Simon Willison’s Weblog

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Tuesday, 6th February 2024

scriptisto (via) This is really clever. “scriptisto is tool to enable writing one file scripts in languages that require compilation, dependencies fetching or preprocessing.”

You start your file with a “#!/usr/bin/env scriptisto” shebang line, then drop in a specially formatted block that tells it which compiler (if any) to use and how to build the tool. The rest of the file can then be written in any of the dozen-plus included languages... or you can create your own template to support something else.

The end result is you can now write a one-off tool in pretty much anything and have it execute as if it was a single built executable.

# 4:49 am / programming

The power of two random choices, visualized. Grant Slatton shares a visualization illustrating “a favorite load balancing technique at AWS”: pick two nodes at random and then send the task to whichever of those two has the lowest current load score.

Why just two nodes? “The function grows logarithmically, so it’s a big jump from 1 to 2 and then tapers off *real* quick.”

# 10:21 pm / scaling, aws, load-balancing

SQL for Data Scientists in 100 Queries. New comprehensive SQLite SQL tutorial from Greg Wilson, author of Teaching Tech Together and founder of The Carpentries.

# 11:08 pm / gregwilson, sql, sqlite