Simon Willison’s Weblog

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Entries in Jul

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sqlite-utils now supports plugins

sqlite-utils 3.34 is out with a major new feature: support for plugins.

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Accessing Llama 2 from the command-line with the llm-replicate plugin

The big news today is Llama 2, the new openly licensed Large Language Model from Meta AI. It’s a really big deal:

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Weeknotes: Self-hosted language models with LLM plugins, a new Datasette tutorial, a dozen package releases, a dozen TILs

A lot of stuff to cover from the past two and a half weeks.

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My LLM CLI tool now supports self-hosted language models via plugins

LLM is my command-line utility and Python library for working with large language models such as GPT-4. I just released version 0.5 with a huge new feature: you can now install plugins that add support for additional models to the tool, including models that can run on your own hardware.

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Weeknotes: Joining the board of the Python Software Foundation

A few weeks ago I was elected to the board of directors for the Python Software Foundation.

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Weeknotes: Datasette, sqlite-utils, Datasette Desktop

A flurry of releases this week, including a new Datasette alpha and a fixed Datasette Desktop.

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sqlite-comprehend: run AWS entity extraction against content in a SQLite database

I built a new tool this week: sqlite-comprehend, which passes text from a SQLite database through the AWS Comprehend entity extraction service and stores the returned entities.

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Using GPT-3 to explain how code works

One of my favourite uses for the GPT-3 AI language model is generating explanations of how code works. It’s shockingly effective at this: its training set clearly include a vast amount of source code.

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Weeknotes: datasette-remote-metadata, sqlite-transform --multi

I mentioned Project Pelican (still a codename until the end of the embargo) last week. This week it inspired a new plugin, datasette-remote-metadata.

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The Baked Data architectural pattern

I’ve been exploring an architectural pattern for publishing websites over the past few years that I call the “Baked Data” pattern. It provides many of the advantages of static site generators while avoiding most of their limitations. I think it deserves to be used more widely.

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Datasette—an ecosystem of tools for working with small data

This is the transcript and video from a talk I gave at PyGotham 2020 about using SQLite, Datasette and Dogsheep to work with small data.

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Weeknotes: sqlite-transform 1.1, Datasette 0.58.1, datasette-graphql 1.5

Work on Project Pelican inspires new features and improvements across a number of different projects.

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It doesn’t take much public creativity to stand out as a job candidate

I’ve spent nearly twenty years blogging, giving talks and releasing open source code. It’s been fantastic for my career, and a huge amount of work. But here’s a useful secret: you don’t have to put very much work at all into public creativity in order to stand out as a job candidate.

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Datasette 0.58: The annotated release notes

I released Datasette 0.58 last night, with new plugin hooks, Unix domain socket support, a major faceting performance fix and a few other improvements. Here are the annotated release notes.

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Weeknotes: Fun with Unix domain sockets

A small enhancement to Datasette this week: I’ve added support for proxying via Unix domain sockets.

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Django SQL Dashboard 1.0

Earlier this week I released Django SQL Dashboard 1.0. I also just released 1.0.1, with a bug fix for PostgreSQL 10 contributed by Ryan Cheley.

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PAGNIs: Probably Are Gonna Need Its

Luke Page has a great post up with his list of YAGNI exceptions.

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Fun with binary data and SQLite

This week I’ve been mainly experimenting with binary data storage in SQLite. sqlite-utils can now insert data from binary files, and datasette-media can serve content over HTTP that originated as binary BLOBs in a database file.

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Weeknotes: datasette-copyable, datasette-insert-api

Two new Datasette plugins this week: datasette-copyable, helping users copy-and-paste data from Datasette into other places, and datasette-insert-api, providing a JSON API for inserting and updating data and creating tables.

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Weeknotes: datasette-auth-passwords, a Datasette logo and a whole lot more

All sorts of project updates this week.

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Building a self-updating profile README for GitHub

GitHub quietly released a new feature at some point in the past few days: profile READMEs. Create a repository with the same name as your GitHub account (in my case that’s github.com/simonw/simonw), add a README.md to it and GitHub will render the contents at the top of your personal profile page—for me that’s github.com/simonw

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Weeknotes: SBA Covid-19 PPP loans, Datasette talks, Datasette plugin upgrades

This week I’ve mainly been exploring Small Business Administration Covid-19 loans data, pitching some talks and upgrading some plugins for compatibility with Datasette 0.44+.

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Datasette 0.45: The annotated release notes

Datasette 0.45, out today, features magic parameters for canned queries, a log out feature, improved plugin documentation and four new plugin hooks.

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Single sign-on against GitHub using ASGI middleware

I released Datasette 0.29 last weekend, the first version of Datasette to be built on top of ASGI (discussed previously in Porting Datasette to ASGI, and Turtles all the way down).

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Documentation unit tests

Or: Test-driven documentation.

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Doc of docs

Here’s a low-tech, high-impact trick I recently learned at work that’s amazingly useful: create a doc-of-docs.

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Software or project management technique for DIY home renovations?

We’ve been using a Trello board for this. Free, flexible, fun to use and has good mobile as well as desktop support. You can model “this task requires this task first” by linking to other cards in comments.

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What is the biggest team to join Y Combinator?

Larger teams that apply for YC generally have to nominate 2-3 “founders”, mainly for logistical reasons: there simply isn’t enough room at the dinners for larger groups. The non-founders don’t get to go to all of the dinners, though they can come along to a few of them as guests of the founders.

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Events (leisure): How do you organize a conferencce?

Read http://www.quirksmode.org/coh/—and good luck!

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How do I choose between asynchronous web frameworks? My tech group is fairly language agnostic and we’re trying to standardize on some technologies.

Since they are all pretty close to each other and it sounds like your tech group’s skills would support any of them, I would suggest having your tram build a simple prototype in all three so you can compare them for your own particular team and situation.

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