Simon Willison’s Weblog

Weeknotes: Citus Con, PyCon and three new niche museums

I’ve had a busy week in terms of speaking: on Tuesday I gave an online keynote at Citus Con, “Big Opportunities in Small Data”. I then flew to Salt Lake City for PyCon that evening and gave a three hour workshop on Wednesday, “Data analysis with SQLite and Python”.

Since then I’ve been mostly decompressing and catching up with old friends, and having lots of interesting conversations about Python (and a few extras about LLMs).

After a several month hiatus I’ve also added three new museums to Niche Museums:

• Pioneer Memorial Museum
• Misalignment Museum
• Mattie Leeds Sculpture Garden

To celebrate this flurry of museum visiting activity, I spent some time upgrading the display of the photo galleries on the site. They’re now using PhotoSwipe, which I first experimented with on this blog.

Here’s the issue, the full set of changes and a TIL describing what I learned about photo EXIF data in figuring out this project.

Entries this week

• Data analysis with SQLite and Python for PyCon 2023
• What’s in the RedPajama-Data-1T LLM training set
• Web LLM runs the vicuna-7b Large Language Model entirely in your browser, and it’s very impressive

TIL this week

• Interpreting photo orientation and locations in EXIF data—2023-04-22