Simon Willison’s Weblog

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Tuesday, 4th April 2023

Weeknotes: A new llm CLI tool, plus automating my weeknotes and newsletter

I started publishing weeknotes in 2019 partly as a way to hold myself accountable but mainly as a way to encourage myself to write more.

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Guess we could start calling this a ’hallucitation’? Kate Crawford coins an excellent neologism for hallucinated citations in LLMs like ChatGPT. # 10:21 pm

trurl manipulates URLs. Brand new command-line tool from curl creator Daniel Stenberg: The tr stands for translate or transpose, and the tool provides various mechanisms for normalizing URLs, adding query strings, changing the path or hostname and other similar modifications. I’ve tried designing APis for this kind of thing in the past—Datasette includes some clumsily named functions such as path_with_removed_args()—and it’s a deceptively deep set of problems.
. # 10:08 pm

Semi-automating a Substack newsletter with an Observable notebook

I recently started sending out a weekly-ish email newsletter consisting of content from my blog. I’ve mostly automated that, using an Observable Notebook to generate the HTML. Here’s how that system works.

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