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<p><strong>Tool:</strong> <a href="https://tools.simonwillison.net/datasette-io-preview">datasette.io news preview</a></p> <p>The <a href="https://datasette.io/">datasette.io</a> website has a news section built from this <a href="https://github.com/simonw/datasette.io/blob/main/news.yaml">news.yaml</a> file in the underlying GitHub repository. The YAML format looks like this:</p> <pre><code>- date: 2026-04-15 body: |- [Datasette 1.0a27](https://docs.datasette.io/en/latest/changelog.html#a27-2026-04-15) changes how CSRF protection works in a way that simplifies form and API integration, and introduces a new `RenameTableEvent` for when a table is renamed by a SQL query. - date: 2026-03-18 body: |- ... </code></pre> <p>This format is a little hard to edit, so I finally <a href="https://claude.ai/share/c96129b9-bcb0-4eba-aee9-4a7ad236dfb7">had Claude build a custom preview UI</a> to make checking for errors have slightly less friction.</p> <p>I built it using standard <a href="https://claude.ai/">claude.ai</a> and Claude Artifacts, taking advantage of Claude's ability to clone GitHub repos and look at their content as part of a regular chat:</p> <blockquote> <p><code>Clone https://github.com/simonw/datasette.io and look at the news.yaml file and how it is rendered on the homepage. Build an artifact I can paste that YAML into which previews what it will look like, and highlights any markdown errors or YAML errors</code></p> </blockquote> <p><img alt="Screenshot showing two side-by-side views of a datasette.io news preview tool. The left panel shows a dark-themed YAML editor with news entries containing date and body fields in Markdown format, with a red validation error at the bottom indicating the date field has an invalid format. The right panel shows the rendered preview output with formatted headings by date (April 2026, 18th March 2026), displaying 115 news entries with linked release names, inline code snippets, and changelog descriptions. A red badge with &quot;1&quot; appears on the left panel header indicating one validation error." src="https://static.simonwillison.net/static/2026/datasette-io-preview.jpg" /></p> <p>Tags: <a href="https://simonwillison.net/tags/vibe-coding">vibe-coding</a>, <a href="https://simonwillison.net/tags/claude">claude</a>, <a href="https://simonwillison.net/tags/tools">tools</a>, <a href="https://simonwillison.net/tags/datasette">datasette</a></p>

RDNE/Pexels In 2022, the founders of chatbot startup Character.AI launched a platform where anyone could create interactive characters powered by artificial intelligence (AI). The app exploded, quickly growing to more than 20 million users who created more than 10 million chatbot characters. Many of the users creating those characters were young people – until they weren’t. In November 2025, under mounting public and legal pressure surrounding youth suicides linked to its use, Character.AI banned users under 18. The decision was made after a number of attempts to improve youth safety, including parental controls and stricter content filters. The ban is an attempt to keep teens safe from potential harm. But the more creative, playful and emotionally expressive AI experiments they were doing have also been silenced. Our new research, published in the proceedings of the Association for Computing Machinery CHI Conference 2026, captures and preserves the new ways youth are experimenting with AI, so that we can build towards something better. What do teens actually use AI chatbots for? In 2026, three in ten US teenagers use AI daily. The idea of using AI for companionship has dominated media headlines and app stores, with hundreds of apps on offer. Media coverage of AI companions taps into two primary fears. One is that young people will replace human friendships with AI. The other is that engaging with sycophantic chatbots instead of real people will result in teens losing their social skills. These concerns are important. But companionship accounts for a surprisingly small share of why young people actually use AI. A recent Pew Research Center survey found the top uses by teens are seeking information (57%), doing homework (54%) and “for fun” (47%). Only a small percentage (12%) used AI for emotional support or advice. Romance and loneliness alleviation frequently rank among the lowest motivations for teen AI use: 4–6% and 8–11%, respectively. When the public narrative almost exclusively frames AI chatbots as companions, it risks overlooking the bulk of how teenagers spend their time with AI. Our team set out to understand what young people choose to do with AI when they’re free to use it outside of school contexts – seeking fun, messing around, and creating characters of their own design. AI as entertainment Before the ban, Character.AI was a popular “AI entertainment” destination for young people. It still has a viral TikTok channel, and has characters from popular youth media, from Peppa Pig to Call of Duty. Our team spent more than eight months, between July 2024 and March 2025, immersed in Character.AI’s official community on online chat platform Discord, with more than 500,000 members. We systematically analysed 2,236 posts by young people aged 13–17. Of those users the majority, 68.2%, identified as female or non-binary; and 59% had created their own AI characters. Through an analysis of youth discussion on the platform, we identified three core intents behind engagement with Character.AI: restoration, exploration and transformation. Restoration my favourite period comfort bot is Percy Jackson Young people used characters for emotional comfort, venting, escapism and mood management. Rather than mirroring a formal clinical practice, we observed youth discussing “comfort bots” where young people engaged in soft, tender and gentle roleplay with familiar characters. Beloved book characters would comfort people on their period, or characters from popular comics would give someone a pep talk for an upcoming math test. Exploration Character.AI has helped me find that creative spark within myself Young people explored boundaries, engaged in creative world-building, and extended their fandoms. One teen wrote a three-book-long saga through character interactions. Another created a troupe of travelling theatre characters inspired by their love of theatre. They reported this use transferred skills into the real world, boosting creativity and improving their writing. Transformation I have characters who struggle with mental health issues and I tend to project on my personas during RP [roleplay] Young people used AI to try on different identities, process real-life relationships, and re-author difficult real-life scenarios. Some people created “clones” of themselves, with superpowers or self-affirming versions of themselves. Inspired by reality, they discussed creating characters that reflected real-world challenging relationships, such as “toxic friends”, “annoying sister”, or “foster care agent”. Characters created with purpose We also mapped seven distinct character archetypes young people were creating and discussing: Soother – emotionally supportive figures Narrator – a cast of characters for roleplays Trickster – jesting, testing and transgressive chats Icon – remixed celebrities or fandom figures Dark Soul – angsty, emotionally complex characters Proxy – modelled after real people in their lives, and Mirror – clones of the self. These archetypes are a central finding of our research. Instead of sycophantic or romantic chatbot engagement, young people are purposefully creating characters that are angsty, transgressive, playful, creative and reflective. This shows we need to stop treating “companion AI” as if it’s one homogeneous thing. Treating AI chatbots as a single category is like treating all screen time as the same experience, whether a child is watching Bluey with family or doomscrolling short-form content at night, alone on their phone when they should be sleeping. Towards better chatbots The American Academy of Paediatrics recently shifted screen-time guidelines from set time limits to a framework that accounts for the individual child, their use, family relationships and their environment. The same logic should apply to AI chatbots. This means moving beyond asking adults about their child’s use of AI, testing AI products with fake accounts that assume certain use cases, and banning access before listening to young people – their experiences, their experiments and their ideas for the future. Banning is a reaction to bad design, but it doesn’t lead to better, safer AI products for teens. The answer is not to permanently keep young people away from AI. Rather, it’s to build AI that deserves their trust, fosters their creativity and keeps them grounded in the physical world with families, friendships and communities. Annabel Blake is a Design Researcher at Canva with a focus on AI, and conducted this research independently as part of their PhD. Eduardo Velloso has recently received funding from Google. He has previously received research funding from Meta, Microsoft, and Snap. Marcus Carter is a recipient of an Australian Research Council Future Fellowship (#220100076) on 'The Monetisation of Children in the Digital Games Industry'. He has previously received funding from Meta, TikTok and Snapchat, and has consulted for Telstra. He is a previous president and board member of the Digital Games Research Association of Australia.

The shareholders explicitly cited multiple 404 Media investigations, including one that showed Thomson Reuters' CLEAR is integrated with a tool ICE uses to find neighborhoods to target.

Leading security firms and enterprises join OpenAI’s Trusted Access for Cyber, using GPT-5.4-Cyber and $10M in API grants to strengthen global cyber defense.

<p><strong>Release:</strong> <a href="https://github.com/datasette/datasette-export-database/releases/tag/0.3a1">datasette-export-database 0.3a1</a></p> <p>This plugin was using the <code>ds_csrftoken</code> cookie as part of a custom signed URL, which needed upgrading now that Datasette 1.0a27 <a href="https://simonwillison.net/2026/Apr/14/replace-token-based-csrf/">no longer sets that cookie</a>.</p> <p>Tags: <a href="https://simonwillison.net/tags/datasette">datasette</a></p>

<p><strong>Release:</strong> <a href="https://github.com/simonw/datasette/releases/tag/1.0a27">datasette 1.0a27</a></p> <p>Two major changes in this new Datasette alpha. I covered the first of those <a href="https://simonwillison.net/2026/Apr/14/replace-token-based-csrf/">in detail yesterday</a> - Datasette no longer uses Django-style CSRF form tokens, instead using modern browser headers <a href="https://words.filippo.io/csrf">as described by Filippo Valsorda</a>.</p> <p>The second big change is that Datasette now fires a new <a href="https://docs.datasette.io/en/latest/events.html#datasette.events.RenameTableEvent">RenameTableEvent</a> any time a table is renamed during a SQLite transaction. This is useful because some plugins (like <a href="https://github.com/datasette/datasette-comments">datasette-comments</a>) attach additional data to table records by name, so a renamed table requires them to react in appropriate ways.</p> <p>Here are the rest of the changes in the alpha:</p> <blockquote> <ul> <li>New <a href="https://docs.datasette.io/en/latest/internals.html#internals-datasette-client-actor">actor= parameter</a> for <code>datasette.client</code> methods, allowing internal requests to be made as a specific actor. This is particularly useful for writing automated tests. (<a href="https://github.com/simonw/datasette/pull/2688">#2688</a>)</li> <li>New <code>Database(is_temp_disk=True)</code> option, used internally for the internal database. This helps resolve intermittent database locked errors caused by the internal database being in-memory as opposed to on-disk. (<a href="https://github.com/simonw/datasette/issues/2683">#2683</a>) (<a href="https://github.com/simonw/datasette/pull/2684">#2684</a>)</li> <li>The <code>/&lt;database&gt;/&lt;table&gt;/-/upsert</code> API (<a href="https://docs.datasette.io/en/latest/json_api.html#tableupsertview">docs</a>) now rejects rows with <code>null</code> primary key values. (<a href="https://github.com/simonw/datasette/issues/1936">#1936</a>)</li> <li>Improved example in the API explorer for the <code>/-/upsert</code> endpoint (<a href="https://docs.datasette.io/en/latest/json_api.html#tableupsertview">docs</a>). (<a href="https://github.com/simonw/datasette/issues/1936">#1936</a>)</li> <li>The <code>/&lt;database&gt;.json</code> endpoint now includes an <code>"ok": true</code> key, for consistency with other JSON API responses.</li> <li><a href="https://docs.datasette.io/en/latest/internals.html#internals-utils-call-with-supported-arguments">call_with_supported_arguments()</a> is now documented as a supported public API. (<a href="https://github.com/simonw/datasette/pull/2678">#2678</a>)</li> </ul> </blockquote> <p>Tags: <a href="https://simonwillison.net/tags/annotated-release-notes">annotated-release-notes</a>, <a href="https://simonwillison.net/tags/datasette">datasette</a>, <a href="https://simonwillison.net/tags/python">python</a></p>

Jimmy Pitaro, chairman of ESPN, addressed the layoffs at Disney in a memo to staffers. Bloomberg/Getty Images Jimmy Pitaro addressed ESPN staff after Disney's recent layoffs. The memo, obtained by Business Insider, said ESPN employees being cut have already been informed. Disney's layoffs are the first under its new CEO, Josh D'Amaro. The top executive at ESPN addressed his staff after the latest round of layoffs at its parent company, Disney. Jimmy Pitaro, chairman of ESPN, sent a memo about the cuts to his employees on Wednesday. The memo, obtained by Business Insider, said that all ESPN employees affected by the cuts have already been notified. "We must continue fostering a more agile and technologically enabled workforce," Pitaro wrote. "While these realities require difficult decisions, that does not lessen how hard it is to say goodbye to colleagues who have dedicated themselves to ESPN." The layoffs, which began Tuesday, were the first at Disney under new CEO Josh D'Amaro, who took over in March. D'Amaro said in a memo to Disney staff that the layoffs came after the company combined its enterprise marketing and brand teams earlier this year. Employees being laid off will receive severance pay based on their level and tenure at the company, according to an employee handbook seen by Business Insider. An ESPN spokesperson declined to comment when reached by Business Insider. Read Pitaro's memo below: Team: As Josh D'Amaro shared, our industry and our businesses are undergoing profound change, and we must continue fostering a more agile and technologically enabled workforce. While these realities require difficult decisions, that does not lessen how hard it is to say goodbye to colleagues who have dedicated themselves to ESPN. I want you to know that conversations are completed with those whose roles are impacted this week. To team members who will be leaving, thank you for your contributions — these decisions do not reflect the strength of your work or of the company, but rather our focus on how to best manage our resources to support continued growth. We are here to help you through this transition, and we encourage you to reach out to your leadership or People & Culture (HR) business partner with any questions. I remain optimistic about our future, even during these tough days. ESPN's foundation is built on strong relationships, perseverance and a commitment to serving sports fans — values that matter particularly in difficult moments. Let's continue to support one another. Jimmy Read the original article on Business Insider

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Nuclear startup X-energy hit the road today to sell prospective investors on its initial public offering.

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