Simon Willison’s Weblog

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Friday, 16th September 2022

Retrospection and Learnings from Dgraph Labs (via) I was excited about Dgraph as an interesting option in the graph database space. It didn’t work out, and founder Manish Rai Jain provides a thoughtful retrospective as to why, full of useful insights for other startup founders considering projects in a similar space. # 6:43 pm

Twitter pranksters derail GPT-3 bot with newly discovered “prompt injection” hack. I’m quoted in this Ars Technica article about prompt injection and the Remoteli.io Twitter bot. # 6:33 pm

I don’t know how to solve prompt injection

Some extended thoughts about prompt injection attacks against software built on top of AI language models such a GPT-3. This post started as a Twitter thread but I’m promoting it to a full blog entry here.

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Weeknotes: Datasette Lite, s3-credentials, shot-scraper, datasette-edit-templates and more

Despite distractions from AI I managed to make progress on a bunch of different projects this week, including new releases of s3-credentials and shot-scraper, a new datasette-edit-templates plugin and a small but neat improvement to Datasette Lite.

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[SQLite is] a database that in full-stack culture has been relegated to “unit test database mock” for about 15 years that is (1) surprisingly capable as a SQL engine, (2) the simplest SQL database to get your head around and manage, and (3) can embed directly in literally every application stack, which is especially interesting in latency-sensitive and globally-distributed applications.

Reason (3) is clearly our ulterior motive here, so we’re not disinterested: our model user deploys a full-stack app (Rails, Elixir, Express, whatever) in a bunch of regions around the world, hoping for sub-100ms responses for users in most places around the world. Even within a single data center, repeated queries to SQL servers can blow that budget. Running an in-process SQL server neatly addresses it.

Thomas Ptacek # 1:49 am

2022 » September

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