Simon Willison’s Weblog

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Semi-automating a Substack newsletter with an Observable notebook

I recently started sending out a weekly-ish email newsletter consisting of content from my blog. I’ve mostly automated that, using an Observable Notebook to generate the HTML. Here’s how that system works.

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AI-enhanced development makes me more ambitious with my projects

The thing I’m most excited about in our weird new AI-enhanced reality is the way it allows me to be more ambitious with my projects.

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I built a ChatGPT plugin to answer questions about data hosted in Datasette

Yesterday OpenAI announced support for ChatGPT plugins. It’s now possible to teach ChatGPT how to make calls out to external APIs and use the responses to help generate further answers in the current conversation.

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Weeknotes: AI won’t slow down, a new newsletter and a huge Datasette refactor

I’m a few weeks behind on my weeknotes, but it’s not through lack of attention to my blog. AI just keeps getting weirder and more interesting.

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apple-notes-to-sqlite (via) With the help of ChatGPT I finally figured out just enough AppleScript to automate the export of my notes to a SQLite database. AppleScript is a notoriously read-only language, which is turns out makes it a killer app for LLM-assisted coding. # 9th March 2023, 6:04 am

Weeknotes: A bunch of things I learned this week, plus datasette-explain

The Datasette table view refactor, JSON redesign and ?_extra= continues this week, mainly in this ongoing pull request and this tracking issue.

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datasette-scraper, Big Local News and other weeknotes

In addition to exploring the new MusicCaps training and evaluation data I’ve been working on the big Datasette JSON refactor, and getting excited about a Datasette project that I didn’t work on at all.

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Examples of sites built using Datasette (via) I gave the examples page on the Datasette website a significant upgrade today: it now includes screenshots (taken using shot-scraper) of six projects chosen to illustrate the variety of problems Datasette can be used to tackle. # 29th January 2023, 3:40 am

Exploring MusicCaps, the evaluation data released to accompany Google’s MusicLM text-to-music model

Google Research just released MusicLM: Generating Music From Text. It’s a new generative AI model that takes a descriptive prompt and produces a “high-fidelity” music track. Here’s the paper (and a more readable version using arXiv Vanity).

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How to implement Q&A against your documentation with GPT3, embeddings and Datasette

If you’ve spent any time with GPT-3 or ChatGPT, you’ve likely thought about how useful it would be if you could point them at a specific, current collection of text or documentation and have it use that as part of its input for answering questions.

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2022 in projects and blogging

In lieu of my regular weeknotes (I took two weeks off for the holidays) here’s a look back at 2022, mainly in terms of projects and things I’ve written about.

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Datasette 1.0a2: Upserts and finely grained permissions

I’ve released the third alpha of Datasette 1.0. The 1.0a2 release introduces upsert support to the new JSON API and makes some major improvements to the Datasette permissions system.

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Over-engineering Secret Santa with Python cryptography and Datasette

We’re doing a family Secret Santa this year, and we needed a way to randomly assign people to each other without anyone knowing who was assigned to who.

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AI assisted learning: Learning Rust with ChatGPT, Copilot and Advent of Code

I’m using this year’s Advent of Code to learn Rust—with the assistance of GitHub Copilot and OpenAI’s new ChatGPT.

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Datasette’s new JSON write API: The first alpha of Datasette 1.0

This week I published the first alpha release of Datasette 1.0, with a significant new feature: Datasette core now includes a JSON API for creating and dropping tables and inserting, updating and deleting data.

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Tracking Mastodon user numbers over time with a bucket of tricks

Mastodon is definitely having a moment. User growth is skyrocketing as more and more people migrate over from Twitter.

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Datasette Lite: Loading JSON data (via) I added a new feature to Datasette Lite: you can now pass it the URL to a JSON file (hosted on a CORS-compatible hosting provider such as GitHub or GitHub Gists) and it will load that file into a database table for you. It expects an array of objects, but if your file has an object as the root it will search through it looking for the first key that is an array of objects and load those instead. # 18th November 2022, 6:43 pm

Datasette is 5 today: a call for birthday presents

Five years ago today I published the first release of Datasette, in Datasette: instantly create and publish an API for your SQLite databases.

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Designing a write API for Datasette

Building out Datasette Cloud has made one thing clear to me: Datasette needs a write API for ingesting new data into its attached SQLite databases.

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Datasette 0.63: The annotated release notes

I released Datasette 0.63 today. These are the annotated release notes.

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Weeknotes: DjangoCon, SQLite in Django, datasette-gunicorn

I spent most of this week at DjangoCon in San Diego—my first outside-of-the-Bay-Area conference since the before-times.

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Measuring traffic during the Half Moon Bay Pumpkin Festival

This weekend was the 50th annual Half Moon Bay Pumpkin Festival.

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Half Moon Bay Pumpkin Festival traffic on Saturday 15th October 2022 (via) It’s the Half Moon Bay Pumpkin Festival this weekend... and its impact on the traffic between our little town of El Granada and Half Moon Bay—8 minutes drive away—is notorious. So I built a git scraper that archives estimated driving times from the Google Maps Navigation API, and used git-history to turn that scraped data into a SQLite database and visualize it on a chart. # 16th October 2022, 3:56 am

shot-scraper 1.0 (via) Only a minor release in terms of features, but I decided that I’m comfortable enough with the CLI design at this point that I’m ready to stamp a 1.0 on it and commit to not making backwards-incompatible changes (at least without shipping a 2.0 release, which I’d like to avoid if possible). # 15th October 2022, 9:28 pm

Weeknotes: Publishing data using Datasette Cloud

My initial preview releases of Datasette Cloud (the SaaS version of my Datasette open source project) have focused on private data collaboration.

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Weeknotes: Datasette Cloud preview invitations

This week I finally started sending out invitations for people to try out the preview of the new Datasette Cloud, my SaaS offering for Datasette.

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A tool to run caption extraction against online videos using Whisper and GitHub Issues/Actions

I released a new project this weekend, built during the Bellingcat Hackathon (I came second!) It’s called Action Transcription and it’s a tool for caturing captions and transcripts from online videos.

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Exploring 10m scraped Shutterstock videos used to train Meta’s Make-A-Video text-to-video model

Make-A-Video is a new “state-of-the-art AI system that generates videos from text” from Meta AI. It looks incredible—it really is DALL-E / Stable Diffusion for video. And it appears to have been trained on 10m video preview clips scraped from Shutterstock.

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Weeknotes: Datasette Lite, s3-credentials, shot-scraper, datasette-edit-templates and more

Despite distractions from AI I managed to make progress on a bunch of different projects this week, including new releases of s3-credentials and shot-scraper, a new datasette-edit-templates plugin and a small but neat improvement to Datasette Lite.

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Open every CSV file in a GitHub repository in Datasette Lite (via) I built an Observable notebook that accepts a GitHub repository as input, scans it for CSV files and generates a link to open all of those CSV files in Datasette Lite. # 1st September 2022, 7:24 pm