Simon Willison's Weblog: Beats

A shot-scraper-style JSON API on Bun 1.4's new Bun.WebView

2026-08-20T15:37:00+00:00

A shot-scraper-style JSON API on Bun 1.4's new Bun.WebView

A zero-dependency, roughly 150-line TypeScript service demonstrates that Bun 1.4’s experimental `Bun.WebView` can provide a shot-scraper-style JSON API for JavaScript evaluation and PNG/JPEG/WebP screenshots without Puppeteer or Playwright. It creates one browser tab per request, supporting concurrency while returning page results and errors as JSON through `/javascript`, `/screenshot`, and `/healthz`.

smolmachines / smolvm as a sandbox for untrusted Python & JavaScript

2026-08-19T23:16:00+00:00

smolmachines / smolvm as a sandbox for untrusted Python & JavaScript

Testing smolvm 1.8.3 shows it is well suited for sandboxing untrusted Python and JavaScript data transformations using hardware-isolated VMs rather than shared-kernel containers. Offline local images, no-network execution, CPU/RAM limits, guest-enforced timeouts, storage quotas, read-only input mounts, writable output mounts, and `--unprivileged` all worked as intended, with cold starts around 0.6–1.5 seconds and warm executions around 50 ms.

Anna's Hummingbird

2026-08-15T17:51:28+00:00

Anna's Hummingbird, in San Mateo County, CA, US

CORS Chat

2026-08-15T14:49:54+00:00

CORS Chat

Chat directly with any OpenAI Responses-compatible API endpoint that supports CORS headers, all within your browser. Configure endpoints with custom headers, save conversations locally, and manage multiple chat sessions with different models and reasoning settings.

Northern Gannet

2026-08-15T03:22:00+00:00

Northern Gannet, in Pillar Point Harbor, CA, US

This is Morris.

Morris is a local celebrity: the only known Northern Gannet (Morus bassanus) in the entire Pacific Ocean.

They showed up in the Farallon Islands off the coast of San Francisco 14 years ago. They have since made Pillar Point harbor their home, where they are quite easy to spot: the only white bird with a yellow head, usually hanging out with the smaller black Brandt’s cormorants near the harbor sign visible from the end of the commercial pier.

Great Horned Owl

2026-08-14T03:53:57+00:00

Great Horned Owl, in San Mateo County, CA, US

sqlite-utils 4.2.1

2026-08-13T23:53:47+00:00

sqlite-utils 4.2.1

Python CLI utility and library for manipulating SQLite databases

sqlite-utils 4.2

2026-08-13T20:11:29+00:00

sqlite-utils 4.2

Python CLI utility and library for manipulating SQLite databases

llm-gemini 0.33

2026-08-13T19:37:34+00:00

llm-gemini 0.33

LLM plugin to access Google's Gemini family of models

alchemy-utils 0.1a1

2026-08-13T03:03:17+00:00

alchemy-utils 0.1a1

Cross-database sqlite-utils built on SQLAlchemy

alchemy-utils 0.1a0

2026-08-12T19:51:30+00:00

alchemy-utils 0.1a0

Cross-database sqlite-utils built on SQLAlchemy

California Brown Pelican, Great Egret

2026-08-12T00:52:48+00:00

California Brown Pelican, Great Egret, in Monterey Bay National Marine Sanctuary, CA, US, CA

datasette-upload-dbs 0.5a0

2026-08-11T20:35:13+00:00

datasette-upload-dbs 0.5a0

Upload SQLite database files to Datasette

California Brown Pelican

2026-08-10T02:07:58+00:00

California Brown Pelican, in Pillar Point Harbor, CA, US

SQLite compressed text-history prototypes

2026-08-09T22:05:00+00:00

SQLite compressed text-history prototypes

SQLite compressed text-history prototypes compare `WholeBlobHistoryStore`, which rewrites one compressed historical blob per edit, with `ChunkedHistoryStore`, which seals compressed chunks to improve scaling for long histories. Both preserve prior text and timestamps, skip unchanged replacements by default, and serialize writers with `BEGIN IMMEDIATE` for atomic updates.