Simon Willison — 2026-05-10#

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Simon highlights a stark example of AI hallucination making its way into mainstream journalism, serving as a critical warning for anyone relying on LLMs for factual summarization.

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Quoting New York Times Editors’ Note · Source Simon shares a sobering editors’ note from the New York Times illustrating the dangers of unchecked generative AI in the newsroom. A reporter mistakenly attributed an AI-generated summary of Canadian Conservative leader Pierre Poilievre’s views as a direct, verbatim quote. The hallucinated text falsely claimed he called politicians who changed allegiances “turncoats,” underscoring exactly why LLM outputs must be rigorously verified against primary sources rather than trusted blindly.

Quoting Andrew Quinn · Source In an insightful snippet from a post about replacing a 3 GB SQLite database with a 10 MB FST binary, Simon highlights Andrew Quinn’s philosophy on “reinventing the wheel”. Quinn argues against the developer paralysis of assuming someone else has already built a better tool decades ago, like immediately reaching for awk instead of writing your own text processing script. Instead, he suggests that purposefully rebuilding a few fundamental tools is actually the fastest way to reach the true frontier of a rigorous field like computer science, providing hands-on context that far outpaces idle study.