Simon Willison’s Weblog

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23 items tagged “annotated-talks”

Annotated versions of talks I have given, with extensive notes and additional links. Here's how I make these.

2024

Imitation Intelligence, my keynote for PyCon US 2024

Visit Imitation Intelligence, my keynote for PyCon US 2024

I gave an invited keynote at PyCon US 2024 in Pittsburgh this year. My goal was to say some interesting things about AI—specifically about Large Language Models—both to help catch people up who may not have been paying close attention, but also to give people who were paying close attention some new things to think about.

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Open challenges for AI engineering

Visit Open challenges for AI engineering

I gave the opening keynote at the AI Engineer World’s Fair yesterday. I was a late addition to the schedule: OpenAI pulled out of their slot at the last minute, and I was invited to put together a 20 minute talk with just under 24 hours notice!

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Building search-based RAG using Claude, Datasette and Val Town

Visit Building search-based RAG using Claude, Datasette and Val Town

Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG) is a technique for adding extra “knowledge” to systems built on LLMs, allowing them to answer questions against custom information not included in their training data. A common way to implement this is to take a question from a user, translate that into a set of search queries, run those against a search engine and then feed the results back into the LLM to generate an answer.

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Language models on the command-line

Visit Language models on the command-line

I gave a talk about accessing Large Language Models from the command-line last week as part of the Mastering LLMs: A Conference For Developers & Data Scientists six week long online conference. The talk focused on my LLM Python command-line utility and ways you can use it (and its plugins) to explore LLMs and use them for useful tasks.

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AI for Data Journalism: demonstrating what we can do with this stuff right now

Visit AI for Data Journalism: demonstrating what we can do with this stuff right now

I gave a talk last month at the Story Discovery at Scale data journalism conference hosted at Stanford by Big Local News. My brief was to go deep into the things we can use Large Language Models for right now, illustrated by a flurry of demos to help provide starting points for further conversations at the conference.

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2023

Financial sustainability for open source projects at GitHub Universe

Visit Financial sustainability for open source projects at GitHub Universe

I presented a ten minute segment at GitHub Universe on Wednesday, ambitiously titled Financial sustainability for open source projects.

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Embeddings: What they are and why they matter

Visit Embeddings: What they are and why they matter

Embeddings are a really neat trick that often come wrapped in a pile of intimidating jargon.

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Open questions for AI engineering

Visit Open questions for AI engineering

Last week I gave the closing keynote at the AI Engineer Summit in San Francisco. I was asked by the organizers to both summarize the conference, summarize the last year of activity in the space and give the audience something to think about by posing some open questions for them to take home.

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Making Large Language Models work for you

Visit Making Large Language Models work for you

I gave an invited keynote at WordCamp 2023 in National Harbor, Maryland on Friday.

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How I make annotated presentations

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Giving a talk is a lot of work. I go by a rule of thumb I learned from Damian Conway: a minimum of ten hours of preparation for every one hour spent on stage.

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Catching up on the weird world of LLMs

Visit Catching up on the weird world of LLMs

I gave a talk on Sunday at North Bay Python where I attempted to summarize the last few years of development in the space of LLMs—Large Language Models, the technology behind tools like ChatGPT, Google Bard and Llama 2.

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Prompt injection explained, with video, slides, and a transcript

Visit Prompt injection explained, with video, slides, and a transcript

I participated in a webinar this morning about prompt injection, organized by LangChain and hosted by Harrison Chase, with Willem Pienaar, Kojin Oshiba (Robust Intelligence), and Jonathan Cohen and Christopher Parisien (Nvidia Research).

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2022

Coping strategies for the serial project hoarder

Visit Coping strategies for the serial project hoarder

I gave a talk at DjangoCon US 2022 in San Diego last month about productivity on personal projects, titled “Massively increase your productivity on personal projects with comprehensive documentation and automated tests”.

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2021

How to build, test and publish an open source Python library

Visit How to build, test and publish an open source Python library

At PyGotham this year I presented a ten minute workshop on how to package up a new open source Python library and publish it to the Python Package Index. Here is the video and accompanying notes, which should make sense even without watching the talk.

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Datasette—an ecosystem of tools for working with small data

Visit Datasette - an ecosystem of tools for working with small data

This is the transcript and video from a talk I gave at PyGotham 2020 about using SQLite, Datasette and Dogsheep to work with small data.

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Git scraping, the five minute lightning talk

Visit Git scraping, the five minute lightning talk

I prepared a lightning talk about Git scraping for the NICAR 2021 data journalism conference. In the talk I explain the idea of running scheduled scrapers in GitHub Actions, show some examples and then live code a new scraper for the CDC’s vaccination data using the GitHub web interface. Here’s the video.

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Video introduction to Datasette and sqlite-utils

Visit Video introduction to Datasette and sqlite-utils

I put together a 17 minute video introduction to Datasette and sqlite-utils for FOSDEM 2021, showing how you can use Datasette to explore data, and demonstrating using the sqlite-utils command-line tool to convert a CSV file into a SQLite database, and then publish it using datasette publish. Here’s the video, plus annotated screen captures with further links and commentary.

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2020

Personal Data Warehouses: Reclaiming Your Data

Visit Personal Data Warehouses: Reclaiming Your Data

I gave a talk yesterday about personal data warehouses for GitHub’s OCTO Speaker Series, focusing on my Datasette and Dogsheep projects. The video of the talk is now available, and I’m presenting that here along with an annotated summary of the talk, including links to demos and further information.

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2018

How to Instantly Publish Data to the Internet with Datasette

Visit How to Instantly Publish Data to the Internet with Datasette

I presented a session about Datasette at the PyBay 2018 conference in San Francisco. I talked about the project itself and demonstrated ways of creating and publishing databases using csvs-to-sqlite, Datasette Publish and my new sqlite-utils library.

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2010

Comprehensive notes from my three hour Redis tutorial

Visit Comprehensive notes from my three hour Redis tutorial

Last week I presented two talks at the inaugural NoSQL Europe conference in London. The first was presented with Matthew Wall and covered the ways in which we have been exploring NoSQL at the Guardian. The second was a three hour workshop on Redis, my favourite piece of software to have the NoSQL label applied to it.

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2009

Node.js is genuinely exciting

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I gave a talk on Friday at Full Frontal, a new one day JavaScript conference in my home town of Brighton. I ended up throwing away my intended topic (JSONP, APIs and cross-domain security) three days before the event in favour of a technology which first crossed my radar less than two weeks ago.

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2007

Comet works, and it’s easier than you think

Visit Comet works, and it's easier than you think

I gave a talk this morning at the Yahoo! Web Developer Summit on Comet, cometd and Bayeux.

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Doing Local Right

Visit Doing Local Right

“Doing Local Right” was the title of my talk at this year’s @media Europe. Patrick had asked me if I could put together a case study, and I jumped at the chance to share some of the work of my former colleagues at the Lawrence Journal-World newspaper in Lawrence, Kansas. I had the privilege of working at the newspaper for a year in late 2003-2004.

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