Simon Willison

@simon.fedi.simonwillison.net.ap.brid.gy

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Open source developer building tools to help journalists, archivists, librarians and others analyze, explore and publish their data. https://datasette.io […]

[bridged from https://fedi.simonwillison.net/@simon on the fediverse by https://fed.brid.gy/ ]

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Not surprised to see Lattice HR cancelling their tone-deaf initiative to add "digital workers" to their org chart and HR management software: "Update: This innovation sparked a lot of conversation and questions that have no answers yet. We look forward to continuing to work with our customers […]

Original post on fedi.simonwillison.netfedi.simonwillison.net

I'm speaking at DjangoCon this year! My talk title is "How to design and implement extensible software with plugins" - full abstract here: https://simonwillison.net/2024/Jul/17/djangocon-us-2024-talks/ https://mastodon.social/@djangonews/112799357740006213

Two new Mistral models today: Codestral Mamba is an Apache 2 licensed 7B code model using a Mamba architecture (not transformers!), and MathΣtral is for "math reasoning and scientific discovery" My notes here, including an update to my llm-mistral plugin […]

Original post on fedi.simonwillison.netfedi.simonwillison.net

Made a tiny upgrade to my pisco sour recipe - I'm now using soft brown sugar for the simple syrup (1-1 by weight with water, stirred together at room temperature) instead of white sugar Pisco, lemon juice, simple syrup, egg white and then topped with […] [Original post on fedi.simonwillison.net]

A neat thing about having your own blog is there's no rule saying you can't backfill the archives... yesterday I added this page for a talk I gave back in 2017, just to have it show up in the archives in the right place https://simonwillison.net/2017/Aug/16/denormalized-query-engine/

Here's the full video plus annotated slides and transcription for my PyCon US 2024 keynote, "Imitation Intelligence" https://simonwillison.net/2024/Jul/14/pycon/

Give people something to link to so they can talk about your features and ideas https://simonwillison.net/2024/Jul/13/give-people-something-to-link-to/

A TIL on running the new Python 3.13 free-threaded (no-GIL) builds on macOS https://til.simonwillison.net/python/trying-free-threaded-python

Thoroughly enjoyed the first two episodes of Sunny, the new dark comedy AI robot dystopia series on Apple TV I've also now developed a mild obsession with the aesthetics of the Kyoto International Conference Center, which they used as the location for the weird robot company […]

Original post on fedi.simonwillison.netfedi.simonwillison.net

Wow this is some diabolical slop... TUAW closed in 2015, now a new company has purchase the brand (but not the content) and then rewrote the old content with LLMs and put up AI generated images in place of the original authors! […]

Original post on fedi.simonwillison.netfedi.simonwillison.net

TIL how to access secrets stored in 1Password from CLI scripts, e.g. to populate an environment variable using an API key stashed in my password manager https://til.simonwillison.net/macos/1password-terminal

It turns out Google Chrome ships a default, hidden extension that allows code on `*.google.com` access to private APIs, including your current CPU usage You can test it out by pasting the following into your Chrome DevTools console on any Google page: chrome.runtime.sendMessage( […]

Original post on fedi.simonwillison.netfedi.simonwillison.net

Reposted by

Simon Willison

Reply to

Julia Evans

also someone elsewhere left a comment like "I CAN’T BELIEVE IT TOOK HER 15 YEARS TO LEARN BASIC READLINE COMMANDS". those comments are very silly and I'm going to keep writing “it took me 15 years to learn this basic thing" forever because I think it's important for people to know that it's […]

Original post on social.jvns.casocial.jvns.ca

Today in tiny tools I got Claude to build me because it was a few seconds faster than searching for and evaluating existing solutions... this interactive tool for messing around with CSS box shadows https://tools.simonwillison.net/box-shadow Prompt […] [Original post on fedi.simonwillison.net]https://tools.simonwillison.net/box-shadow Prompt […] [Original post on fedi.simonwillison.net]

@rohini I've been using a Dropbox folder for this kind of thing for ~15 years now - works great, it means I can access on my laptop and my phone and the search feature is Good Enough (plus I can search with Spotlight on my Mac)

In case anyone catches wind of the story going around that Reform fielded at least one fake candidate in the UK election, Private Eye tracked down that candidate and confirmed that, while their photo was AI-generated (supposedly due to a wrong […] [Original post on fedi.simonwillison.net]

This may be the nicest thing anyone has ever said about my software! I'm going to be chuffing about this all weekend https://mastodon.me.uk/@fantasticlife/112738153601043450

Was poking around in the ukparliament GitHub account just now... and found a repo that was using Datasette! https://github.com/ukparliament/psephology-datasette The repo includes a 3.24MB SQLite database which means you can preview it in Datasette […] [Original post on fedi.simonwillison.net]https://github.com/ukparliament/psephology-datasette The repo includes a 3.24MB SQLite database which means you can preview it in Datasette […] [Original post on fedi.simonwillison.net]

I've made a bunch of small tweaks to my blog over the past month and I'm really happy with the results - my link blog and quotations are much more prominent now, partly inspired by @daringfireball, and the result is I'm posting more often and adding more detail to the things I link to (since my […]

Original post on fedi.simonwillison.netfedi.simonwillison.net

I realized I've been running a whole bunch of my own smaller projects that way for several years now and I absolutely love it, and now default to it for everything I build

Today in LLM-enabled side quests: I got Claude 3.5 Sonnet to build me a web UI for visually comparing PDF files using a couple of short prompts - result is here: https://tools.simonwillison.net/compare-pdfs Further notes (including the prompts and a […] [Original post on fedi.simonwillison.net]https://tools.simonwillison.net/compare-pdfs Further notes (including the prompts and a […] [Original post on fedi.simonwillison.net]

Weeknotes: a livestream, a surprise keynote and progress on Datasette Cloud billing https://simonwillison.net/2024/Jul/2/weeknotes/

The new Ladybird initiative is exciting: a new us non-profit initially backed by $1m to support development of Ladybird, an open source web browser that isn't based on a fork of something older and that doesn't depend on Google for funding! […]

Original post on fedi.simonwillison.netfedi.simonwillison.net

PyCon US 2024 talk videos have started to be released on YouTube - a bunch of the tutorials from the conference are now available on the PyCon channel https://youtube.com/@pyconus

I'm a late addition to the AI World's Fair morning lineup - I'll be speaking on the main stage (and the YouTube livestream) in a few minute's time https://www.youtube.com/live/5zE2sMka620?si=smOeQA9LCijwFbaa

Worth grepping your source code for "polyfill.io" and taking urgent measures to remove that code if you're linking it into your site - the domain name apparently now intermittently serves malicious JavaScript My notes here: https://simonwillison.net/2024/Jun/25/polyfill-supply-chain-attack/ - […]

Original post on fedi.simonwillison.netfedi.simonwillison.net

Published some notes on the new Claude Projects feature, which lets Claude Plus users create a Claude with custom instructions and up to 200,000 tokens of additional data https://simonwillison.net/2024/Jun/25/claude-projects/

The BBC appear to have restricted The Archers to only listeners located in the UK. The relevant Facebook group spotted this 42 minutes ago https://www.facebook.com/groups/1133707723696454/posts/2135091543558062 This is going to flare up into an international incident

Often the best code documentation is a commit message that links to an issue thread full of notes and screenshots

It took me an embarrassingly long time to realize that type hints (in Python and in TypeScript) aren't so much about avoiding accidental type errors at runtime... they're much more about enabling really good editor autocomplete