Simon Willison’s Weblog

Wrap text at specified width. New Observable notebook. I built this with the help of Claude 3 Opus—it’s a text wrapping tool which lets you set the width and also lets you optionally add a four space indent.

The four space indent is handy for posting on forums such as Hacker News that treat a four space indent as a code block. # 28th March 2024, 3:36 am

GitHub Public repo history tool (via) I built this Observable Notebook to run queries against the GH Archive (via ClickHouse) to try to answer questions about repository history—in particular, were they ever made public as opposed to private in the past.

It works by combining together PublicEvent event (moments when a private repo was made public) with the most recent PushEvent event for each of a user’s repositories. # 20th March 2024, 9:56 pm

Coroutines and web components (via) I like using generators in Python but I rarely knowingly use them in JavaScript—I’m probably most exposed to them by Observable, which uses then extensively under the hood as a mostly hidden implementation detail.

Laurent Renard here shows some absolutely ingenious tricks with them as a way of building stateful Web Components. # 9th March 2024, 3:38 am

Observable Framework 1.1 (via) Less than three weeks after 1.0, the 1.1 release adds a whole lot of interesting new stuff. The signature feature is self-hosted npm imports: Framework 1.0 linked out to CDN hosted copies of libraries, but 1.1 fetches copies locally and then bundles that code with the deployed static site.

This works by using the acorn JavaScript parsing library to statically analyze the code and find all of the relevant imports. # 5th March 2024, 9:12 pm