Blogmarks in 2022
Filters: Type: blogmark × Year: 2022 × Sorted by date
Draw SVG rope using JavaScript (via) Delightful interactive tutorial by Stanko Tadić showing how to render an illustration of a rope using SVG, starting with a path. The way the tutorial is presented is outstanding.
Reverse Prompt Engineering for Fun and (no) Profit (via) swyx pulls off some impressive prompt leak attacks to reverse engineer the new AI features that just got added to Notion. He concludes that “Prompts are like clientside JavaScript. They are shipped as part of the product, but can be reverse engineered easily, and the meaningful security attack surface area is exactly the same.”
Detailed comment on HN describing how Second Life works these days. “There are about 27,500 live regions today, each with its own simulator program, always on even if nobody is using it. Each simulator program takes about one CPU and under 4GB on a server.”
Speech-to-text with Whisper: How I Use It & Why. Sumana Harihareswara’s in-depth review of Whisper, the shockingly effective open source text-to-speech transcription model release by OpenAI a few months ago. Includes an extremely thoughtful section considering the ethics of using this model—some of the most insightful short-form writing I’ve seen on AI model ethics generally.
Boring Python: code quality. James Bennett provides an opinionated guide to setting up Python tools for linting, code formatting and and other code quality concerns. Of particular interest to me is his section on packaging checks, which introduces a whole bunch of new-to-me tools that can help avoid accidentally shipping broken packages to PyPI.
Playing with ActivityPub (via) Tom MacWright describes his attempts to build the simplest possible ActivityPub publication—for a static site powered by Jekyll, where he used Netlify functions to handle incoming subscriptions (storing them in PlanetScale via their Deno API library) and wrote a script which loops through and notifies all of his subscriptions every time he publishes something new.
Data-driven performance optimization with Rust and Miri (via) Useful guide to some Rust performance optimization tools. Miri can be used to dump out a detailed JSON profile of a program which can then be opened and explored using the Chrome browser’s performance tool.
Introducing sqlite-loadable-rs: A framework for building SQLite Extensions in Rust. Alex Garcia has built a new Rust library for creating SQLite extensions—initially supporting custom scalar functions, virtual tables and table functions and with more types of extension coming soon. This looks very easy to use, partly because the documentation and examples are already delightfully thorough, especially for an initial release.
talk.wasm (via) “Talk with an Artificial Intelligence in your browser”. Absolutely stunning demo which loads the Whisper speech recognition model (75MB) and a GPT-2 model (240MB) and executes them both in your browser via WebAssembly, then uses the Web Speech API to talk back to you. The result is a full speak-with-an-AI interface running entirely client-side. GPT-2 sadly mostly generates gibberish but the fact that this works at all is pretty astonishing.
I Taught ChatGPT to Invent a Language (via) Dylan Black talks ChatGPT through the process of inventing a new language, with its own grammar. Really fun example of what happens when someone with a deep understanding of both the capabilities of language models and some other field (in this case linguistics) can achieve with an extended prompting session.
Understanding a Protocol. Andrew’s latest notes on how ActivityPub and Mastodon work under the hood, based on his extensive development work building out Takahē.
Building A Virtual Machine inside ChatGPT (via) Jonas Degrave presents a remarkable example of a creative use of ChatGPT: he prompts it to behave as a if it was a Linux shell, then runs increasingly complex sequences of commands against it and gets back surprisingly realistic results. By the end of the article he’s getting it to hallucinate responses to curl API requests run against imagined API versions of itself.
three.js examples: webgl_postprocessing_pixel (via) Neat new example for three.js that uses a pixel-shader postprocessor to apply an isometric pixel-art feel to a 3D scene.
Scaling Mastodon: The Compendium (via) Hazel Weakly’s collection of notes on scaling Mastodon, covering PostgreSQL, Sidekiq, Redis, object storage and more.
Stable Diffusion 2.0 and the Importance of Negative Prompts for Good Results. Stable Diffusion 2.0 is out, and it’s a very different model from 1.4/1.5. It’s trained using a new text encoder (OpenCLIP, in place of OpenAI’s CLIP) which means a lot of the old tricks—notably using “Greg Rutkowski” to get high quality fantasy art—no longer work. What DOES work, incredibly well, is negative prompting—saying things like “cyberpunk forest by Salvador Dali” but negative on “trees, green”. Max Woolf explores negative prompting in depth in this article, including how to combine it with textual inversion.
An Interactive Guide to Flexbox. Joshua Comeau built this fantastic guide to CSS flexbox layouts, with interactive examples of all of the properties. This is a really useful tour of the layout model.
Microsoft Flight Simulator: WebAssembly (via) This is such a smart application of WebAssembly: it can now be used to write extensions for Microsoft Flight Simulator, which means you can run code from untrusted sources safely in a sandbox. I’m really looking forward to more of this kind of usage—I love the idea of finally having a robust sandbox for running things like plugins.
Building a BFT JSON CRDT (via) Jacky Zhao describes their project to build a CRDT library for JSON data in Rust, and includes a thorough explanation of what CRDTs are and how they work. “I write this blog post mostly as a note to my past self, distilling a lot of what I’ve learned since into a blog post I wish I had read before going in”—the best kind of blog post!
Every remaining website using the .museum TLD (via) Jonty did a survey of every one of the 1,134 domains using the .museum TLD, which dates back to 2001 and is managed by The Museum Domain Management Association.
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.
fasiha/yamanote (via) Yamanote is “a guerrilla bookmarking server” by Ahmed Fasih—it works using a bookmarklet that grabs a full serialized copy of the page—the innerHTML of both the head and body element—and passes it to the server, which stores it in a SQLite database. The files are then served with a Content-Security-Policy’: `default-src ’self’ header to prevent stored pages from fetching ANY external assets when they are viewed.
JSON Changelog with SQLite (via) One of my favourite database challenges is how to track changes to rows over time. This is a neat recipe from 2018 which uses SQLite triggers and the SQLite JSON functions to serialize older versions of the rows and store them in TEXT columns.
Home invasion: Mastodon’s Eternal September begins. Hugh Rundle’s thoughtful write-up of the impact of the massive influx of new users from Twitter on the existing Mastodon community. If you’re new to Mastodon (like me) you should read this and think carefully about how best to respectfully integrate with your new online space.
PyScript Updates: Bytecode Alliance, Pyodide, and MicroPython. Absolutely huge news about Python on the Web tucked into this announcement: Anaconda have managed to get a version of MicroPython compiled to WebAssembly running in the browser. Pyodide weighs in at around 6.5MB compressed, but the MicroPython build is just 303KB—the size of a large image. This makes Python in the web browser applicable to so many more potential areas.
Semantic text search using embeddings. Example Python notebook from OpenAI demonstrating how to build a search engine using embeddings rather than straight up token matching. This is a fascinating way of implementing search, providing results that match the intent of the search (“delicious beans” for example) even if none of the keywords are actually present in the text.
Inside the mind of a frontend developer: Hero section. Ahmad Shadeed provides a fascinating, hyper-detailed breakdown of his approach to implementing a “hero section” component using HTML and CSS, including notes on CSS grids and gradient backgrounds.
Blessed.rs Crate List (via) Rust doesn’t have a very large standard library, so part of learning Rust is figuring out which of the third-party crates are the best for tackling common problems. This here is an opinionated guide to crates, which looks like it could be really useful.
GOV.UK: Rules for getting production access (via) Fascinating piece of internal documentation on GOV.UK describing their rules, procedures and granted permissions for their deployment and administrative ops roles.
Nikodemus’ Guide to Mastodon (via) I’ve been reading a bunch of different Mastodon guides and this one had pretty much exactly the information I needed to see when I first started out.
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.