage counts to take tool calls, system prompts, and reasoning tokens into account. Example usage…

Summary published by Simon Willison's Weblog · 18 Oct 2026 · Read the original ↗

Anthropic's proposed AI safety bill only kicks in if 50 deaths or $1B in damages

Article URL: https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/artificial-intelligence/anthropics-proposed-ai-safety-bill-only-kicks-in-if-50-deaths-or-usd1-billion-in-damages-are-on-the-line-proposal-would-effectively-make-the-commerce-department-the-only-agency-capable-of-stopping-an-ai-model Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50141429 Points: 172 # Comments: 167

Summary published by Hacker News - Newest: "AI" · 18 Oct 2026 · Read the original ↗