Simon Willison’s Weblog

Marimo (via) This is a really interesting new twist on Python notebooks.

The most powerful feature is that these notebooks are reactive: if you change the value or code in a cell (or change the value in an input widget) every other cell that depends on that value will update automatically. It’s the same pattern implemented by Observable JavaScript notebooks, but now it works for Python.

There are a bunch of other nice touches too. The notebook file format is a regular Python file, and those files can be run as “applications” in addition to being edited in the notebook interface. The interface is very nicely built, especially for such a young project—they even have GitHub Copilot integration for their CodeMirror cell editors. # 12th January 2024, 9:17 pm

The Random Transformer (via) “Understand how transformers work by demystifying all the math behind them”—Omar Sanseviero from Hugging Face meticulously implements the transformer architecture behind LLMs from scratch using Python and numpy. There’s a lot to take in here but it’s all very clearly explained. # 10th January 2024, 5:09 am

Python 3.13 gets a JIT. “In late December 2023 (Christmas Day to be precise), CPython core developer Brandt Bucher submitted a little pull-request to the Python 3.13 branch adding a JIT compiler.”

Anthony Shaw does a deep dive into this new experimental JIT, explaining how it differs from other JITs. It’s an implementation of a copy-and-patch JIT, an idea that only emerged in 2021. This makes it architecturally much simpler than a traditional JIT, allowing it to compile faster and take advantage of existing LLVM tools on different architectures.

So far it’s providing a 2-9% performance improvement, but the real impact will be from the many future optimizations it enables. # 9th January 2024, 9:25 pm

Fastest Way to Read Excel in Python (via) Haki Benita produced a meticulously researched and written exploration of the options for reading a large Excel spreadsheet into Python. He explored Pandas, Tablib, Openpyxl, shelling out to LibreOffice, DuckDB and python-calamine (a Python wrapper of a Rust library). Calamine was the winner, taking 3.58s to read 500,00 rows—compared to Pandas in last place at 32.98s. # 3rd January 2024, 8:04 pm

iSH: The Linux shell for iOS (via) Installing this iOS app gives you a full Linux shell environment running on your phone, using a “usermode x86 emulator”. You can even install packages: “apk add python3” gave me a working Python 3.9 interpreter, installed from the apk.ish.app repository.

I didn’t think this kind of thing was allowed by the App Store, but that’s not been the case for a few years now: Section 4.5.2 of the App Store guidelines clarifies that “Educational apps designed to teach, develop, or allow students to test executable code may, in limited circumstances, download code provided that such code is not used for other purposes.” # 31st December 2023, 4:20 am

ast-grep (via) There are a lot of interesting things about this year-old project.

sg (an alias for ast-grep) is a CLI tool for running AST-based searches against code, built in Rust on top of the Tree-sitter parsing library. You can run commands like this:

sg -p ’await await_me_maybe($ARG)’ datasette --lang python

To search the datasette directory for code that matches the search pattern, in a syntax-aware way.

It works across 19 different languages, and can handle search-and-replace too, so it can work as a powerful syntax-aware refactoring tool.

My favourite detail is how it’s packaged. You can install the CLI utility using Homebrew, Cargo, npm or pip/pipx—each of which will give you a CLI tool you can start running. On top of that it provides API bindings for Rust, JavaScript and Python! # 10th December 2023, 7:56 pm

It’s Time For A Change: datetime.utcnow() Is Now Deprecated (via) Miguel Grinberg explains the deprecation of datetime.utcnow() and utcfromtimestamp() in Python 3.12, since they return naive datetime objects which cause all sorts of follow-on problems.

The replacement idiom is datetime.datetime.now(datetime.timezone.utc) # 18th November 2023, 7:24 pm

Fleet Context. This project took the source code and documentation for 1221 popular Python libraries and ran them through the OpenAI text-embedding-ada-002 embedding model, then made those pre-calculated embedding vectors available as Parquet files for download from S3 or via a custom Python CLI tool.

I haven’t seen many projects release pre-calculated embeddings like this, it’s an interesting initiative. # 15th November 2023, 10:20 pm

See the History of a Method with git log -L (via) Neat Git trick from Caleb Hearth that I hadn’t seen before, and it works for Python out of the box:

git log -L :path_with_format:__init__.py

That command displays a log (with diffs) of just the portion of commits that changed the path_with_format function in the __init__.py file. # 5th November 2023, 8:16 pm

My User Experience Porting Off setup.py (via) PyOxidizer maintainer Gregory Szorc provides a detailed account of his experience trying to figure out how to switch from setup.py to pyproject.toml for his zstandard Python package.

This kind of detailed usability feedback is incredibly valuable for project maintainers, especially when the user encountered this many different frustrations along the way. It’s like the written version of a detailed usability testing session. # 31st October 2023, 7:57 pm

chDB (via) This is a really interesting development: chDB offers “an embedded SQL OLAP Engine” as a Python package, which you can install using “pip install chdb”. What you’re actually getting is a wrapper around ClickHouse—it’s almost like ClickHouse has been repackaged into an embedded database similar to SQLite. # 24th October 2023, 11:04 pm

I’m banned for life from advertising on Meta. Because I teach Python. (via) If accurate, this describes a nightmare scenario of automated decision making.

Reuven recently found he had a permanent ban from advertising on Facebook. They won’t tell him exactly why, and have marked this as a final decision that can never be reviewed.

His best theory (impossible for him to confirm) is that it’s because he tried advertising a course on Python and Pandas a few years ago which was blocked because a dumb algorithm thought he was trading exotic animals!

The worst part? An appeal is no longer possible because relevant data is only retained for 180 days and so all of the related evidence has now been deleted.

Various comments on Hacker News from people familiar with these systems confirm that this story likely holds up. # 19th October 2023, 2:56 pm

Bottleneck T5 Text Autoencoder (via) Colab notebook by Linus Lee demonstrating his Contra Bottleneck T5 embedding model, which can take up to 512 tokens of text, convert that into a 1024 floating point number embedding vector... and then then reconstruct the original text (or a close imitation) from the embedding again.

This allows for some fascinating tricks, where you can do things like generate embeddings for two completely different sentences and then reconstruct a new sentence that combines the weights from both. # 10th October 2023, 2:12 am

New sqlite3 CLI tool in Python 3.12. The newly released Python 3.12 includes a SQLite shell, which you can open using “python -m sqlite3”—handy for when you’re using a machine that has Python installed but no sqlite3 binary.

I installed Python 3.12 for macOS using the official installer from Python.org and now “/usr/local/bin/python3 -m sqlite3” gives me a SQLite 3.41.1 shell—a pleasantly recent version from March 2023 (the latest SQLite is 3.43.1, released in September). # 3rd October 2023, 6:57 pm

Get Your Mac Python From Python.org. Glyph recommends the official Python installer from python.org as the best way to get started with a Python environment on macOS—with require-virtualenv = true in your ~/.pip/pip.conf to help avoid accidentally installing global packages. # 30th September 2023, 2:39 am

A Hackers’ Guide to Language Models. Jeremy Howard’s new 1.5 hour YouTube introduction to language models looks like a really useful place to catch up if you’re an experienced Python programmer looking to start experimenting with LLMs. He covers what they are and how they work, then shows how to build against the OpenAI API, build a Code Interpreter clone using OpenAI functions, run models from Hugging Face on your own machine (with NVIDIA cards or on a Mac) and finishes with a demo of fine-tuning a Llama 2 model to perform text-to-SQL using an open dataset. # 25th September 2023, 12:24 am

How CPython Implements and Uses Bloom Filters for String Processing. Fascinating dive into Python string internals by Abhinav Upadhyay. It turns out CPython uses very simple bloom filters in several parts of the core string methods, to solve problems like splitting on newlines where there are actually eight codepoints that could represent a newline, and a tiny bloom filter can help filter a character in a single operation before performing all eight comparisons only if that first check failed. # 16th September 2023, 10:32 pm

bpy—Blender on PyPI (via) TIL you can “pip install” Blender!

bpy “provides Blender as a Python module”—it’s part of the official Blender project, and ships with binary wheels ranging in size from 168MB to 319MB depending on your platform.

It only supports the version of Python used by the current Blender release though—right now that’s Python 3.10. # 8th September 2023, 3:29 pm

Understanding Immortal Objects in Python 3.12. Abhinav Upadhyay provides a clear and detailed explanation of immortal objects coming in Python 3.12, which ensure Python no longer updates reference counts for immutable objects such as True, False, None and low-values integers. The trick (which maintains ABI compatibility) is pretty simple: a reference count value of 4294967295 now means an object is immortal, and the existing Py_INCREF and Py_DECREF macros have been updated to take that into account. # 26th August 2023, 12:08 pm

Lark parsing library JSON tutorial (via) A very convincing tutorial for a new-to-me parsing library for Python called Lark.

The tutorial covers building a full JSON parser from scratch, which ends up being just 19 lines of grammar definition code and 15 lines for the transformer to turn that tree into the final JSON.

It then gets into the details of optimization—the default Earley algorithm is quite slow, but swapping that out for a LALR parser (a one-line change) provides a 5x speedup for this particular example. # 13th August 2023, 9:50 pm

deno_python (via) A wildly impressive hack: deno_python uses Deno’s FFI interface to load your system’s Python framework (.dll/.dylib/.so) and sets up JavaScript proxy objects for imported Python objects—so you can run JavaScript code that instantiates objects from Python libraries and uses them to process data in different ways.

The latest release added pip support, so things like ’const np = await pip.import(“numpy”)’ now work. # 12th August 2023, 10:14 pm

Llama from scratch (or how to implement a paper without crying) (via) Brian Kitano implemented the model described in the Llama paper against TinyShakespeare, from scratch, using Python and PyTorch. This write-up is fantastic—meticulous, detailed and deeply informative. It would take several hours to fully absorb and follow everything Brian does here but it would provide multiple valuable lessons in understanding how all of this stuff fits together. # 9th August 2023, 7:21 pm

Python cocktail: mix a context manager and an iterator in equal parts (via) Explanation of a neat trick used by the Tenacity Python library, which provides a mechanism for retrying a chunk of code automatically on errors up to three times using a mixture of an iterator and a context manager to work around Python’s lack of multi-line lambda functions. # 6th August 2023, 5:44 pm

A Steering Council notice about PEP 703 (Making the Global Interpreter Lock Optional in CPython) (via) Huge news concerning the nogil research fork of Python: “It’s clear that the overall sentiment is positive, both for the general idea and for PEP 703 specifically. The Steering Council is also largely positive on both. We intend to accept PEP 703, although we’re still working on the acceptance details.” # 29th July 2023, 9:23 pm

textual-paint (via) Isaiah Odhner built a full working clone of MS Paint that runs entirely in the terminal, using Textual and Python. It’s worth trying this out to get a feel for quite how much you can get done with a CLI app these days—“pipx install textual-paint” worked for me. # 25th July 2023, 2:32 pm

Stamina: tutorial (via) Stamina is Hynek’s new Python library that implements an opinionated wrapper on top of Tenacity, providing a decorator for easily implementing exponential backoff retries. This tutorial includes a concise, clear explanation as to why this is such an important concept in building distributed systems. # 4th July 2023, 8:13 pm

Data analysis with SQLite and Python. I turned my 2hr45m workshop from PyCon into the latest official tutorial on the Datasette website. It includes an extensive handout which should be useful independently of the video itself. # 2nd July 2023, 4:48 pm