Simon Willison — Week of 2026-05-22 to 2026-05-29#

Highlight of the Week#

This week’s most significant milestone is the release of Datasette 1.0a31, which fundamentally shifts the project’s paradigm by introducing UI support for executing write queries directly against the database. This officially bridges Datasette from a purely read-only tool to one that embraces secure data mutation, allowing developers to save and template insert, update, and delete operations.

Key Posts#

[I think Anthropic and OpenAI have found product-market fit] · Source Simon analyzes the shift in enterprise pricing to argue that AI coding agents have crossed the threshold into massive usage and real revenue generation. He points to Anthropic’s staggering $1.25 billion monthly compute spend and notes that labs are pivoting to capture enterprise value directly from heavy agent users rather than relying on middlemen.

CNBeta — 2026-05-30#

Top Story#

A cnbeta report reveals that DeepSeek has started temporarily restricting its “regenerate” and “modify” features without prior notice. This move is driven by severe compute constraints following a massive user surge, highlighting the immense infrastructure pressure facing high-performing Chinese AI models. It underscores a critical bottleneck in the global AI race: the soaring cost and scarcity of inference compute as experimental products transition into high-frequency daily tools.

AI Valuations Surge, Semiconductor Innovations, and Aerospace Milestones — Week of 2026-05-22 to 2026-05-29#

Week in Review#

This week’s news was dominated by a massive surge in AI valuations, with software unicorns like DeepSeek and Anthropic reaching staggering new heights while hardware giants like SK Hynix and Micron joined the trillion-dollar club. Geopolitical tensions continued to reshape the global tech ecosystem, prompting innovative domestic semiconductor breakthroughs from Chinese firms like Huawei and unprecedented corporate restructuring like Manus’s $1 billion buyback. Concurrently, the aerospace sector experienced critical leaps and devastating setbacks, highlighted by SpaceX’s successful Starship V3 flight and a catastrophic Blue Origin launchpad explosion.

Gaming Videos — 2026-05-30#

Watch First#

If you only have a minute today, skip the padding and watch THE BEST BITS | Minecraft LIVE – May 2026 to instantly catch up on all the major news from TwitchCon Rotterdam. It efficiently packs in the reveals for the Chaos Cubed drop, the Minecraft Dungeons II announcement, and Hollywood movie updates into a breezy 84-second recap.

Highlights by Theme#

Trailers & Announcements#

The Minecraft channel dominated today’s reveals, headlined by the highly anticipated teaser MINECRAFT DUNGEONS II IS COMING, where the game’s directors showcase a formidable new foe emerging from the deep dark. We also got a gorgeous environmental deep dive in FIRST LOOK: DAPPLED FOREST, detailing the new biome’s autumnal poplar trees and mysterious abandoned camp structures. On the cinematic front, the franchise revealed its Hollywood sequel plans in “A MINECRAFT MOVIE SQUARED”, confirming a stacked cast that includes Jack Black, Jason Momoa, and Kirsten Dunst. For the hardcore fans, the full 29-minute MINECRAFT LIVE - MAY 2026 broadcast is also available for a complete breakdown of all these updates.

Espionage Epics, Free Games, and Minecraft Memes — Week of 2026-05-22 to 2026-05-29#

Week in Review#

This week’s gaming video landscape was heavily defined by a deep obsession with 007-style espionage action, driving massive multi-day playthroughs and exhaustive Easter egg deep dives. Meanwhile, bargain-hunting PC players were treated to an absolute goldmine of free game alerts and Steam sale roundups. On the lighter side, the Minecraft community kept our feeds populated with a non-stop, daily drip of algorithm-tailored meme shorts.

Gaming News — 2026-05-30#

Top Story#

The Stop Killing Games movement just scored a massive victory for game preservation as a consumer protection bill passed the California State Assembly. Bill AB-1921 forces publishers to give a 60-day notice before pulling server-dependent games offline and requires them to offer a refund or an alternative offline playback method.

News & Reviews#

Assassin’s Creed Black Flag Resynced Details and Concerns · IGN Ubisoft is completely overhauling Black Flag with a seamless, loading-screen-free Caribbean and modernized combat inspired by Assassin’s Creed Shadows. However, purists might be annoyed that the infamous Abstergo modern-day segments have been entirely removed, and the essential Freedom Cry DLC isn’t included in the base package.

Gaming News — Week of 2026-05-22 to 2026-05-29#

Story of the Week#

Bungie has shocked the gaming community by officially winding down live-service support for Destiny 2 this June, effectively bringing a 12-year era to a close as the studio pours all remaining resources into its upcoming extraction shooter, Marathon. Reports indicate Bungie even considered a massive “Destiny Infinity” franchise relaunch before pulling the plug due to the high risks following underperforming expansions like Edge of Fate. Devastated and disgruntled fans are now organizing mass server-crashing protests on June 9, desperate to prove to Sony that the franchise still has a dedicated player base worth saving.

Chinese Tech Daily — 2026-05-30#

Top Story#

Apple is reportedly utilizing Google’s Gemini large language model to train its lightweight, on-device AI models via model distillation. To handle complex cloud tasks that edge devices cannot process, Apple has also approved the use of Nvidia’s Confidential Compute privacy technology within Google Cloud. This strategy allows Apple to maintain its “Private Cloud Compute” privacy promise while heavily leveraging the cloud infrastructure of its rivals.

Chinese Tech — Week of 2026-05-22 to 2026-05-29#

Week in Review#

The maturation of Agentic AI is fundamentally shaking up both software engineering workflows and underlying computing architectures, sparking an arms race in domestic tech infrastructure. Meanwhile, geopolitical decoupling continues to drive aggressive indigenous innovation, most notably characterized by Huawei’s new semiconductor scaling laws and BYD’s unprecedented liability guarantees for autonomous driving.

Engineering & Dev#

The rapid adoption of Agentic AI is exposing cracks in traditional ecosystems and workflows. Microsoft internally banned Claude Code out of fear of Anthropic’s dominance and soaring API costs, forcing engineers back to GitHub Copilot to artificially protect its ecosystem, while a Claude-generated PR for a Node.js virtual file system sparked intense debate over the safety of committing AI code to core infrastructure. To handle the complex orchestration, memory retrieval, and tool execution demands of these agents, Huawei is pivoting back to CPUs, positioning its Kunpeng chips for Agentic workflows while utilizing Ascend for raw inference. Domestic models are also making serious strides in this arena; Alibaba’s Qwen3.7-Max excelled in “Vibe Coding” tests, successfully generating complex web apps from single prompts and beating global models like GPT-5.5, while ModelBest released ForgeTrain, the first production-grade training framework entirely written by AI without human intervention. Finally, to solve the “Babel” of fragmented enterprise agent data, Shushi Tech and others are adopting Snowflake’s OSI standard, allowing diverse AI agents to natively query unified business metrics without hallucinating logic.