Simon Willison’s Weblog

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Entries in Mar, 2024

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Running OCR against PDFs and images directly in your browser

I attended the Story Discovery At Scale data journalism conference at Stanford this week. One of the perennial hot topics at any journalism conference concerns data extraction: how can we best get data out of PDFs and images?

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llm cmd undo last git commit—a new plugin for LLM

I just released a neat new plugin for my LLM command-line tool: llm-cmd. It lets you run a command to to generate a further terminal command, review and edit that command, then hit <enter> to execute it or <ctrl-c> to cancel.

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Building and testing C extensions for SQLite with ChatGPT Code Interpreter

I wrote yesterday about how I used Claude and ChatGPT Code Interpreter for simple ad-hoc side quests—in that case, for converting a shapefile to GeoJSON and merging it into a single polygon.

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Claude and ChatGPT for ad-hoc sidequests

Here is a short, illustrative example of one of the ways in which I use Claude and ChatGPT on a daily basis.

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Weeknotes: the aftermath of NICAR

NICAR was fantastic this year. Alex and I ran a successful workshop on Datasette and Datasette Cloud, and I gave a lightning talk demonstrating two new GPT-4 powered Datasette plugins—datasette-enrichments-gpt and datasette-extract. I need to write more about the latter one: it enables populating tables from unstructured content (using a variant of this technique) and it’s really effective. I got it working just in time for the conference.

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The GPT-4 barrier has finally been broken

Four weeks ago, GPT-4 remained the undisputed champion: consistently at the top of every key benchmark, but more importantly the clear winner in terms of “vibes”. Almost everyone investing serious time exploring LLMs agreed that it was the most capable default model for the majority of tasks—and had been for more than a year.

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Prompt injection and jailbreaking are not the same thing

I keep seeing people use the term “prompt injection” when they’re actually talking about “jailbreaking”.

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Interesting ideas in Observable Framework

Mike Bostock, Announcing: Observable Framework:

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