Simon Willison’s Weblog

Subscribe

Items tagged projects in Mar, 2024

Filters: Year: 2024 × Month: Mar × projects × Sorted by date


llm-nomic-api-embed. My new plugin for LLM which adds API access to the Nomic series of embedding models. Nomic models can be run locally too, which makes them a great long-term commitment as there’s no risk of the models being retired in a way that damages the value of your previously calculated embedding vectors. # 31st March 2024, 3:17 pm

textract-cli. This is my other OCR project from yesterday: I built the thinnest possible CLI wrapper around Amazon Textract, out of frustration at how hard that tool is to use on an ad-hoc basis.

It only works with JPEGs and PNGs (not PDFs) up to 5MB in size, reflecting limitations in Textract’s synchronous API: it can handle PDFs amazingly well but you have to upload them to an S3 bucket yet and I decided to keep the scope tight for the first version of this tool.

Assuming you’ve configured AWS credentials already, this is all you need to know:

pipx install textract-cli
textract-cli image.jpeg > output.txt # 30th March 2024, 7:01 pm

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?

[... 2263 words]

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

llm-gemini 0.1a1. I upgraded my llm-gemini plugin to add support for the new Google Gemini Pro 1.5 model, which is beginning to roll out in early access.

The 1.5 model supports 1,048,576 input tokens and generates up to 8,192 output tokens—a big step up from Gemini 1.0 Pro which handled 30,720 and 2,048 respectively.

The big missing feature from my LLM tool at the moment is image input—a fantastic way to take advantage of that huge context window. I have a branch for this which I really need to get into a useful state. # 28th March 2024, 3:32 am

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.

[... 923 words]

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.

[... 4612 words]

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

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.

[... 1430 words]

llm-claude-3 0.3. Anthropic released Claude 3 Haiku today, their least expensive model: $0.25/million tokens of input, $1.25/million of output (GPT-3.5 Turbo is $0.50/$1.50). Unlike GPT-3.5 Haiku also supports image inputs.

I just released a minor update to my llm-claude-3 LLM plugin adding support for the new model. # 13th March 2024, 9:18 pm

datasette/studio. I’m trying a new way to make Datasette available for small personal data manipulation projects, using GitHub Codespaces.

This repository is designed to be opened directly in Codespaces—detailed instructions in the README.

When the container starts it installs the datasette-studio family of plugins—including CSV upload, some enrichments and a few other useful feature—then starts the server running and provides a big green button to click to access the server via GitHub’s port forwarding mechanism. # 10th March 2024, 3:03 am

llm-claude-3. I built a new plugin for LLM—my command-line tool and Python library for interacting with Large Language Models—which adds support for the new Claude 3 models from Anthropic. # 4th March 2024, 6:46 pm