Simon Willison’s Weblog

Talking about Django’s history and future on Django Chat (via) Django co-creator Jacob Kaplan-Moss sat down with the Django Chat podcast team to talk about Django’s history, his recent return to the Django Software Foundation board and what he hopes to achieve there.

Here’s his post about it, where he used Whisper and Claude to extract some of his own highlights from the conversation. # 21st March 2024, 12:42 am

“Wherever you get your podcasts” is a radical statement. Anil Dash points out that podcasts are one of the few cases where the dream really did work out:

“[...] what it represents is the triumph of exactly the kind of technology that’s supposed to be impossible: open, empowering tech that’s not owned by any one company, that can’t be controlled by any one company, and that allows people to have ownership over their work and their relationship with their audience.” # 9th February 2024, 5:18 am

Django Chat: Datasette, LLMs, and Django. I’m the guest on the latest episode of the Django Chat podcast. We talked about Datasette, LLMs, the New York Times OpenAI lawsuit, the Python Software Foundation and all sorts of other topics. # 24th January 2024, 8:41 pm

Open Source LLMs with Simon Willison. I was invited to the Oxide and Friends weekly audio show (previously on Twitter Spaces, now using broadcast using Discord) to talk about open source LLMs, and to respond to a very poorly considered op-ed calling for them to be regulated as “uniquely dangerous”. It was a really fun conversation, now available to listen to as a podcast or YouTube audio-only video. # 17th January 2024, 8:53 pm

Simon Willison (Part Two): How Datasette Helps With Investigative Reporting. The second part of my Newsroom Robots podcast conversation with Nikita Roy. This episode includes my best audio answer yet to the “what is Datasette?” question, plus notes on how to use LLMs in journalism despite their propensity to make things up. # 5th December 2023, 8:27 pm

AGI is Being Achieved Incrementally (OpenAI DevDay w/ Simon Willison, Alex Volkov, Jim Fan, Raza Habib, Shreya Rajpal, Rahul Ligma, et al). I participated in an an hour long conversation today about the new things released at OpenAI DevDay, now available on the Latent Space podcast. # 8th November 2023, 2:50 am

Llama 2: The New Open LLM SOTA. I’m in this Latent Space podcast, recorded yesterday, talking about the Llama 2 release. # 19th July 2023, 5:37 pm

Latent Space: Code Interpreter == GPT 4.5 (via) I presented as part of this Latent Space episode over the weekend, talking about the newly released ChatGPT Code Interpreter mode with swyx, Alex Volkov, Daniel Wilson and more. swyx did a great job editing our Twitter Spaces conversation into a podcast and writing up a detailed executive summary, posted here along with the transcript. If you’re curious you can listen to the first 15 minutes to get a great high-level explanation of Code Interpreter, or stick around for the full two hours for all of the details.

Apparently our live conversation had 17,000+ listeners! # 10th July 2023, 10:06 pm

Emergency Pod: OpenAI’s new Functions API, 75% Price Drop, 4x Context Length (via) I participated in a Twitter Spaces conversation last night about the new OpenAI functions mechanism. The recording has now been turned into a Latent Space podcast, and swyx has accompanied the recording with a detailed write-up of the different topics we covered. # 14th June 2023, 7:23 pm

No Moat: Closed AI gets its Open Source wakeup call — ft. Simon Willison (via) I joined the Latent Space podcast yesterday (on short notice, so I was out and about on my phone) to talk about the leaked Google memo about open source LLMs. This was a Twitter Space, but swyx did an excellent job of cleaning up the audio and turning it into a podcast. # 5th May 2023, 6:17 pm

The Changelog: Stable Diffusion breaks the internet. I’m on this week’s episode of The Changelog podcast, talking about Stable Diffusion, AI ethics and a little bit about prompt injection attacks too. # 17th September 2022, 2:14 am

The Untold Story of SQLite With Richard Hipp. This is a really interesting interview with SQLite creator D. Richard Hipp—it covers all sorts of aspects of the SQLite story I hadn’t heard before, from its inspiration by a software challenge on a battleship to the first income from clients such as AOL and Symbian to the formation of the SQLite Consortium (based on advice from Mozilla’s Mitchell Baker) and more. # 16th July 2021, 8:12 pm

Develomentor podcast: Simon Willison – Data Journalism, The Importance of Side Projects (via) Grant Ingersoll interviewed me for the Develomentor podcast. We talked about my career so far, and how much of it was driven by side-projects that I’ve worked on individually or with Natalie. # 17th July 2020, 1:33 am

Welcome to Django Dose. Launched at DjangoCon, a new Django community site designed to be a successor to TWiD, still with (shorter) podcasts but also featuring more news, articles and screencasts. # 21st September 2009, 6:21 pm

This Week in Django. After 33 episodes Django’s usually-weekly podcast finally has its own website. # 14th August 2008, 2:57 pm

Open Web Podcast Episode 1. I haven’t listened yet, but Alex Russell, John Resig and Dion Almaer all at once? Awesome. # 8th August 2008, 11:59 pm

FLOSS Weekly 34: Django. Randal Schwartz interviewed Jacob Kaplan-Moss at OSCON for the consistently excellent FLOSS Weekly podcast. # 27th July 2008, 9:47 am

The end of LugRadio. Wow. LugRadio was a podcast before the term podcast had even been coined. It will be sorely missed. # 30th June 2008, 2:03 pm

This Week in Django podcast. Michael Trier’s been doing a really fantastic job putting together a Django podcast. The most recent episode (number 4) includes an update on the newforms-admin branch and a couple of handy tips. # 1st January 2008, 10:44 am