Simon Willison’s Weblog

The Depths of Wikipedians (via) Asterisk Magazine interviewed Annie Rauwerda, curator of the Depths of Wikipedia family of social media accounts (I particularly like her TikTok).

There's a ton of insight into the dynamics of the Wikipedia community in here.

[...] when people talk about Wikipedia as a decision making entity, usually they're talking about 300 people — the people that weigh in to the very serious and (in my opinion) rather arcane, boring, arduous discussions. There's not that many of them.

There are also a lot of islands. There is one woman who mostly edits about hamsters, and always on her phone. She has never interacted with anyone else. Who is she? She's not part of any community that we can tell.

I appreciated these concluding thoughts on the impact of ChatGPT and LLMs on Wikipedia:

The traffic to Wikipedia has not taken a dramatic hit. Maybe that will change in the future. The Foundation talks about coming opportunities, or the threat of LLMs. With my friends that edit a lot, it hasn't really come up a ton because I don't think they care. It doesn't affect us. We're doing the same thing. Like if all the large language models eat up the stuff we wrote and make it easier for people to get information — great. We made it easier for people to get information.

And if LLMs end up training on blogs made by AI slop and having as their basis this ouroboros of generated text, then it's possible that a Wikipedia-type thing — written and curated by a human — could become even more valuable.

# 6:22 pm / wikipedia, chatgpt, llms

From where I left. Four and a half years after he left the project, Redis creator Salvatore Sanfilippo is returning to work on Redis.

Hacking randomly was cool but, in the long run, my feeling was that I was lacking a real purpose, and every day I started to feel a bigger urgency to be part of the tech world again. At the same time, I saw the Redis community fragmenting, something that was a bit concerning to me, even as an outsider.

I'm personally still upset at the license change, but Salvatore sees it as necessary to support the commercial business model for Redis Labs. It feels to me like a betrayal of the volunteer efforts by previous contributors. I posted about that on Hacker News and Salvatore replied:

I can understand that, but the thing about the BSD license is that such value never gets lost. People are able to fork, and after a fork for the original project to still lead will be require to put something more on the table.

Salvatore's first new project is an exploration of adding vector sets to Redis. The vector similarity API he previews in this post reminds me of why I fell in love with Redis in the first place - it's clean, simple and feels obviously right to me.

VSIM top_1000_movies_imdb ELE "The Matrix"  WITHSCORES
1) "The Matrix"
2) "0.9999999403953552"
3) "Ex Machina"
4) "0.8680362105369568"
...

# 6:56 pm / redis, salvatore-sanfilippo, open-source, vector-search

Introducing Limbo: A complete rewrite of SQLite in Rust (via) This looks absurdly ambitious:

Our goal is to build a reimplementation of SQLite from scratch, fully compatible at the language and file format level, with the same or higher reliability SQLite is known for, but with full memory safety and on a new, modern architecture.

The Turso team behind it have been maintaining their libSQL fork for two years now, so they're well equipped to take on a challenge of this magnitude.

SQLite is justifiably famous for its meticulous approach to testing. Limbo plans to take an entirely different approach based on "Deterministic Simulation Testing" - a modern technique pioneered by FoundationDB and now spearheaded by Antithesis, the company Turso have been working with on their previous testing projects.

Another bold claim (emphasis mine):

We have both added DST facilities to the core of the database, and partnered with Antithesis to achieve a level of reliability in the database that lives up to SQLite’s reputation.

[...] With DST, we believe we can achieve an even higher degree of robustness than SQLite, since it is easier to simulate unlikely scenarios in a simulator, test years of execution with different event orderings, and upon finding issues, reproduce them 100% reliably.

The two most interesting features that Limbo is planning to offer are first-party WASM support and fully asynchronous I/O:

SQLite itself has a synchronous interface, meaning driver authors who want asynchronous behavior need to have the extra complication of using helper threads. Because SQLite queries tend to be fast, since no network round trips are involved, a lot of those drivers just settle for a synchronous interface. [...]

Limbo is designed to be asynchronous from the ground up. It extends sqlite3_step, the main entry point API to SQLite, to be asynchronous, allowing it to return to the caller if data is not ready to consume immediately.

Datasette provides an async API for executing SQLite queries which is backed by all manner of complex thread management - I would be very interested in a native asyncio Python library for talking to SQLite database files.

I successfully tried out Limbo's Python bindings against a demo SQLite test database using uv like this:

uv run --with pylimbo python
>>> import limbo
>>> conn = limbo.connect("/tmp/demo.db")
>>> cursor = conn.cursor()
>>> print(cursor.execute("select * from foo").fetchall())

It crashed when I tried against a more complex SQLite database that included SQLite FTS tables.

The Python bindings aren't yet documented, so I piped them through LLM and had the new google-exp-1206 model write this initial documentation for me:

files-to-prompt limbo/bindings/python -c | llm -m gemini-exp-1206 -s 'write extensive usage documentation in markdown, including realistic usage examples'

# 7:25 pm / rust, sqlite, uv, open-source, python, llm, ai-assisted-programming, documentation