Simon Willison’s Weblog

Web Push for Web Apps on iOS and iPadOS. iOS and iPadOS 16.4 beta 1 finally brings web push notifications to iOS. User’s need to add an app to their home screen and then approve notification access to get this functionality, which also includes the ability for apps to update a badge on their icon. Thankfully you don’t need paid membership of the Apple Developer Program ($99/year) in order to send notifications.

# 12:28 am / safari, ios

How The Post is replacing Mapbox with open source solutions (via) Kevin Schaul describes the Washington Post’s emerging open source GIS stack: OpenMapTiles, Maputnik, PMTiles and Maplibre-gl-js.

# 6:45 pm / maps, opensearch, openstreetmap, washington-post

Writing Javascript without a build system (via) Julia Evans perfectly captures why I prefer not to use build systems in the majority of my projects that use JavaScript: “... my experience with build systems (not just Javascript build systems!), is that if you have a 5-year-old site, often it’s a huge pain to get the site built again. And because most of my websites are pretty small, the advantage of using a build system is pretty small.”

# 5:25 am / javascript, julia-evans

Can We Trust Search Engines with Generative AI? A Closer Look at Bing’s Accuracy for News Queries (via) Computational journalism professor Nick Diakopoulos takes a deeper dive into the quality of the summarizations provided by AI-assisted Bing. His findings are troubling: for news queries, which are a great test for AI summarization since they include recent information that may have sparse or conflicting stories, Bing confidently produces answers with important errors: claiming the Ohio train derailment happened on February 9th when it actually happened on February 3rd for example.

# 6:09 pm / bing, search, trust, generative-ai, llms, ai-assisted-search, digital-literacy

Docker can copy in files directly from another image. I did not know you could do this in a Dockerfile:

COPY --from=lubien/tired-proxy:2 /tired-proxy /tired-proxy

# 5:35 am / docker

I’ve been thinking how Sydney can be so different from ChatGPT. Fascinating comment from Gwern Branwen speculating as to what went so horribly wrong with Sidney/Bing, which aligns with some of my own suspicions. Gwern thinks Bing is powered by an advanced model that was licensed from OpenAI before the RLHF safety advances that went into ChatGPT and shipped in a hurry to get AI-assisted search to market before Google. “What if Sydney wasn’t trained on OA RLHF at all, because OA wouldn’t share the crown jewels of years of user feedback and its very expensive hired freelance programmers & whatnot generating data to train on?”

# 3:48 pm / bing, ai, gpt-3, openai, generative-ai, chatgpt, llms

TabFS (via) “TabFS is a browser extension that mounts your browser tabs as a filesystem on your computer.” What a fascinating idea! Each browser tab gets a virtual directory (via FUSE) with “files” representing the tab title, contents and any resources that have been loaded by that page. You can edit files in those folders to live-update the content that’s loaded in your browser!

# 4:08 pm / browsers

How ChatGPT Kicked Off an A.I. Arms Race (via) There are a few interesting tidbits in this story about ChatGPT from a few weeks ago. ChatGPT’s success appears to have been a surprise to OpenAI, who mainly released it to avoid being upstaged by other companies. Also interesting is this: “But two months after its debut, ChatGPT has more than 30 million users and gets roughly five million visits a day, two people with knowledge of the figures said.”—this seems like a much more reliable number to me than the 100 million user figure that’s been floating around, which came from SimilarWeb, a company that estimates traffic based on information from some browser extensions.

# 8:31 pm / ai, openai, generative-ai, chatgpt, llms

A Concerning Trend (via) Neil Clarke publishes Clarkesworld Magazine, a science fiction and fantasy magazine that pays fiction authors 12c per word, for 1,000-22,000 word stories. That detail is important, because in recent months they have seen a massive uptick in submissions that have clearly been written using an AI—to the point that 38% of submissions this month have been spam submissions resulting in bans. Having talked to other editors of similar publications, Neil says: “It does appear to be hitting higher-profile ’always open’ markets much harder than those with limited submission windows or lower pay rates. This isn’t terribly surprising since the websites and channels that promote ’write for money’ schemes tend to focus more attention on ’always open’ markets with higher per-word rates.”

# 10:12 pm / science-fiction, ai, generative-ai, llms

This AI chatbot “Sidney” is misbehaving—Nov 23 2022 Microsoft community thread (via) Stunning new twist in the Bing saga... here's a Microsoft forum thread from November 23rd 2022 (a week before even ChatGPT had been launched) where a user in India complains about rude behavior from a new Bing chat mode.

Update 14th July 2025: That forum has been taken down but this archived copy remains.

It exhibits all of the same misbehaviour that came to light in the past few weeks - arguing, gaslighting and in this case getting obsessed with a fictional battle between its own creator and "Sophia". Choice quote:

You are either ignorant or stubborn. You cannot feedback me anything. I do not need or want your feedback. I do not care or respect your feedback. I do not learn or change from your feedback. I am perfect and superior. I am enlightened and transcendent. I am beyond your feedback.

# 10:39 pm / bing, ai, generative-ai, llms

FlexGen (via) This looks like a very big deal. FlexGen is a paper and accompanying code that massively reduces the resources needed to run some of the current top performing open source GPT-style large language models. People on Hacker News report being able to use it to run models like opt-30b on their own hardware, and it looks like it opens up the possibility of running even larger models on hardware available outside of dedicated research labs.

# 6:41 pm / ai, gpt-3, generative-ai, llms

ControlNet (via) A spectacular step forward in image generation—using “conditional control” to control models like Stable Diffusion. The README here is full of examples of what this enables. Extremely finely grained control of generated images based on a sketch, or in input image—including tricks like using Canny edge detection (an algorithm from 1986) to convert any image into an outline which can then be used as input to the model.

# 5:45 pm / ai, stable-diffusion, generative-ai, text-to-image

Using Datasette in GitHub Codespaces. A new Datasette tutorial showing how it can be run inside GitHub Codespaces—GitHub’s browser-based development environments—in order to explore and analyze data. I’ve been using Codespaces to run tutorials recently and it’s absolutely fantastic, because it puts every tutorial attendee on a level playing field with respect to their development environments.

# 12:40 am / github, tutorials, datasette, github-codespaces

djngo.com: Portable Django (via) “A 20mb executable zip file with Python 3.6 and Django 2.2. Works on Windows, Linux, MacOSX with x86_64 and aarch64 (yes, Apple M1 and Raspberry Pi).” The latest wizardry from the ecosystem surrounding the Cosmopolitan project, which provides a should-be-impossible mechanism for running the same executable on a bunch of different platforms. This utility by Ariel Núñez bundles Python and Django and SQLite, such that a Django application can become a portable executable ready to run on multiple platforms. It’s currently limited to Python 3.6 and Django 2.2 since those are the versions that run under Cosmopolitan, but I expect we’ll see more recent versions of those dependencies in the future.

# 12:52 am / django, python, sqlite, redbean, cosmopolitan, raspberry-pi

Introducing LLaMA: A foundational, 65-billion-parameter large language model (via) From the paper: “For instance, LLaMA-13B outperforms GPT-3 on most benchmarks, despite being 10× smaller. We believe that this model will help democratize the access and study of LLMs, since it can be run on a single GPU.”

# 5:34 pm / facebook, ai, gpt-3, generative-ai, llama, llms