December 2022
45 posts: 8 entries, 13 links, 5 quotes, 19 beats
Dec. 15, 2022
Datasette 1.0a2: Upserts and finely grained permissions
I’ve released the third alpha of Datasette 1.0. The 1.0a2 release introduces upsert support to the new JSON API and makes some major improvements to the Datasette permissions system.
[... 2,844 words]Dec. 18, 2022
Dec. 20, 2022
TL;DR: To serve users at the 75th percentile (P75) of devices and networks, we can now afford ~150KiB of HTML/CSS/fonts and ~300-350KiB of JavaScript (gzipped). This is a slight improvement on last year's budgets, thanks to device and network improvements. [... This is] what we should be aiming to send over the wire per page in 2023 to reach interactivity in less than 5 seconds on first load
Weeknotes: Datasette 0.63.3, datasette-ripgrep
We’re back in the UK to see family over Christmas (our first trip back since 2019). Here are a few notes from the past couple of weeks.
[... 801 words]Boring Python: code quality. James Bennett provides an opinionated guide to setting up Python tools for linting, code formatting and and other code quality concerns. Of particular interest to me is his section on packaging checks, which introduces a whole bunch of new-to-me tools that can help avoid accidentally shipping broken packages to PyPI.
Dec. 22, 2022
However, with millions of new active users rushing into Mastodon, I’m forced to reevaluate that. I think I may have become too focused on what I saw of as the limits of a federated setup (putting yourself into someone else’s fiefdom), without recognizing that if it started to take off (as it has), it would become easier and easier for people to set up their own instances, allowing those who are concerned about setting up in someone else’s garden the freedom to set up their own plot of land.
A 4.2GiB file isn’t a heist of every single artwork on the Internet, and those who think it is are the ones undervaluing their own contributions and creativity. It’s an amazing summary of what we know about art, and everyone should be able to use it to learn, grow, and create.
Speech-to-text with Whisper: How I Use It & Why. Sumana Harihareswara’s in-depth review of Whisper, the shockingly effective open source text-to-speech transcription model release by OpenAI a few months ago. Includes an extremely thoughtful section considering the ethics of using this model—some of the most insightful short-form writing I’ve seen on AI model ethics generally.
Dec. 24, 2022
Detailed comment on HN describing how Second Life works these days. “There are about 27,500 live regions today, each with its own simulator program, always on even if nobody is using it. Each simulator program takes about one CPU and under 4GB on a server.”
Dec. 28, 2022
Reverse Prompt Engineering for Fun and (no) Profit (via) swyx pulls off some impressive prompt leak attacks to reverse engineer the new AI features that just got added to Notion. He concludes that “Prompts are like clientside JavaScript. They are shipped as part of the product, but can be reverse engineered easily, and the meaningful security attack surface area is exactly the same.”
Dec. 31, 2022
Draw SVG rope using JavaScript (via) Delightful interactive tutorial by Stanko Tadić showing how to render an illustration of a rope using SVG, starting with a path. The way the tutorial is presented is outstanding.
2022 in projects and blogging
In lieu of my regular weeknotes (I took two weeks off for the holidays) here’s a look back at 2022, mainly in terms of projects and things I’ve written about.