Simon Willison’s Weblog

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Thursday, 23rd April 2026

[...] if you ever needed another reason to learn in public by digital gardening or podcasting or streaming or whathaveyou, add on that people will assume you’re more competent than you are. This will get you invites to very cool exclusive events filled with high-achieving, interesting people, even though you have no right to be there. A+ side benefit.

Maggie Appleton, Gathering Structures (via)

# 1:35 pm / blogging, maggie-appleton

A pelican for GPT-5.5 via the semi-official Codex backdoor API

Visit A pelican for GPT-5.5 via the semi-official Codex backdoor API

GPT-5.5 is out. It’s available in OpenAI Codex and is rolling out to paid ChatGPT subscribers. I’ve had some preview access and found it to be a fast, effective and highly capable model. As is usually the case these days, it’s hard to put into words what’s good about it—I ask it to build things and it builds exactly what I ask for!

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Extract PDF text in your browser with LiteParse for the web

Visit Extract PDF text in your browser with LiteParse for the web

LlamaIndex have a most excellent open source project called LiteParse, which provides a Node.js CLI tool for extracting text from PDFs. I got a version of LiteParse working entirely in the browser, using most of the same libraries that LiteParse uses to run in Node.js.

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Wednesday, 22nd April 2026

2026 » April

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