Simon Willison’s Weblog

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191 items tagged “weeknotes”

I publish weeknotes once every two or three weeks documenting what I've been working on recently.

2024

December in LLMs has been a lot

I had big plans for December: for one thing, I was hoping to get to an actual RC of Datasette 1.0, in preparation for a full release in January. Instead, I’ve found myself distracted by a constant barrage of new LLM releases.

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Weeknotes: asynchronous LLMs, synchronous embeddings, and I kind of started a podcast

These past few weeks I’ve been bringing Datasette and LLM together and distracting myself with a new sort-of-podcast crossed with a live streaming experiment.

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W̶e̶e̶k̶n̶o̶t̶e̶s̶ Monthnotes for October

I try to publish weeknotes at least once every two weeks. It’s been four since the last entry, so I guess this one counts as monthnotes instead.

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Weeknotes: Three podcasts, two trips and a new plugin system

I fell behind a bit on my weeknotes. Here’s most of what I’ve been doing in September.

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Calling LLMs from client-side JavaScript, converting PDFs to HTML + weeknotes

Visit Calling LLMs from client-side JavaScript, converting PDFs to HTML + weeknotes

I’ve been having a bunch of fun taking advantage of CORS-enabled LLM APIs to build client-side JavaScript applications that access LLMs directly. I also span up a new Datasette plugin for advanced permission management.

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Optimizing Datasette (and other weeknotes)

Visit Optimizing Datasette (and other weeknotes)

I’ve been working with Alex Garcia on an experiment involving using Datasette to explore FEC contributions. We currently have a 11GB SQLite database—trivial for SQLite to handle, but at the upper end of what I’ve comfortably explored with Datasette in the past.

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Weeknotes: a staging environment, a Datasette alpha and a bunch of new LLMs

My big achievement for the last two weeks was finally wrapping up work on the Datasette Cloud staging environment. I also shipped a new Datasette 1.0 alpha and added support to the LLM ecosystem for a bunch of newly released models.

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Weeknotes: GPT-4o mini, LLM 0.15, sqlite-utils 3.37 and building a staging environment

Upgrades to LLM to support the latest models, and a whole bunch of invisible work building out a staging environment for Datasette Cloud.

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Weeknotes: a livestream, a surprise keynote and progress on Datasette Cloud billing

Visit Weeknotes: a livestream, a surprise keynote and progress on Datasette Cloud billing

My first YouTube livestream with Val Town, a keynote at the AI Engineer World’s Fair and some work integrating Stripe with Datasette Cloud. Plus a bunch of upgrades to my blog.

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Weeknotes: Datasette Studio and a whole lot of blogging

Visit Weeknotes: Datasette Studio and a whole lot of blogging

I’m still spinning back up after my trip back to the UK, so actual time spent building things has been less than I’d like. I presented an hour long workshop on command-line LLM usage, wrote five full blog entries (since my last weeknotes) and I’ve also been leaning more into short-form link blogging—a lot more prominent on this site now since my homepage redesign last week.

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Weeknotes: PyCon US 2024

Earlier this month I attended PyCon US 2024 in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. I gave an invited keynote on the Saturday morning titled “Imitation intelligence”, tying together much of what I’ve learned about Large Language Models over the past couple of years and making the case that the Python community has a unique opportunity and responsibility to help try to nudge this technology in a positive direction.

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Weeknotes: more datasette-secrets, plus a mystery video project

Visit Weeknotes: more datasette-secrets, plus a mystery video project

I introduced datasette-secrets two weeks ago. The core idea is to provide a way for end-users to store secrets such as API keys in Datasette, allowing other plugins to access them.

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Weeknotes: Llama 3, AI for Data Journalism, llm-evals and datasette-secrets

Visit Weeknotes: Llama 3, AI for Data Journalism, llm-evals and datasette-secrets

Llama 3 landed on Thursday. I ended up updating a whole bunch of different plugins to work with it, described in Options for accessing Llama 3 from the terminal using LLM.

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Three major LLM releases in 24 hours (plus weeknotes)

Visit Three major LLM releases in 24 hours (plus weeknotes)

I’m a bit behind on my weeknotes, so there’s a lot to cover here. But first... a review of the last 24 hours of Large Language Model news. All times are in US Pacific on April 9th 2024.

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Weeknotes: the aftermath of NICAR

Visit 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.

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Weeknotes: Getting ready for NICAR

Next week is NICAR 2024 in Baltimore—the annual data journalism conference hosted by Investigative Reporters and Editors. I’m running a workshop on Datasette, and I plan to spend most of my time in the hallway track talking to people about Datasette, Datasette Cloud and how the Datasette ecosystem can best help support their work.

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Weeknotes: a Datasette release, an LLM release and a bunch of new plugins

I wrote extensive annotated release notes for Datasette 1.0a8 and LLM 0.13 already. Here’s what else I’ve been up to this past three weeks.

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Weeknotes: datasette-test, datasette-build, PSF board retreat

I wrote about Page caching and custom templates in my last weeknotes. This week I wrapped up that work, modifying datasette-edit-templates to be compatible with the jinja2_environment_from_request() plugin hook. This means you can edit templates directly in Datasette itself and have those served either for the full instance or just for the instance when served from a specific domain (the Datasette Cloud case).

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Weeknotes: Page caching and custom templates for Datasette Cloud

My main development focus this week has been adding public page caching to Datasette Cloud, and exploring what custom template support might look like for that service.

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2023

Last weeknotes of 2023

I’ve slowed down for that last week of the year. Here’s a wrap-up for everything else from the month of December.

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Weeknotes: datasette-enrichments, datasette-comments, sqlite-chronicle

Visit Weeknotes: datasette-enrichments, datasette-comments, sqlite-chronicle

I’ve mainly been working on Datasette Enrichments and continuing to explore the possibilities enabled by sqlite-chronicle.

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Weeknotes: DevDay, GitHub Universe, OpenAI chaos

Three weeks of conferences and Datasette Cloud work, four days of chaos for OpenAI.

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DALL-E 3, GPT4All, PMTiles, sqlite-migrate, datasette-edit-schema

Visit DALL-E 3, GPT4All, PMTiles, sqlite-migrate, datasette-edit-schema

I wrote a lot this week. I also did some fun research into new options for self-hosting vector maps and pushed out several new releases of plugins.

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Weeknotes: PyBay, AI Engineer Summit, Datasette metadata and JavaScript plugins

I’ve had a bit of a slow two weeks in terms of building things and writing code, thanks mainly to a couple of conference appearances. I did review and land a couple of major contributions to Datasette though.

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Weeknotes: the Datasette Cloud API, a podcast appearance and more

Datasette Cloud now has a documented API, plus a podcast appearance, some LLM plugins work and some geospatial excitement.

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Weeknotes: Embeddings, more embeddings and Datasette Cloud

Since my last weeknotes, a flurry of activity. LLM has embeddings support now, and Datasette Cloud has driven some major improvements to the wider Datasette ecosystem.

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Datasette 1.0a4 and 1.0a5, plus weeknotes

Two new alpha releases of Datasette, plus a keynote at WordCamp, a new LLM release, two new LLM plugins and a flurry of TILs.

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Datasette Cloud, Datasette 1.0a3, llm-mlc and more

Visit Datasette Cloud, Datasette 1.0a3, llm-mlc and more

Datasette Cloud is now a significant step closer to general availability. The Datasette 1.03 alpha release is out, with a mostly finalized JSON format for 1.0. Plus new plugins for LLM and sqlite-utils and a flurry of things I’ve learned.

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Weeknotes: Plugins for LLM, sqlite-utils and Datasette

Visit Weeknotes: Plugins for LLM, sqlite-utils and Datasette

The principle theme for the past few weeks has been plugins.

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Weeknotes: Self-hosted language models with LLM plugins, a new Datasette tutorial, a dozen package releases, a dozen TILs

A lot of stuff to cover from the past two and a half weeks.

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