Simon Willison’s Weblog

Get Your Mac Python From Python.org. Glyph recommends the official Python installer from python.org as the best way to get started with a Python environment on macOS—with require-virtualenv = true in your ~/.pip/pip.conf to help avoid accidentally installing global packages. # 30th September 2023, 2:39 am

Meta in Myanmar, Part I: The Setup. The first in a series by Erin Kissane explaining in detail exactly how things went so incredibly wrong with Facebook in Myanmar, contributing to a genocide ending hundreds of thousands of lives. This is an extremely tough read. # 30th September 2023, 2:27 am

Draggable objects (via) Amit Patel’s detailed write-up of a small but full-featured JavaScript function for creating draggable objects, with support for both mouse and touch devices “using browser features that are widely supported since 2020”. # 29th September 2023, 7:56 pm

Getting started with the Datasette Cloud API. I wrote an introduction to the Datasette Cloud API for the company blog, with a tutorial showing how to use Python and GitHub Actions to import data from the Federal Register into a table in Datasette Cloud, then configure full-text search against it. # 28th September 2023, 11:05 pm

Google was accidentally leaking its Bard AI chats into public search results. I’m quoted in this piece about yesterday’s Bard privacy bug: it turned out the share URL and “Let anyone with the link see what you’ve selected” feature wasn’t correctly setting a noindex parameter, and so some shared conversations were being swept up by the Google search crawlers. Thankfully this was a mistake, not a deliberate design decision, and it should be fixed by now. # 27th September 2023, 7:35 pm

Finding Bathroom Faucets with Embeddings. Absolutely the coolest thing I’ve seen someone build on top of my LLM tool so far: Drew Breunig is renovating a bathroom and needed a way to filter through literally thousands of options for facet taps. He scraped 20,000 images of fixtures from a plumbing supply site and used LLM to embed every one of them via CLIP... and now he can ask for “faucets that look like this one”, or even run searches for faucets that match “Gawdy” or “Bond Villain” or “Nintendo 64”. Live demo included! # 27th September 2023, 6:18 pm

Optimizing for Taste. David Cramer’s detailed explanation as to why his company Sentry mostly avoids A/B testing. David wrote this as an internal blog post originally, but is now sharing it with the world. I found myself nodding along vigorously as I read this—lots of astute observations here.

I particularly appreciated his closing note: “The strength of making a decision is making it. You can always make a new one later. Choose the obvious path forward, and if you don’t see one, find someone who does.” # 27th September 2023, 4:34 am

Rethinking the Luddites in the Age of A.I. I’ve been staying way clear of comparisons to Luddites in conversations about the potential harmful impacts of modern AI tools, because it seemed to me like an offensive, unproductive cheap shot.

This article has shown me that the comparison is actually a lot more relevant—and sympathetic—than I had realized.

In a time before labor unions, the Luddites represented an early example of a worker movement that tried to stand up for their rights in the face of transformational, negative change to their specific way of life.

“Knitting machines known as lace frames allowed one employee to do the work of many without the skill set usually required” is a really striking parallel to what’s starting to happen with a surprising array of modern professions already. # 26th September 2023, 11:45 pm

Batch size one billion: SQLite insert speedups, from the useful to the absurd (via) Useful, detailed review of ways to maximize the performance of inserting a billion integers into a SQLite database table. # 26th September 2023, 5:31 pm

Upsert in SQL (via) Anton Zhiyanov is currently on a one-man quest to write detailed documentation for all of the fundamental SQL operations, comparing and contrasting how they work across multiple engines, generally with interactive examples.

Useful tips in here on why “insert... on conflict” is usually a better option than “insert or replace into” because the latter can perform a delete and then an insert, firing triggers that you may not have wanted to be fired. # 25th September 2023, 8:34 pm

Geospatial SQL queries in SQLite using TG, sqlite-tg and datasette-sqlite-tg. Alex Garcia built sqlite-tg—a SQLite extension that uses the brand new TG geospatial library to provide a whole suite of custom SQL functions for working with geospatial data.

Here are my notes on trying out his initial alpha releases. The extension already provides tools for converting between GeoJSON, WKT and WKB, plus the all important tg_intersects() function for testing if a polygon or point overlap each other.

It’s pretty useful already. Without any geospatial indexing at all I was still able to get 700ms replies to a brute-force point-in-polygon query against 150MB of GeoJSON timezone boundaries stored as JSON text in a table. # 25th September 2023, 7:45 pm

A Hackers’ Guide to Language Models. Jeremy Howard’s new 1.5 hour YouTube introduction to language models looks like a really useful place to catch up if you’re an experienced Python programmer looking to start experimenting with LLMs. He covers what they are and how they work, then shows how to build against the OpenAI API, build a Code Interpreter clone using OpenAI functions, run models from Hugging Face on your own machine (with NVIDIA cards or on a Mac) and finishes with a demo of fine-tuning a Llama 2 model to perform text-to-SQL using an open dataset. # 25th September 2023, 12:24 am

Should you give candidates feedback on their interview performance? Jacob provides a characteristically nuanced answer to the question of whether you should provide feedback to candidates you have interviewed. He suggests offering the candidate the option to email asking for feedback early in the interview process to avoid feeling pushy later on, and proposes the phrase “you failed to demonstrate...” as a useful framing device. # 24th September 2023, 10:25 pm

TG: Polygon indexing (via) TG is a brand new geospatial library by Josh Baker, author of the Tile38 in-memory spatial server (kind of a geospatial Redis). TG is written in pure C and delivered as a single C file, reminiscent of the SQLite amalgamation.

TG looks really interesting. It implements almost the exact subset of geospatial functionality that I find most useful: point-in-polygon, intersect, WKT, WKB, and GeoJSON—all with no additional dependencies.

The most interesting thing about it is the way it handles indexing. In this documentation Josh describes two approaches he uses to speeding up point-in-polygon and intersection using a novel approach that goes beyond the usual RTree implementation.

I think this could make the basis of a really useful SQLite extension—a lighter-weight alternative to SpatiaLite. # 23rd September 2023, 4:32 am

The WebAssembly Go Playground (via) Jeff Lindsay has a full Go 1.21.1 compiler running entirely in the browser. # 19th September 2023, 7:53 pm

LLM 0.11. I released LLM 0.11 with support for the new gpt-3.5-turbo-instruct completion model from OpenAI.

The most interesting feature of completion models is the option to request “log probabilities” from them, where each token returned is accompanied by up to 5 alternatives that were considered, along with their scores. # 19th September 2023, 3:28 pm

Notes on using a single-person Mastodon server. Julia Evans experiences running a single-person Mastodon server (on masto.host—the same host I use for my own) pretty much exactly match what I’ve learned so far as well. The biggest disadvantage is the missing replies issue, where your server only shows replies to posts that come from people who you follow—so it’s easy to reply to something in a way that duplicates other replies that are invisible to you. # 16th September 2023, 10:35 pm

How CPython Implements and Uses Bloom Filters for String Processing. Fascinating dive into Python string internals by Abhinav Upadhyay. It turns out CPython uses very simple bloom filters in several parts of the core string methods, to solve problems like splitting on newlines where there are actually eight codepoints that could represent a newline, and a tiny bloom filter can help filter a character in a single operation before performing all eight comparisons only if that first check failed. # 16th September 2023, 10:32 pm

CAISO Grid Status (via) CAISO is the California Independent System Operator, a non-profit managing 80% of California’s electricity flow. This grid status page shows live data about the state of the grid and it’s fascinating: right now (2pm local time) California is running 71.4% on renewables, having peaked at 80% three hours ago. The current fuel mix is 52% solar, 31% natural gas, 7% each large hydro and nuclear and 2% wind. The charts on this page show how solar turns off overnight and then picks up and peaks during daylight hours. # 14th September 2023, 9:08 pm

Introducing datasette-litestream: easy replication for SQLite databases in Datasette. We use Litestream on Datasette Cloud for streaming backups of user data to S3. Alex Garcia extracted out our implementation into a standalone Datasette plugin, which bundles the Litestream Go binary (for the relevant platform) in the package you get when you run “datasette install datasette-litestream”—so now Datasette has a very robust answer to questions about SQLite disaster recovery beyond just the Datasette Cloud platform. # 13th September 2023, 7:28 pm

Some notes on Local-First Development (via) Local-First is the name that has been coined by the community of people who are interested in building apps where data is manipulated in a client application first (mobile, desktop or web) and then continually synchronized with a server, rather than the other way round. This is a really useful review by Kyle Mathews of how the space is shaping up so far—lots of interesting threads to follow here. # 13th September 2023, 3:48 am

Simulating History with ChatGPT (via) Absolutely fascinating new entry in the using-ChatGPT-to-teach genre. Benjamin Breen teaches history at UC Santa Cruz, and has been developing a sophisticated approach to using ChatGPT to play out role-playing scenarios involving different periods of history. His students are challenged to participate in them, then pick them apart—fact-checking details from the scenario and building critiques of the perspectives demonstrated by the language model. There are so many quotable snippets in here, I recommend reading the whole thing. # 13th September 2023, 3:36 am

All models on Hugging Face, sorted by downloads (via) I realized this morning that “sort by downloads” against the list of all of the models on Hugging Face can work as a reasonably good proxy for “which of these models are easiest to get running on your own computer”. # 10th September 2023, 5:24 pm

The AI-assistant wars heat up with Claude Pro, a new ChatGPT Plus rival. I’m quoted in this piece about the new Claude Pro $20/month subscription from Anthropic:

> Willison has also run into problems with Claude’s morality filter, which has caused him trouble by accident: “I tried to use it against a transcription of a podcast episode, and it processed most of the text before—right in front of my eyes—it deleted everything it had done! I eventually figured out that they had started talking about bomb threats against data centers towards the end of the episode, and Claude effectively got triggered by that and deleted the entire transcript.” # 10th September 2023, 5:07 pm

promptfoo: How to benchmark Llama2 Uncensored vs. GPT-3.5 on your own inputs. promptfoo is a CLI and library for “evaluating LLM output quality”. This tutorial in their documentation about using it to compare Llama 2 to gpt-3.5-turbo is a good illustration of how it works: it uses YAML files to configure the prompts, and more YAML to define assertions such as “not-icontains: AI language model”. # 10th September 2023, 4:19 pm

Matthew Honnibal from spaCy on why LLMs have not solved NLP. A common trope these days is that the entire field of NLP has been effectively solved by Large Language Models. Here’s a lengthy comment from Matthew Honnibal, creator of the highly regarded spaCy Python NLP library, explaining in detail why that argument doesn’t hold up. # 9th September 2023, 9:30 pm

Dynamic linker tricks: Using LD_PRELOAD to cheat, inject features and investigate programs (via) This tutorial by Rafał Cieślak from 2013 filled in a bunch of gaps in my knowledge about how C works on Linux. # 8th September 2023, 10:05 pm

bpy—Blender on PyPI (via) TIL you can “pip install” Blender!

bpy “provides Blender as a Python module”—it’s part of the official Blender project, and ships with binary wheels ranging in size from 168MB to 319MB depending on your platform.

It only supports the version of Python used by the current Blender release though—right now that’s Python 3.10. # 8th September 2023, 3:29 pm

hubcap.php (via) This PHP script by Dave Hulbert delights me. It’s 24 lines of code that takes a specified goal, then calls my LLM utility on a loop to request the next shell command to execute in order to reach that goal... and pipes the output straight into exec() after a 3s wait so the user can panic and hit Ctrl+C if it’s about to do something dangerous! # 6th September 2023, 3:45 pm

Using ChatGPT Code Intepreter (aka “Advanced Data Analysis”) to analyze your ChatGPT history. I posted a short thread showing how to upload your ChatGPT history to ChatGPT itself, then prompt it with “Build a dataframe of the id, title, create_time properties from the conversations.json JSON array of objects. Convert create_time to a date and plot it daily”. # 6th September 2023, 3:42 pm