Simon Willison’s Weblog

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Sunday, 26th March 2023

Leicester balloon riot (via) In 1864 a test flight of a new hydrogen balloon in Leicester’s Victoria Park attracted 50,000 spectators, and ended in a riot that destroyed the balloon. “Early in the afternoon there was a disturbance when a gentleman, claiming to be an aeronaut, announced that Britannia was not Coxwell’s newest and biggest balloon but an older model. This enraged the crowd who, shortly after 2pm, broke down the barrier and demanded that Coxwell take off immediately.” # 6:29 pm

After three decades of working with software, I’m also seeing myself learning faster using ChatGPT. So apparently it works even for us more seasoned programmers.

Salvatore Sanfilippo # 2:55 pm

scrapeghost (via) Scraping is a really interesting application for large language model tools like GPT3. James Turk’s scrapeghost is a very neatly designed entrant into this space—it’s a Python library and CLI tool that can be pointed at any URL and given a roughly defined schema (using a neat mini schema language) which will then use GPT3 to scrape the page and try to return the results in the supplied format. # 5:29 am