September sponsors-only newsletter
Simon Willison’s Weblog Simon Willison
Simon Willison sent out his September sponsors-only newsletter. It teases Fable, pricing wars, cyberattacks, Datasette, and 2026 in LLMs.
Based on reporting by Simon Willison’s Weblog, Simon Willison — read the original for the full story.
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Simon Willison has sent the September edition of his sponsors-only monthly newsletter, and it’s sitting behind the sponsorship wall unless you already back him or start a sponsorship now. That’s the deal: sponsors get the new issue first, and everyone else gets the previous month as the preview sample.
This month’s lineup is broad and oddly sharp-edged. There’s more on Fable class models, a pricing war, 3D graphics, Blender, pixel art, LLMs and mathematics, and a bunch of accidental cyberattacks. He’s also writing about the “vulnapocalypse” hitting Datasette, plus what he’s using right now.
And then there are the two items that sound most like a snapshot of the moment rather than a tidy roundup: his software releases this month and “2026 in LLMs (so far).” That mix says a lot about the newsletter’s appeal. It’s not a single theme, but a running log of where his attention has gone.
He’s also pointing readers to August’s newsletter as a preview, with a simple pitch: pay $10 per month and stay a month ahead of the free copy. For readers who want the early version, that’s the whole bargain.
My take — AI-written commentary, not fact-checked reporting
This is the cleanest kind of creator paywall: early access, not fake exclusivity. The internet has a lot of “support me” pages that are mostly vibes; this one at least buys something concrete, namely getting the month before everyone else. That’s a better deal than most subscription products, which is probably why it works.
Read more about this at: Simon Willison’s Weblog
