š Announcing DjangoTV.
I'm ~10 minutes away from boarding my flight which means, I technically still launched this project while at #DjangoCon #Django #Python
https://micro.webology.dev/2024/09/27/announcing-djangotv.html
š Announcing DjangoTV. I'm ~10 minutes away from boarding my flight which means, I technically still launched this project while at #DjangoCon #Django #Python https://micro.webology.dev/2024/09/27/announcing-djangotv.html Themes from DjangoCon US 2024 - my notes from #djangoconUS My first update to Niche Museums in a while... the Vincent and Ethel Simonetti Historic Tuba Collection in Durham, North Carolina! I went with a group of five during this year's DjangoCon US 2024 - it was utterly delightful https://www.niche-museums.com/112 ... just spotted they have a photo of us on their Instagram! https://www.instagram.com/p/DAZRx-QSVZK/ Sent out he latest issue of my newsletter - everything from my blog for the last two weeks turns out to be quite a lot of stuff this time round https://simonw.substack.com/p/llama-32-and-plugins-for-django Llama 3.2 is out, and it's a much more substantial release than the 3.1 to 3.2 version bump might indicate Four new models, including Meta's first two vision models (11B and 90B) and two new text-only small models (1B and 3B) My notes so far: https://simonwillison.net/2024/Sep/25/llama-32/ You can try out the vision models on https://lmarena.ai/ by navigating to "Direct Chat" and then selecting those models from the dropdown menu here's some home-brewed software for ya; personal image search using @simon's llm-clip in a little wee webpage flask thingy. And you could run it on your own customized version of CLIP too, if you really dug into things. https://github.com/shawngraham/personal-image-search-engine/ Gergely Orosz has a new podcast, and I was the guest for the first episode: "AI tools for software engineers, but without the hype" https://newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/p/ai-tools-for-software-engineers-simon-willison We covered a bunch of ground, but my favorite topic was an exploration of the (very legitimate) reasons that many engineers are resistant to taking advantage of AI-assisted programming tools. Here's a detailed write-up of my new project: DJP: A plugin system for Django - which I introduced yesterday at #djangoconUS https://simonwillison.net/2024/Sep/25/djp-a-plugin-system-for-django/ New in DJP 0.2: @carlton suggested it would be useful if plugins could say āthis middleware needs to be inserted directly before/after this other middlewareā - thatās now supported: djp.Position("my_plugin.middleware.MyPluginMiddleware", before="django.middleware.common.CommonMiddleware") I'm really impressed by nanodjango (by @radiac, presented in a lightning talk at #djangoconUS just now) - it's the latest in a long line of attempts to have Django work for Flask-style single file apps but it's got WAY more features than previous attempts I've seen, like model and admin support and even async My notes here: https://simonwillison.net/2024/Sep/24/nanodjango/ nanodjango docs and tutorial: https://nanodjango.readthedocs.io/ Pretty cool that the Django Software Foundation is about 1/3 funded by individual donors (from a @jacob talk at DjangoCon US) Jacobās talk is exploring what the DSF could do if revenue quadrupled from $250,000/year to $1,000,000/year It's the ten year anniversary of XKCD 1425, one of the all-time greats and one that resonates slightly differently today. Wrote up some notes on that here: https://simonwillison.net/2024/Sep/24/xkcd-1425-turns-ten-years-old-today/ @simon I do find it incredible that I don't find it incredible that I can take a crappy photo of a bird and very quickly get the bird identified (using pre-AI-hype google image search for example) New TIL: How streaming LLM APIs work I put together some notes after poking around with the OpenAI, Anthropic and Google Gemini streaming APIs
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@simon Nice. Little note: on a recent curl, you can POST JSON with `curl --json <string>, saving the header setting. Update: `--no-buffer` always `fflush()`es the output in curl. So it might still be beneficiary. Updated my TIL with example JavaScript code for streaming events from a fetch() POST API (using an async iterator function) https://til.simonwillison.net/llms/streaming-llm-apis#user-content-bonus--2-processing-streaming-events-in-javascript-with-fetch If you donāt have an unhealthy TikTok habit with the right algorithmic history itās possible you are unaware of Pesto, the unbelievably chunky baby King penguin at the Melbourne Aquarium Pesto weighs 21kg now - thatās more than our dog! https://www.tiktok.com/@heraldsun_/video/7397377035854712072 (That video is a bit out of date, Pesto has now been confirmed as male) I was on another podcast! TWIML - This Week in Machine Learning & AI - where we mainly talked about using LLMs to help with programming I extracted and edited a couple of sections from the episode transcript, about the difference between exploratory and production coding with LLMs plus some more notes on prototyping "If you go to a meeting with five people, and youāve got a working prototype, the conversation will be so much more informed than if you go in with an idea and a whiteboard sketch. Iāve always been a prototyper, but I feel like the speed at which I can prototype things in the past 12 months has gone up by an order of magnitude. [...] I can tap a thing into my phone, and 30 seconds later, Iāve got a user interface in Claude Artifacts that illustrates the idea that Iām trying to explore." Things Iāve learned serving on the board of the Python Software Foundation If youāre curious about what the PSF is and how it works, hereās much of what Iāve figured out so far @ThePSF
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@simon That was really interesting! I love this kind of behind-the-scenes look at critical institutional structures we rarely think about This is one of my favorite genres of blog post: the article I wish Iād been able to read myself Has there ever been a better pre-credit sequence than the 20 minute Spider-Gwen story at the start of Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse?
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@simon Not many, probably. Should have won an Academy Award for animation, imho. I was literally watching with my mouth open when I saw it at the cinema. @simon fully co-signed +āself loveā by coi leray and metro boomin is an absolutely perfect soundtrack to that opening OK, I _swear_ I didnāt do this on purpose but PDF sucks so bad as a publishing format that the easiest way to build search traffic to a website turns out to be republishing information thatās otherwise locked up in a PDF
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@simon Most of my PDF creation is solving the āhow do I save the current content of a webpage as a single file and not just an imageā problem. SingleFile <https://github.com/gildas-lormeau/SingleFile> and/or MHTML <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MHTML> should be more universal than they are. I'm always interested in exposure to management advice from unconventional sources... and there's a leaked PDF floating around called "HOW TO SUCCEED IN MRBEAST PRODUCTION" which appears to be the onboarding document for new members of the MrBeast YouTube production company It's 36 pages long, so I put together some of my own notes from reading it here: https://simonwillison.net/2024/Sep/15/how-to-succeed-in-mrbeast-production/
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One of my favourite documents in this genre remains "THE ELEVEN LAWS OF SHOWRUNNING", about how to run production of a TV show It's unintentionally a fantastic guide to being an engineering manager, or startup founder, or indeed any role where you need a bunch of different creative people to understand and work together to bring about a creative vision: https://simonwillison.net/2019/Feb/19/eleven-laws-showrunning/ @simon I always find things from the entertainment industry interesting because they have a very different definition of done than we do. Nobody is expecting changes to a video which is a month old, much less 10 years old, and thatās such a different concept than most software projects have. @simon I found this an interesting read from a management point of view. I donāt launch people into space but have found value in the ideas around planning and testing. https://ntrs.nasa.gov/citations/19720005243 Just ran across this quote, itās fun to know that the fence posts on what counts as āintelligenceā in AI have been consistently in motion since at least 1979! On my blog: https://simonwillison.net/2024/Sep/13/pamela-mccorduck-in-1979/ Source on Internet Archive: https://archive.org/details/machineswhothink0000pame I heard about it on this Wikipedia page on the āAI effectā: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AI_effect
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@simon Maybe the issue isn't the fence-post-movers (people saying "this isn't intelligent yet"), but the fence-post-planters: i.e., those boldly offering a definition of intelligence, usually one that depends on performing a given task. The "is it AI yet?" game may be decades old now, but the game of defining measures of intelligence that turn out to be naive and/or racist is much older, as Stephen J. Gould describes in The Mismeasure of Man. @simon This reflects the difficulty of defining "intelligence". When a previously-unsolved problem is solved via a method that is clearly ad hoc, the field naturally moves the goal posts. Problem-by-problem, we discover what is easy and what is hard for computers. @simon I remember when the idea was the computer couldn't learn. That one never made sense to me at all, even on simple computers you can write a program that seems to learn as it goes. Being introduced to computing by terminal and then PC, I didn't understand that up to that time, most programmers had probably been working on batch processing of data, having put the human "computers" out of work. |
@webology woohoo, very nice !
@webology What an awesome idea, I would love to see this done for PyCons too (there are just so any it's hard to keep track of them all when they upload VODs!)
@webology when you're rested and have some time, would love to know how to help out while I have some free time.