Simon Willison’s Weblog

Danielle Del, a spokeswoman for Sasso, said Dudesy is not actually an A.I.

“It’s a fictional podcast character created by two human beings, Will Sasso and Chad Kultgen,” Del wrote in an email. “The YouTube video ‘I’m Glad I’m Dead’ was completely written by Chad Kultgen.”

— George Carlin’s Estate Sues Podcasters Over A.I. Episode # 27th January 2024, 5:52 pm

If you have had any prior experience with personal computers, what you might expect to see is some sort of opaque code, called a “prompt,” consisting of phosphorescent green or white letters on a murky background. What you see with Macintosh is the Finder. On a pleasant, light background (you can later change the background to any of a number of patterns, if you like), little pictures called “icons” appear, representing choices available to you.

— Steven Levy (in 1984) # 27th January 2024, 1:33 am

Find a level of abstraction that works for what you need to do. When you have trouble there, look beneath that abstraction. You won’t be seeing how things really work, you’ll be seeing a lower-level abstraction that could be helpful. Sometimes what you need will be an abstraction one level up. Is your Python loop too slow? Perhaps you need a C loop. Or perhaps you need numpy array operations.

You (probably) don’t need to learn C.

— Ned Batchelder # 24th January 2024, 6:25 pm

We estimate the supply-side value of widely-used OSS is $4.15 billion, but that the demand-side value is much larger at $8.8 trillion. We find that firms would need to spend 3.5 times more on software than they currently do if OSS did not exist. [...] Further, 96% of the demand-side value is created by only 5% of OSS developers.

— The Value of Open Source Software, Harvard Business School Strategy Unit # 22nd January 2024, 4:35 pm

And now, in Anno Domini 2024, Google has lost its edge in search. There are plenty of things it can’t find. There are compelling alternatives. To me this feels like a big inflection point, because around the stumbling feet of the Big Tech dinosaurs, the Web’s mammals, agile and flexible, still scurry. They exhibit creative energy and strongly-flavored voices, and those voices still sometimes find and reinforce each other without being sock puppets of shareholder-value-focused private empires.

— Tim Bray # 20th January 2024, 12:13 pm

Tools are the things we build that we don’t ship—but that very much affect the artifact that we develop.

It can be tempting to either shy away from developing tooling entirely or (in larger organizations) to dedicate an entire organization to it.

In my experience, tooling should be built by those using it.

This is especially true for tools that improve the artifact by improving understanding: the best time to develop a debugger is when debugging!

— Bryan Cantrill # 18th January 2024, 3:27 am

You likely have a TinyML system in your pocket right now: every cellphone has a low power DSP chip running a deep learning model for keyword spotting, so you can say “Hey Google” or “Hey Siri” and have it wake up on-demand without draining your battery. It’s an increasingly pervasive technology. [...]

It’s astonishing what is possible today: real time computer vision on microcontrollers, on-device speech transcription, denoising and upscaling of digital signals. Generative AI is happening, too, assuming you can find a way to squeeze your models down to size. We are an unsexy field compared to our hype-fueled neighbors, but the entire world is already filling up with this stuff and it’s only the very beginning. Edge AI is being rapidly deployed in a ton of fields: medical sensing, wearables, manufacturing, supply chain, health and safety, wildlife conservation, sports, energy, built environment—we see new applications every day.

— Daniel Situnayake # 16th January 2024, 6:49 pm

We believe that AI tools are at their best when they incorporate and represent the full diversity and breadth of human intelligence and experience. [...] Because copyright today covers virtually every sort of human expression– including blog posts, photographs, forum posts, scraps of software code, and government documents–it would be impossible to train today’s leading AI models without using copyrighted materials. Limiting training data to public domain books and drawings created more than a century ago might yield an interesting experiment, but would not provide AI systems that meet the needs of today’s citizens.

— OpenAI to the Lords Select Committee on LLMs # 8th January 2024, 5:33 pm

If you learn something the hard way, share your findings with others. You have blazed a new trail; now you must mark it for your fellow travellers. Sharing knowledge is an unreasonably effective way of helping others.

— Nicolas Bouliane # 5th January 2024, 10:32 pm

Since the advent of ChatGPT, and later by using LLMs that operate locally, I have made extensive use of this new technology. The goal is to accelerate my ability to write code, but that’s not the only purpose. There’s also the intent to not waste mental energy on aspects of programming that are not worth the effort.

[...] Current LLMs will not take us beyond the paths of knowledge, but if we want to tackle a topic we do not know well, they can often lift us from our absolute ignorance to the point where we know enough to move forward on our own.

— Salvatore Sanfilippo # 2nd January 2024, 2:50 pm