Simon Willison’s Weblog

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Tuesday, 7th April 2026

Research SQLite WAL Mode Across Docker Containers Sharing a Volume — SQLite’s WAL mode reliably supports concurrent access when two Docker containers share a volume on the same host, due to shared kernel and filesystem semantics. The experiment, using Docker Desktop for macOS and a named volume, demonstrated real-time propagation of database changes and effective memory-mapped file sharing by monitoring `.db-shm`.

Inspired by this conversation on Hacker News about whether two SQLite processes in separate Docker containers that share the same volume might run into problems due to WAL shared memory. The answer is that everything works fine - Docker containers on the same host and filesystem share the same shared memory in a way that allows WAL to collaborate as it should.

Anthropic’s Project Glasswing—restricting Claude Mythos to security researchers—sounds necessary to me

Visit Anthropic's Project Glasswing - restricting Claude Mythos to security researchers - sounds necessary to me

Anthropic didn’t release their latest model, Claude Mythos (system card PDF), today. They have instead made it available to a very restricted set of preview partners under their newly announced Project Glasswing.

[... 1,296 words]

GLM-5.1: Towards Long-Horizon Tasks. Chinese AI lab Z.ai's latest model is a giant 754B parameter 1.51TB (on Hugging Face) MIT-licensed monster - the same size as their previous GLM-5 release, and sharing the same paper.

It's available via OpenRouter so I asked it to draw me a pelican:

llm install llm-openrouter
llm -m openrouter/z-ai/glm-5.1 'Generate an SVG of a pelican on a bicycle'

And something new happened... unprompted, the model decided to give me an HTML page that included both the SVG and a separate set of CSS animations!

The SVG was excellent, and might be my new favorite from an open weights model:

The bicycle is red and has a frame the correct shape and wheels with spokes. The pelican is a perky little fella.

But the animation broke it:

Animation - the wheels and pedals rotate, the clouds move... and the pelican has vanished, but there is a little blob bobbing up and down in the top left corner.

That's the pelican, floating up in the top left corner.

I usually don't do follow-up prompts for the pelican test, but in this case I made an exception:

llm -c 'the animation is a bit broken, the pelican ends up positioned off the screen at the top right'

GLM 5.1 replied:

The issue is that CSS transform animations on SVG elements override the SVG transform attribute used for positioning, causing the pelican to lose its placement and fly off to the top-right. The fix is to separate positioning (SVG attribute) from animation (inner group) and use <animateTransform> for SVG rotations since it handles coordinate systems correctly.

And spat out fresh HTML which fixed the problem!

Now everything is right - the bicycle rotates correctly, the pelican sits on it and bobs up and down, and its lower beak moves slightly as well.

I particularly like the animation of the beak, which is described in the SVG comments like so:

<!-- Pouch (lower beak) with wobble -->
<g>
    <path d="M42,-58 Q43,-50 48,-42 Q55,-35 62,-38 Q70,-42 75,-60 L42,-58 Z" fill="url(#pouchGrad)" stroke="#b06008" stroke-width="1" opacity="0.9"/>
    <path d="M48,-50 Q55,-46 60,-52" fill="none" stroke="#c06a08" stroke-width="0.8" opacity="0.6"/>
    <animateTransform attributeName="transform" type="scale"
    values="1,1; 1.03,0.97; 1,1" dur="0.75s" repeatCount="indefinite"
    additive="sum"/>
</g>

Update: On Bluesky @charles.capps.me suggested a "NORTH VIRGINIA OPOSSUM ON AN E-SCOOTER" and...

This is so great. It's dark, the possum is clearly a possum, it's riding an escooter, lovely animation, tail bobbing up and down, caption says NORTH VIRGINIA OPOSSUM, CRUISING THE COMMONWEALTH SINCE DUSK - only glitch is that it occasionally blinks and the eyes fall off the face

The HTML+SVG comments on that one include /* Earring sparkle */, <!-- Opossum fur gradient -->, <!-- Distant treeline silhouette - Virginia pines -->, <!-- Front paw on handlebar --> - here's the transcript and the HTML result.

# 9:25 pm / css, svg, ai, generative-ai, llms, pelican-riding-a-bicycle, llm-release, ai-in-china, glm

Monday, 6th April 2026

2026 » April

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