Simon Willison’s Weblog

The Articulation Barrier: Prompt-Driven AI UX Hurts Usability. Jakob Nielsen: “Generative AI systems like ChatGPT use prose prompts for intent-based outcomes, requiring users to be articulate in writing prose, which is a challenge for half of the population in rich countries.”

# 3:49 pm / jakob-nielsen, generative-ai, ai, usability, llms

Simon Willison interview: AI software still needs the human touch. Thomas Claburn interviewed me for The Register. We talked about AI training copyright, applications of AI for programming, AI security and a whole bunch of other topics.

# 10:08 pm / generative-ai, interviews, the-register, ai, llms

ColBERT query-passage scoring interpretability (via) Neat interactive visualization tool for understanding what the ColBERT embedding model does—this works by loading around 50MB of model files directly into your browser and running them with WebAssembly.

# 4:49 pm / webassembly, ai, embeddings, interpretability

llm-embed-onnx. I wrote a new plugin for LLM that acts as a thin wrapper around onnx_embedding_models by Benjamin Anderson, providing access to seven embedding models that can run on the ONNX model framework.

The actual plugin is around 50 lines of code, which makes for a nice example of how thin a plugin wrapper can be that adds new models to my LLM tool.

# 10:28 pm / embedding, projects, ai, llm, plugins

Observable notebook: URL to download a GitHub repository as a zip file (via) GitHub broke the “right click -> copy URL” feature on their Download ZIP button a few weeks ago. I’m still hoping they fix that, but in the meantime I built this Observable Notebook to generate ZIP URLs for any GitHub repo and any branch or commit hash.

Update 30th January 2024: GitHub have fixed the bug now, so right click -> Copy URL works again on that button.

# 9:17 pm / observable, github

Getting Started With CUDA for Python Programmers (via) if, like me, you’ve avoided CUDA programming (writing efficient code that runs on NVIGIA GPUs) in the past, Jeremy Howard has a new 1hr17m video tutorial that demystifies the basics. The code is all run using PyTorch in notebooks running on Google Colab, and it starts with a very clear demonstration of how to convert a RGB image to black and white.

# 9:23 pm / jeremy-howard, pytorch, ai, python, gpus

urllib3 2.2.0. Highlighted feature: “urllib3 now works in the browser”—the core urllib3 library now includes code that can integrate with Pyodide, using the browser’s fetch() or XMLHttpRequest APIs to make HTTP requests (to CORS-enabled endpoints).

# 4:31 pm / webassembly, pyodide, python, cors

pgroll (via) “Zero-downtime, reversible, schema migrations for Postgres”

I love this kind of thing. This one is has a really interesting design: you define your schema modifications (adding/dropping columns, creating tables etc) using a JSON DSL, then apply them using a Go binary.

When you apply a migration the tool first creates a brand new PostgreSQL schema (effectively a whole new database) which imitates your new schema design using PostgreSQL views. You can then point your applications that have been upgraded to the new schema at it, using the PostgreSQL search_path setting.

Old applications can continue talking to the previous schema design, giving you an opportunity to roll out a zero-downtime deployment of the new code.

Once your application has upgraded and the physical rows in the database have been transformed to the new schema you can run a --continue command to make the final destructive changes and drop the mechanism that simulates both schema designs at once.

# 9:27 pm / migrations, postgresql, zero-downtime

Beej’s Guide to Networking Concepts (via) Beej’s Guide to Network Programming is a legendary tutorial on network programming in C, continually authored and updated by Brian “Beej” Hall since 1995.

This is NOT that. Beej’s Guide to Networking Concepts is brand new—started in March 2023—and illustrates a whole bunch of networking concepts using Python instead of C.

From the forward: “Is it Beej’s Guide to Network Programming in Python? Well, kinda, actually. The C book is more about how C’s (well, Unix’s) network API works. And this book is more about the concepts underlying it, using Python as a vehicle.”

# 10:08 pm / networking, c, python

GitHub Actions: Introducing the new M1 macOS runner available to open source! Set “runs-on: macos-14” to run a GitHub Actions workflow on a 7GB of RAM ARM M1 runner. I have been looking forward to this for ages: it should make it much easier to build releases of both Electron apps and Python binary wheels for Apple Silicon.

# 2:04 am / github-actions, macosx

Macaroons Escalated Quickly (via) Thomas Ptacek’s follow-up on Macaroon tokens, based on a two year project to implement them at Fly.io. The way they let end users calculate new signed tokens with additional limitations applied to them (“caveats” in Macaroon terminology) is fascinating, and allows for some very creative solutions.

# 4:57 pm / fly, thomas-ptacek, apis, security

snoop. Neat Python debugging utility by Alex Hall: snoop lets you “import snoop” and then add “@snoop” as a decorator to any function, which causes that function’s source code to be output directly to the console with details of any variable state changes that occur while it’s running.

I didn’t know you could make a Python module callable like that—turns out it’s running “sys.modules[’snoop’] = snoop” in the __init__.py module!

# 6:19 pm / debugging, python

stanchion (via) Dan Gallagher’s new (under-development) SQLite extension that adds column-oriented tables to SQLite, using a virtual table implemented in Zig that stores records in row groups, where each row group has multiple segments (one for each column) and those segments are stored as SQLite BLOBs.

I’m surprised that this is possible using the virtual table mechanism. It has the potential to bring some of the analytical querying performance we’ve seen in engines like DuckDB to SQLite itself.

# 10:32 pm / sqlite