Entries in 2022
Filters: Type: entry × Year: 2022 × Sorted by date
Exploring the training data behind Stable Diffusion
Two weeks ago, the Stable Diffusion image generation model was released to the public. I wrote about this last week, in Stable Diffusion is a really big deal—a post which has since become one of the top ten results for “stable diffusion” on Google and shown up in all sorts of different places online.
[... 2897 words]Notes on the SQLite DuckDB paper
SQLite: Past, Present, and Future is a newly published paper authored by Kevin P. Gaffney, Martin Prammer and Jignesh M. Patel from the University of Wisconsin-Madison and D. Richard Hipp, Larry Brasfield and Dan Kennedy from the core SQLite engineering team.
[... 1021 words]Stable Diffusion is a really big deal
If you haven’t been paying attention to what’s going on with Stable Diffusion, you really should be.
[... 1443 words]Building a searchable archive for the San Francisco Microscopical Society
The San Francisco Microscopical Society was founded in 1870 by a group of scientists dedicated to advancing the field of microscopy.
[... 1845 words]Analyzing ScotRail audio announcements with Datasette—from prototype to production
Scottish train operator ScotRail released a two-hour long MP3 file containing all of the components of its automated station announcements. Messing around with them is proving to be a huge amount of fun.
[... 4428 words]Plugin support for Datasette Lite
I’ve added a new feature to Datasette Lite, my distribution of Datasette that runs entirely in the browser using Python and SQLite compiled to WebAssembly. You can now install additional Datasette plugins by passing them in the URL.
[... 865 words]Litestream backups for Datasette Cloud (and weeknotes)
My main focus this week has been adding robust backups to the forthcoming Datasette Cloud.
[... 1604 words]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.
[... 2081 words]Weeknotes: Datasette, sqlite-utils, Datasette Desktop
A flurry of releases this week, including a new Datasette alpha and a fixed Datasette Desktop.
[... 1113 words]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.
[... 1146 words]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.
[... 1983 words]s3-ocr: Extract text from PDF files stored in an S3 bucket
I’ve released s3-ocr, a new tool that runs Amazon’s Textract OCR text extraction against PDF files in an S3 bucket, then writes the resulting text out to a SQLite database with full-text search configured so you can run searches against the extracted data.
[... 1493 words]First impressions of DALL-E, generating images from text
I made it off the DALL-E waiting list a few days ago and I’ve been having an enormous amount of fun experimenting with it. Here are some notes on what I’ve learned so far (and a bunch of example images too).
[... 2102 words]Joining CSV files in your browser using Datasette Lite
I added a new feature to Datasette Lite—my version of Datasette that runs entirely in your browser using WebAssembly (previously): you can now use it to load one or more CSV files by URL, and then run SQL queries against them—including joins across data from multiple files.
[... 546 words]Weeknotes: datasette-socrata, and the last 10%...
... takes 90% of the work. I continue to work towards a preview of the new Datasette Cloud, and keep finding new “just one more things” to delay inviting in users.
[... 1214 words]Twenty years of my blog
I started this blog on June 12th 2002—twenty years ago today! To celebrate two decades of blogging, I decided to pull together some highlights and dive down a self-indulgent nostalgia hole.
[... 4455 words]A tiny web app to create images from OpenStreetMap maps
Earlier today I found myself wanting to programmatically generate some images of maps.
[... 1388 words]Weeknotes: Datasette Cloud ready to preview
I made an absolute ton of progress building Datasette Cloud on Fly this week, and also had a bunch of fun playing with GPT-3.
[... 370 words]How to use the GPT-3 language model
I ran a Twitter poll the other day asking if people had tried GPT-3 and why or why not. The winning option, by quite a long way, was “No, I don’t know how to”. So here’s how to try it out, for free, without needing to write any code.
[... 838 words]A Datasette tutorial written by GPT-3
I’ve been playing around with OpenAI’s GPT-3 language model playground for a few months now. It’s a fascinating piece of software. You can sign up here—apparently there’s no longer a waiting list.
[... 1244 words]Weeknotes: Building Datasette Cloud on Fly Machines, Furo for documentation
Hosting provider Fly released Fly Machines this week. I got an early preview and I’ve been working with it for a few days—it’s a fascinating new piece of technology. I’m using it to get my hosting service for Datasette ready for wider release.
[... 1005 words]Bundling binary tools in Python wheels
I spotted a new (to me) pattern which I think is pretty interesting: projects are bundling compiled binary applications as part of their Python packaging wheels. I think it’s really neat.
[... 903 words]Weeknotes: Camping, a road trip and two new museums
Natalie and I took a week-long road trip and camping holiday. The plan was to camp on Santa Rosa Island in the California Channel Islands, but the boat to the island was cancelled due to bad weather. We treated ourselves to a Central Californian road trip instead.
[... 872 words]Weeknotes: Datasette Lite, nogil Python, HYTRADBOI
My big project this week was Datasette Lite, a new way to run Datasette directly in a browser, powered by WebAssembly and Pyodide. I also continued my research into running SQL queries in parallel, described last week. Plus I spoke at HYTRADBOI.
[... 1434 words]Datasette Lite: a server-side Python web application running in a browser
Datasette Lite is a new way to run Datasette: entirely in a browser, taking advantage of the incredible Pyodide project which provides Python compiled to WebAssembly plus a whole suite of useful extras.
[... 4800 words]Automatically opening issues when tracked file content changes
I figured out a GitHub Actions pattern to keep track of a file published somewhere on the internet and automatically open a new repository issue any time the contents of that file changes.
[... 1211 words]Weeknotes: Parallel SQL queries for Datasette, plus some middleware tricks
A promising new performance optimization for Datasette, plus new datasette-gzip and datasette-total-page-time plugins.
Useful tricks with pip install URL and GitHub
The pip install command can accept a URL to a zip file or tarball. GitHub provides URLs that can create a zip file of any branch, tag or commit in any repository. Combining these is a really useful trick for maintaining Python packages.
Building a Covid sewage Twitter bot (and other weeknotes)
I built a new Twitter bot today: @covidsewage. It tweets a daily screenshot of the latest Covid sewage monitoring data published by Santa Clara county.
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