Simon Willison’s Weblog

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March 2026

65 posts: 6 entries, 17 links, 13 quotes, 2 notes, 20 beats, 7 chapters

March 19, 2026

Research PDF to Image Converter — Leveraging Rust's `pdfium-render` crate and Python's PyO3 bindings, this project enables fast and reliable conversion of PDF pages to JPEG images, packaged as a self-contained Python wheel. The CLI tool and Python library are both built to require no external dependencies, bundling the necessary PDFium binary for ease of installation and cross-platform compatibility.
19th Mar 2026, 9:06 pm

March 20, 2026

Research SQLite Tags Benchmark: Comparing 5 Tagging Strategies — Benchmarking five tagging strategies in SQLite reveals clear trade-offs between query speed, storage, and implementation complexity for workflows involving tags (100,000 rows, 100 tags, average 6.5 tags/row). Indexed approaches—materialized lookup tables on JSON and classic many-to-many tables—easily outperform others, handling single-tag queries in under 1.5 milliseconds, while raw JSON and LIKE-based solutions are much slower.
20th Mar 2026, 2:57 am

Congrats to the @cursor_ai team on the launch of Composer 2!

We are proud to see Kimi-k2.5 provide the foundation. Seeing our model integrated effectively through Cursor's continued pretraining & high-compute RL training is the open model ecosystem we love to support.

Note: Cursor accesses Kimi-k2.5 via @FireworksAI_HQ hosted RL and inference platform as part of an authorized commercial partnership.

— Kimi.ai @Kimi_Moonshot, responding to reports that Composer 2 was built on top of Kimi K2.5

# 8:29 pm / ai, generative-ai, llms, cursor, ai-in-china, kimi

Tool TURBO.COM — 39,731 Bytes Deconstructed
20th Mar 2026, 11:48 pm

Turbo Pascal 3.02A, deconstructed. In Things That Turbo Pascal is Smaller Than James Hague lists things (from 2011) that are larger in size than Borland's 1985 Turbo Pascal 3.02 executable - a 39,731 byte file that somehow included a full text editor IDE and Pascal compiler.

This inspired me to track down a copy of that executable (available as freeware since 2000) and see if Claude could interpret the binary and decompile it for me.

It did a great job, so I had it create this interactive artifact illustrating the result. Here's the sequence of prompts I used (in regular claude.ai chat, not Claude Code):

Read this https://prog21.dadgum.com/116.html

Now find a copy of that binary online

Explore this (I attached the zip file)

Build an artifact - no react - that embeds the full turbo.com binary and displays it in a way that helps understand it - broke into labeled segments for different parts of the application, decompiled to visible source code (I guess assembly?) and with that assembly then reconstructed into readable code with extensive annotations

Infographic titled "TURBO.COM" with subtitle "Borland Turbo Pascal 3.02A — September 17, 1986 — Deconstructed" on a dark background. Four statistics are displayed: 39,731 TOTAL BYTES, 17 SEGMENTS MAPPED, 1 INT 21H INSTRUCTION, 100+ BUILT-IN IDENTIFIERS. Below is a "BINARY MEMORY MAP — 0X0100 TO 0X9C33" shown as a horizontal color-coded bar chart with a legend listing 17 segments: COM Header & Copyright, Display Configuration Table, Screen I/O & Video BIOS Routines, Keyboard Input Handler, String Output & Number Formatting, DOS System Call Dispatcher, Runtime Library Core, Error Handler & Runtime Errors, File I/O System, Software Floating-Point Engine, x86 Code Generator, Startup Banner & Main Menu Loop, File Manager & Directory Browser, Compiler Driver & Status, Full-Screen Text Editor, Pascal Parser & Lexer, and Symbol Table & Built-in Identifiers.

# 11:59 pm / computer-history, tools, ai, generative-ai, llms, claude

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