Simon Willison’s Weblog

The Zen of Python, Unix, and LLMs. Here’s the YouTube recording of my 1.5 hour conversation with Hugo Bowne-Anderson yesterday.

I fed a Whisper transcript to Google Gemini Pro 1.5 and asked it for the themes from our conversation, and it said we talked about “Python’s success and versatility, the rise and potential of LLMs, data sharing and ethics in the age of LLMs, Unix philosophy and its influence on software development and the future of programming and human-computer interaction”. # 29th February 2024, 9:04 pm

The Zen of Python, Unix, and LLMs with Simon Willison (via) I’m participating in a live online fireside chat with Hugo Bowne-Anderson tomorrow afternoon (3pm Pacific / 6pm Eastern / 11pm GMT) talking about LLMs, Datasette, my open source process, applying the Unix pipes philosophy to LLMs and a whole lot more. It’s free to register. # 27th February 2024, 11:11 pm

Latent Space: Code Interpreter == GPT 4.5 (via) I presented as part of this Latent Space episode over the weekend, talking about the newly released ChatGPT Code Interpreter mode with swyx, Alex Volkov, Daniel Wilson and more. swyx did a great job editing our Twitter Spaces conversation into a podcast and writing up a detailed executive summary, posted here along with the transcript. If you’re curious you can listen to the first 15 minutes to get a great high-level explanation of Code Interpreter, or stick around for the full two hours for all of the details.

Apparently our live conversation had 17,000+ listeners! # 10th July 2023, 10:06 pm

Data analysis with SQLite and Python. I turned my 2hr45m workshop from PyCon into the latest official tutorial on the Datasette website. It includes an extensive handout which should be useful independently of the video itself. # 2nd July 2023, 4:48 pm

Emergency Pod: OpenAI’s new Functions API, 75% Price Drop, 4x Context Length (via) I participated in a Twitter Spaces conversation last night about the new OpenAI functions mechanism. The recording has now been turned into a Latent Space podcast, and swyx has accompanied the recording with a detailed write-up of the different topics we covered. # 14th June 2023, 7:23 pm

No Moat: Closed AI gets its Open Source wakeup call — ft. Simon Willison (via) I joined the Latent Space podcast yesterday (on short notice, so I was out and about on my phone) to talk about the leaked Google memo about open source LLMs. This was a Twitter Space, but swyx did an excellent job of cleaning up the audio and turning it into a podcast. # 5th May 2023, 6:17 pm

Don’t Read Off The Screen (via) Stuart Langridge provides a fantastic set of public speaking tips in a five minute lightning talk remix of Sunscreen. Watch with sound. # 4th November 2022, 4:02 pm

OCTO Speaker Series: Simon Willison—Personal Data Warehouses: Reclaiming Your Data. I’m giving a talk in the GitHub OCTO (Office of the CTO) speaker series about Datasette and my Dogsheep personal analytics project. You can register for free here—the stream will be on Thursday November 12, 2020 at 8:30am PST (4:30pm GMT). # 23rd October 2020, 3 am

mendoza-trees-workshop (via) Eventbrite Argentina has an academy program to train new Python/Django developers. I presented a workshop there this morning showing how Django and Jupyter can be used together to iterate on a project. Since the session was primarily about demonstrating Jupyter it was mostly live-coding, but the joy of Jupyter is that at the end of a workshop you can go back and add inline commentary to the notebooks that you used. In putting together the workshop I learned about the django_extensions “/manage.py shell_plus --notebook” command—it’s brilliant! It launches Jupyter in a way that lets you directly import your Django models without having to mess around with DJANGO_SETTINGS_MODULE. # 8th May 2018, 5:22 pm

How To Be A Good Participant On A Panel: Disagree. When I’m on a panel, I always try to have lunch or dinner with the other panelists beforehand to figure out in advance what points we disagree on. # 5th March 2010, 9 am

What’s coming in Django 1.2 (presentation notes). I wrote up some background notes for the talk on Django 1.2 I gave at DJUGL last week. # 5th December 2009, 5:10 pm

Exploring Python (via) Notes from the introduction to Python presentation I gave today at Stack Overflow DevDays Amsterdam. # 2nd November 2009, 3:35 pm

Zeppelin 101 in 5 mins (via) Ribot videoed my five minute lightning talk on Zeppelins at last night’s Skillswap Brighton. # 30th October 2008, 5:05 pm

When Ajax Attacks! Web application security fundamentals. Slides and (other people’s) notes from my presentation at @media Ajax on Tuesday. # 17th September 2008, 11:18 pm

I love Zeppelins, and you should too (via) Slides from my PyCon UK lightning talk on Zeppelins. I’ve annotated them using SlideShare comments. # 13th September 2008, 6:38 pm

Django snippets: Orderable inlines using drag and drop with jQuery UI. Code example from my PyCon tutorial on customising the Django admin interface. # 13th September 2008, 12:19 pm

Debugging Django, a slidecast. I used SlideShare’s slidecast tool for the first time to synchronize audio of my Django London User Group talk with the slides. The talk included several live demos which aren’t represented in the slides so it’s a bit piecemeal in places. # 25th May 2008, 2:47 pm

How to make Ajax work for you. Slides from my three hour Ajax tutorial, presented at Web 2.0 Expo Berlin on Monday. # 7th November 2007, 10:35 am

Webstock 2008—New Zealand’s web conference. I’m speaking next year in New Zealand! Very excited, plan to spend most of February there to make the most of the flights. # 18th September 2007, 12:02 pm

OpenID Bootcamp Tutorial. Slides from the OpenID Bootcamp tutorial I gave this morning with David Recordon. # 25th July 2007, 12:39 am

Django Master Class. Notes and slides from the OSCON tutorial I gave yesterday with Jacob Kaplan-Moss and Jeremy Dunck. # 24th July 2007, 3:20 pm

The Django Web Application Framework. I’m slowly pushing my presentations from the past couple of years up to Slideshare. This is a Django talk from April 2006, so it’s a little out of date. # 5th July 2007, 1:07 am

My Google Tech Talk on OpenID. I gave this extended and improved version of my “Implications of OpenID” talk at Google on Monday. Fast turnaround on the video! # 28th June 2007, 8 am

@media 2007 writeup from AlastairC. Good notes on a bunch of sessions, including mine. # 11th June 2007, 12:24 am

XTech 2007 Registration. Deadline for online registrations is 2nd May. It looks like it’ll be a really good conference this year (disclaimer: I’m speaking). # 27th April 2007, 4:05 pm

The sliding scale. Jeremy’s write-up of my panel at the Web 2.0 Expo, with illustrative photograph. # 25th April 2007, 7:09 pm

How to Moderate a Panel. By Derek Powazek. I tried to follow this advice a couple of days ago. # 20th April 2007, 7:41 am

What the heck is HTML 5? Slides from my five minute HTML 5 talk at Oxford Geek Night 2. # 12th April 2007, 2:41 pm

Oxford Geek Nights. 8pm on the 7th of February 2007 at the Jericho Tavern in Oxford. Three 15 minute talks and a bunch of 5 minute microslots. I’ll be giving a talk on OpenID. # 22nd January 2007, 7:22 pm