Simon Willison’s Weblog

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October 2020

75 posts: 7 entries, 16 links, 6 quotes, 46 beats

Oct. 22, 2020

CG-SQL (via) This is the toolkit the Facebook Messenger team wrote to bring stored procedures to SQLite. It implements a custom version of the T-SQL language which it uses to generate C code that can then be compiled into a SQLite module.

# 6:25 pm / c, facebook, sqlite

Oct. 23, 2020

OCTO Speaker Series: Simon Willison—Personal Data Warehouses: Reclaiming Your Data. I’m giving a talk in the GitHub OCTO (Office of the CTO) speaker series about Datasette and my Dogsheep personal analytics project. You can register for free here—the stream will be on Thursday November 12, 2020 at 8:30am PST (4:30pm GMT).

# 3 am / github, speaking, datasette, dogsheep

Oct. 24, 2020

Weeknotes: incremental improvements

I’ve been writing my talk for PyCon Argentina this week, which has proved surprisingly time consuming. I hope to have that wrapped up soon—I’m pre-recording it, which it turns out is much more work than preparing a talk to stream live.

[... 630 words]

Oct. 26, 2020

Apple now receives an estimated $8 billion to $12 billion in annual payments — up from $1 billion a year in 2014 — in exchange for building Google’s search engine into its products. It is probably the single biggest payment that Google makes to anyone and accounts for 14 to 21 percent of Apple’s annual profits.

Apple, Google and a Deal That Controls the Internet

# 3:10 am / apple, google, search-engines

Oct. 28, 2020

Release sqlite-utils 2.23 — Python CLI utility and library for manipulating SQLite databases
TIL Decorators with optional arguments — [sqlite-utils](https://sqlite-utils.datasette.io/) provides [a decorator](https://sqlite-utils.datasette.io/en/stable/python-api.html#registering-custom-sql-functions) for registering custom Python functions that looks like this:
Release datasette-render-markdown 1.2 — Datasette plugin for rendering Markdown

Oct. 29, 2020

Seniors generally report having more trust in the people around them, a characteristic that may make them more credulous of information that comes from friends and family. There is also the issue of context: Misinformation appears in a stream that also includes baby pictures, recipes and career updates. Users may not expect to toggle between light socializing and heavy truth-assessing when they’re looking at their phone for a few minutes in line at the grocery store.

Michael Hobbes

# 3:06 pm / social-media, misinformation, digital-literacy

Defining Data Intuition. Ryan T. Harter, Principal Data Scientist at Mozilla defines data intuition as “a resilience to misleading data and analyses”. He also introduces the term “data-stink” as a similar term to “code smell”, where your intuition should lead you to distrust analysis that exhibits certain characteristics without first digging in further. I strongly believe that data reports should include a link the raw methodology and numbers to ensure they can be more easily vetted—so that data-stink can be investigated with the least amount of resistance.

# 3:14 pm / analytics, mozilla, data-science

Oct. 30, 2020

Release datasette 0.51a1 — An open source multi-tool for exploring and publishing data
Release datasette-edit-schema 0.4a0 — Datasette plugin for modifying table schemas
Release datasette 0.51a2 — An open source multi-tool for exploring and publishing data

Oct. 31, 2020

Release datasette 0.51 — An open source multi-tool for exploring and publishing data
Release datasette-upload-csvs 0.6 — Datasette plugin for uploading CSV files and converting them to database tables
Release datasette-edit-schema 0.4 — Datasette plugin for modifying table schemas

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