Simon Willison’s Weblog

Newsletter

June 2023

70 posts: 5 entries, 18 links, 6 quotes, 38 beats, 3 newsletters

Saturday, 17th June 2023

Sighting 2:19 PM — Indian Peafowl, in Devon, England, GB
Indian Peafowl
Indian Peafowl
Release llm 0.4.1 — Access large language models from the command-line

sqlean.py: Python’s sqlite3 with extensions. Anton Zhiyanov built a new Python package which bundles a fresh, compiled copy of SQLite with his SQLean family of C extensions built right in. Installing it gets you the latest SQLite—3.42.0—with nearly 200 additional functions, including things like define() and eval(), fileio_read() and fileio_write(), percentile_95() and uuid4() and many more. “import sqlean as sqlite3” works as a drop-in replacement for the module from the standard library.

# 10:42 pm / python, sqlite, anton-zhiyanov

LLM 0.4. I released a major update to my LLM CLI tool today—version 0.4, which adds conversation mode and prompt templates so you can store and re-use interesting prompts, plus a whole bunch of other large and small improvements.

I also released 0.4.1 with some minor fixes and the ability to install the tool using Hombrew: brew install simonw/llm/llm

# 10:58 pm / cli, projects, releases, ai, openai, generative-ai, chatgpt, llms

Sunday, 18th June 2023

Release strip-tags 0.4 — CLI tool for stripping tags from HTML
Release strip-tags 0.4.1 — CLI tool for stripping tags from HTML
Sighting 12:37 PM — Crowned Aeolis, in Wembury BioBlitz Area, England, GB
Crowned Aeolis
Crowned Aeolis
Release symbex 0.1 — Find the Python code for specified symbols
Release symbex 0.1.1 — Find the Python code for specified symbols
Release symbex 0.1.2 — Find the Python code for specified symbols
Release symbex 0.2 — Find the Python code for specified symbols
None
TIL Using ChatGPT Browse to name a Python package — I needed a name for my new Python CLI tool.

Symbex: search Python code for functions and classes, then pipe them into a LLM

Visit Symbex: search Python code for functions and classes, then pipe them into a LLM

I just released a new Python CLI tool called Symbex. It’s a search tool, loosely inspired by ripgrep, which lets you search Python code for functions and classes by name or wildcard, then see just the source code of those matching entities.

[... 1,183 words]

Monday, 19th June 2023

Release symbex 0.2.1 — Find the Python code for specified symbols

Building Search DSLs with Django (via) Neat tutorial by Dan Lamanna: how to build a GitHub-style search feature—supporting modifiers like “is:open author:danlamanna”—using PyParsing and the Django ORM.

# 8:30 am / django, dsl, parsing, python, search

Release symbex 0.3 — Find the Python code for specified symbols
Release symbex 0.3.1 — Find the Python code for specified symbols
Release symbex 0.3.2 — Find the Python code for specified symbols
Release symbex 0.4 — Find the Python code for specified symbols

Tuesday, 20th June 2023

Release symbex 0.5 — Find the Python code for specified symbols
Release symbex 0.6 — Find the Python code for specified symbols

Wednesday, 21st June 2023

None
TIL Automatically maintaining Homebrew formulas using GitHub Actions — I previously wrote about [Packaging a Python CLI tool for Homebrew](https://til.simonwillison.net/homebrew/packaging-python-cli-for-homebrew). I've now figured out a pattern for automatically updating those formulas over time, using GitHub Actions.

Thursday, 22nd June 2023

Back then [in 2012], no one was thinking about AI. You just keep uploading your images [to Adobe Stock] and you get your residuals every month and life goes on — then all of a sudden, you find out that they trained their AI on your images and on everybody’s images that they don’t own. And they’re calling it ‘ethical’ AI.

— Eric Urquhart

# 11:13 am / adobe, ethics, ai, generative-ai, ai-ethics

Friday, 23rd June 2023

Release symbex 0.7 — Find the Python code for specified symbols

Every year, some generation of engineers have to learn the concepts of "there is no silver bullet", "use the right tech for the right problem", "your are not google", "rewriting a codebase every 2 years is not a good business decision", "things cost money".

— sametmax

# 11:59 pm / software-engineering

Saturday, 24th June 2023

Sighting 3:36 PM — Barn Swallow, in Sonoma Coast OAEC California Naturalist, CA, US
Barn Swallow
Barn Swallow

Monday, 26th June 2023

Release sqlite-utils 3.33 — Python CLI utility and library for manipulating SQLite databases
None
TIL TOML in Python — I finally got around to fully learning [TOML](https://toml.io/). Some notes, including how to read and write it from Python.

Tuesday, 27th June 2023

Status of Python Versions (via) Very clear and useful page showing the exact status of different Python versions. 3.7 reaches end of life today (no more security updates), while 3.11 will continue to be supported until October 2027.

# 2:01 pm / python

2023 » June

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