Simon Willison’s Weblog

Australia/Lord_Howe is the weirdest timezone (via) Lord Howe Island - part of Australia, population 382 - is unique in that the island's standard time zone is UTC+10:30 but is UTC+11 when daylight saving time applies. It's the only time zone where DST represents a 30 minute offset.

# 10:03 pm / timezones

Cerebras Coder (via) Val Town founder Steve Krouse has been building demos on top of the Cerebras API that runs Llama3.1-70b at 2,000 tokens/second.

Having a capable LLM with that kind of performance turns out to be really interesting. Cerebras Coder is a demo that implements Claude Artifact-style on-demand JavaScript apps, and having it run at that speed means changes you request are visible within less than a second:

Steve's implementation (created with the help of Townie, the Val Town code assistant) demonstrates the simplest possible version of an iframe sandbox:

<iframe
    srcDoc={code}
    sandbox="allow-scripts allow-modals allow-forms allow-popups allow-same-origin allow-top-navigation allow-downloads allow-presentation allow-pointer-lock"
/>

Where code is populated by a setCode(...) call inside a React component.

The most interesting applications of LLMs continue to be where they operate in a tight loop with a human - this can make those review loops potentially much faster and more productive.

# 10:39 pm / val-town, llms, react, iframes, ai-assisted-programming, generative-ai, sandboxing, ai, steve-krouse, llama, cerebras