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248 posts total
Simon Willison

If you don’t have an unhealthy TikTok habit with the right algorithmic history it’s possible you are unaware of Pesto, the unbelievably chunky baby King penguin at the Melbourne Aquarium

Pesto weighs 21kg now - that’s more than our dog!

tiktok.com/@heraldsun_/video/7

(That video is a bit out of date, Pesto has now been confirmed as male)

21 September at 15:18 | Open on fedi.simonwillison.net
Simon Willison

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

simonwillison.net/2024/Sep/20/

20 September at 3:14 | Open on fedi.simonwillison.net
Simon Willison

"If you go to a meeting with five people, and you’ve got a working prototype, the conversation will be so much more informed than if you go in with an idea and a whiteboard sketch.

I’ve 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, I’ve got a user interface in Claude Artifacts that illustrates the idea that I’m trying to explore."

20 September at 3:19 | Open on fedi.simonwillison.net
kfet

@simon I found this episode quite entertaining and informative, thanks

#genAI #LLMs

20 September at 3:20 | Open on fosstodon.org
Simon Willison

Things I’ve learned serving on the board of the Python Software Foundation

If you’re curious about what the PSF is and how it works, here’s much of what I’ve figured out so far @ThePSF
simonwillison.net/2024/Sep/18/

What is the PSF? The PSF employs staff A lot of this is about money The PSF does not directly develop Python itself PyPI—the Python Package Index PyCon is a key commitment Other PSF activities Work Groups Acting as a fiscal sponsor Life as a board member The kinds of things the board talks about Want to know more?
18 September at 14:18 | Open on fedi.simonwillison.net
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Evan der Ausländer

@simon That was really interesting! I love this kind of behind-the-scenes look at critical institutional structures we rarely think about

18 September at 16:57 | Open on mas.to
Simon Willison

This is one of my favorite genres of blog post: the article I wish I’d been able to read myself

18 September at 17:45 | Open on fedi.simonwillison.net
Thib

Oh lord of the rings, this resonates so much with my experience of a former board member of @gnome

Many insightful takes in this post, I definitely think GNOME and the PSF should try to work together more

@simon @ThePSF

21 September at 11:41 | Open on mamot.fr
Simon Willison

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?

16 September at 22:14 | Open on fedi.simonwillison.net
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Fabian N. T. 🦆

@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.

16 September at 23:24 | Open on floss.social
jake lazaroff

@simon fully co-signed +“self love” by coi leray and metro boomin is an absolutely perfect soundtrack to that opening

17 September at 0:31 | Open on mastodon.social
Angela Ambroz

@simon That whole movie is chef's kiss.

17 September at 1:36 | Open on econtwitter.net
Simon Willison

OK, I _swear_ I didn’t 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 that’s otherwise locked up in a PDF

16 September at 14:56 | Open on fedi.simonwillison.net
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Jeremiah Lee

@simon Most of my PDF creation is solving the “how do I save the current content of a webpage as a single file and not just an image” problem.

SingleFile <github.com/gildas-lormeau/Sing> and/or MHTML <en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MHTML> should be more universal than they are.

16 September at 15:22 | Open on alpaca.gold
Mark T. Tomczak

@simon I actually wonder if it's a technical challenge issue.

There are so many ways to create a PDF that's readable to humans and illegible to computers that it's much, much easier to make something search-engine-friendly in HTML format. Even in the case of Google where, I imagine, they can OCR that shit, that pipeline's gotta be more of a bottleneck than interpreting token-stripped HTML because it just costs more resources to transform images of text.

And that's before we factor in the human element: Google still gets signal on popularity from clicks, and if I see a PDF in the wild, my default response is "No thank you; I do not want this information in likely-unsearchable page-by-page form that'll be harder to consume than a plain web page."

@simon I actually wonder if it's a technical challenge issue.

There are so many ways to create a PDF that's readable to humans and illegible to computers that it's much, much easier to make something search-engine-friendly in HTML format. Even in the case of Google where, I imagine, they can OCR that shit, that pipeline's gotta be more of a bottleneck than interpreting token-stripped HTML because it just costs more resources to transform images of text.

16 September at 16:59 | Open on mastodon.fixermark.com
Francis 🏴‍☠️ Gulotta

@simon or from an old ssl invalid website

17 September at 4:23 | Open on toot.cafe
Simon Willison

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: simonwillison.net/2024/Sep/15/

15 September at 14:46 | Open on fedi.simonwillison.net
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Simon Willison

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:

simonwillison.net/2019/Feb/19/

15 September at 15:01 | Open on fedi.simonwillison.net
[DATA EXPUNGED]
firefriendly

@simon I found this an interesting read from a management point of view. I don’t launch people into space but have found value in the ideas around planning and testing. ntrs.nasa.gov/citations/197200

16 September at 16:12 | Open on mastodon.social
Simon Willison
Reilly Wood
14 September at 18:06 on post Jamie Brandon's Speed Matters post has aged really well. It's also pretty much what @simon is observing...

I think what a lot of people miss is that if you have a commit-sized piece of work in mind, there's a very good chance that you can get an LLM to do it in under a minute

you don't have to be an AI True Believer to see how this changes what an experienced programmer can do!

15 September at 8:40 | Open on fedi.simonwillison.net
Simon Willison

Just ran across this quote, it’s fun to know that the fence posts on what counts as “intelligence” in AI have been consistently in motion since at least 1979!

On my blog: simonwillison.net/2024/Sep/13/

Source on Internet Archive: archive.org/details/machineswh

I heard about it on this Wikipedia page on the “AI effect”: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AI_effec

“There is superstition about creativity, and for that matter, about thinking in every sense, and it&#39;s part of the history of the field of artificial intelligence that every time somebody figured out how to make a computer do something - play good checkers, solve simple but relatively informal problems - there was a chorus of critics to say, but that&#39;s not thinking.” — Pamela McCorduck, in 1979
13 September at 8:01 | Open on fedi.simonwillison.net
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Jordan B. L. Smith

@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.

13 September at 8:48 | Open on sigmoid.social
tdietterich

@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.

13 September at 8:58 | Open on mastodon.social
John Abbe (aka Slow)

@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.

13 September at 9:30 | Open on mastodon.social
Simon Willison

Here's everything I've figured out about the new OpenAI o1 family of models so far simonwillison.net/2024/Sep/12/

12 September at 22:41 | Open on fedi.simonwillison.net
Simon Willison

And a new release of LLM that adds support for those models - for anyone lucky enough to have a tier 5 OpenAI API account at least llm.datasette.io/en/stable/cha

0.16 (2024-09-12) OpenAI models now use the internal self.get_key() mechanism, which means they can be used from Python code in a way that will pick up keys that have been configured using llm keys set or the OPENAI_API_KEY environment variable. #552. This code now works correctly: import llm print(llm.get_model(&quot;gpt-4o-mini&quot;).prompt(&quot;hi&quot;)) New documented API methods: llm.get_default_model(), llm.set_default_model(alias), llm.get_default_embedding_model(alias), llm.set_default_embedding_model(). #553 Support for OpenAI’s new o1 family of preview models, llm -m o1-preview &quot;prompt&quot; and llm -m o1-mini &quot;prompt&quot;. These models are currently only available to tier 5 OpenAI API users, though this may change in the future. #570
12 September at 23:26 | Open on fedi.simonwillison.net
Jonathan Moore

@simon o1 gets my unbirthday question which none of OpenAI's other models have: "Do all people have the same number of unbirthdays?"

chatgpt.com/share/66e3652c-7ae

12 September at 23:46 | Open on mastodon.social
ijm

@simon the "Limit additional context in retrieval-augmented generation (RAG)" and "Hidden reasoning tokens" seem to be contradictory, or at least at odds: reduce the context, but you cannot use any reasoning tokens that came up while deciding what was and wasn't relevant.
I've been trying to find ways to improve rag index vectors, effectively trying to extract some internal state from a model as a sort-of pre-compiled version of the text - and these hidden reasoning tokens seem to be exactly related to what I'm looking for, but nope we're not allowed to see'm !

@simon the "Limit additional context in retrieval-augmented generation (RAG)" and "Hidden reasoning tokens" seem to be contradictory, or at least at odds: reduce the context, but you cannot use any reasoning tokens that came up while deciding what was and wasn't relevant.
I've been trying to find ways to improve rag index vectors, effectively trying to extract some internal state from a model as a sort-of pre-compiled version of the text - and these hidden reasoning tokens seem to be exactly related...

13 September at 15:34 | Open on mathstodon.xyz
Simon Willison

Mistral launched Pixtral 12B today, their first multi-modal (text plus images) vision LLM. It’s Apache 2 licensed and a 25GB download. I put together some notes on the release here: simonwillison.net/2024/Sep/11/

11 September at 22:29 | Open on fedi.simonwillison.net
Danil

@simon I wish I can download 30GB ram... to use those

11 September at 23:23 | Open on mastodon.gamedev.place
Zachary Bennoui

@simon Lets goooooo!!!!!! So pumped for this!

12 September at 1:06 | Open on dragonscave.space
Rihards Olups

@simon At first thought this is some new weapon (probably French) that will be given to Ukraine etc.

"LLM thing or a military thing" could be one of those online games.
12 September at 7:23 | Open on mastodon.social
Simon Willison

I'm interviewed in the latest episode of the Software Misadventures podcast. It was a *really fun* conversation - we talked about my past career highlights, my experiences as an independent open source developer, my various processes for working in public, blogging and releasing code and (of course) a whole bunch about my explorations of LLMs
softwaremisadventures.com/p/si

10 September at 21:21 | Open on fedi.simonwillison.net
Simon Willison

I extracted some highlights from the transcript and wrote them up on my blog: simonwillison.net/2024/Sep/10/

Benefits for people with English as a second language For people who don’t speak English or have English as a second language, this stuff is incredible. We live in a society where having really good spoken and written English puts you at a huge advantage. The street light outside your house is broken and you need to write a letter to the council to get it fixed? That used to be a significant barrier. It’s not anymore. ChatGPT will write a formal letter to the council complaining about a broken street light that is absolutely flawless. And you can prompt it in any language. I’m so excited about that. Interestingly, it sort of breaks aspects of society as well—because we’ve been using written English skills as a filter for so many different things. If you want to get into university, you have to write formal letters and all of that kind of stuff, which used to keep people out. Now it doesn’t anymore, which I think is thrilling…. but at the same time, if you’ve got institutions that are designed around the idea that you can evaluate everyone and filter them based on written essays, and now you can’t, we’ve got to redesign those institutions. That’s going to take a while. What does that even look like? It’s so disruptive to society in all of these different ways.
Letting skills atrophy We talked about the risk of learned helplessness, and letting our skills atrophy by outsourting so much of our work to LLMs. The other day I reported a bug against GitHub Actions complaining that the windows-latest version of Python couldn’t load SQLite extensions. Then after I’d filed the bug, I realized that I’d got Claude to write my test code and it had hallucinated the wrong SQLite code for loading an extension! I had to close that bug and say, no, sorry, this was my fault. That was a bit embarrassing. I should know better than most people that you have to check everything these things do, and it had caught me out. Python and SQLite are my bread and butter. I really should have caught that one! But my counter to this is that I feel like my overall capabilities are expanding so quickly. I can get so much more stuff done that I’m willing to pay with a little bit of my soul. I’m willing to accept a little bit of atrophying in some of my abilities in exchange for, honestly, a two to five X productivity boost on the time that I spend typing code into a computer. That’s like 10% of my job, so it’s not like I’m two to five times more productive overall. But it’s still a material improvement. It’s making me more ambitious. I’m writing software I would never have even dared to write before. So I think that’s worth the risk.
10 September at 22:53 | Open on fedi.simonwillison.net
Matt Hayes

@simon - Great podcast episode with useful real-world advice on LLMs, programming techniques and blogging! It has inspired me to experiment more with AI and blog about it (fighting my natural AI cynicism)

18 September at 8:54 | Open on techhub.social
Simon Willison
Python Software Foundation
10 September at 12:45

The first edition of the PSF Board Office Hours is about to begin 🐍 🗒️ 1 PM UTC. Join us to share how we can help your community, express your perspectives, and provide feedback for the PSF! #python
pyfound.blogspot.com/2024/08/a

10 September at 12:54 | Open on fedi.simonwillison.net
Simon Willison
Charlie Marsh
8 September at 19:34 on post 2000s: "extend Python with C" 2010s: "extend Python with Python" 2020s: "extend Python with Rust" I have...

@freakboy3742 @glyph @jacob @sgillies An example of what this might look like (we may not do this, but it's helpful to have a concrete example of the strategy) would be something like an enterprise-focused private package registry. A lot of big companies use uv. We spend time talking to them. They all spend money on private package registries, and have issues with them. We could build a private registry that integrates well with uv, and sell it to those companies.

8 September at 20:17 | Open on fedi.simonwillison.net
Simon Willison

Gathered a few notes on the insightful conversation about uv happening in the Python Mastodon community right now simonwillison.net/2024/Sep/8/u

8 September at 16:26 | Open on fedi.simonwillison.net
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Phil Gyford

@simon Thanks for pointing this out. The complete mess of Python packaging has been the worst, most embarrassing aspect of Python to me. Those more expert than me seem less bothered, but trying to explain to newbies how to choose which collection of tools to use just to start writing code has been ridiculous. I just want one good tool.

I'm usually very, very against anything VC-funded but I love what's happening with uv and I really hope it succeeds in a way that keeps people happy.

8 September at 20:54 | Open on mastodon.social
Tom Bortels

@simon

I have kinda taken "written in rust" to be a strength - but not because of rust, at least not directly.

It solves for bootstrapping, and it does so in a manner that is entirely independent of the payload.

If you screw up your python (and perl and ruby and so on before that) - you could easily get into a situation where there is no easy fix aside from a reinstall, and when the language came with the OS and the Os depended on it - you were in a pickle.

Uv entirely removes this failure mode. It isn't part of the OS, has no external dependencies, and you won't mess it up from the python side. It provides a separation of duties that mechanisms that manage python from python have lacked. And it means a python I use on platform X can be as identical as possible to platform Y - no worrying about what the vendor did to their install you're bootstrapping from.

Have I used it in anger in production yet? No. Will I? Yeah, almost certainly.

@simon

I have kinda taken "written in rust" to be a strength - but not because of rust, at least not directly.

It solves for bootstrapping, and it does so in a manner that is entirely independent of the payload.

If you screw up your python (and perl and ruby and so on before that) - you could easily get into a situation where there is no easy fix aside from a reinstall, and when the language came with the OS and the Os depended on it - you were in a pickle.

8 September at 22:16 | Open on infosec.exchange
Harro van der Klauw

@simon thanks for the summary, I think it was a good discussion.

9 September at 5:20 | Open on mastodon.social
Simon Willison

Posted a video and some photos I took of the humpback whale that's currently hanging out in Pillar Point Harbor near Half Moon Bay, California - their name is Teresa T simonwillison.net/2024/Sep/8/t

8 September at 1:07 | Open on fedi.simonwillison.net
Simon Willison

Put together some notes on how I used the combination of llm, files-to-prompt and Claude 3.5 Sonnet for an initial draft of documentation describing how one of my tools worked, then tidied it up with the help of Cog and added that to the README simonwillison.net/2024/Sep/7/j

files-to-prompt *.py | llm -m claude-3.5-sonnet --system 'write detailed documentation in markdown describing the format used to represent JSON and nested JSON as key/value pairs, include a table as well'

7 September at 5:45 | Open on fedi.simonwillison.net
Simon Willison

My @covidsewage bot broke again after Santa Clara County changed the design of their publichealth.santaclaracounty. dashboard - you now have to click the "COVID" button inside the Power BI dashboard to get those charts, which is infuriatingly difficult because Power BI's idea of a "button" is a SVG path element with a click handler buried in a nest of weird HTML

Fixed it though! Details of the fix here: github.com/simonw/covidsewage-

My @covidsewage bot broke again after Santa Clara County changed the design of their publichealth.santaclaracounty. dashboard - you now have to click the "COVID" button inside the Power BI dashboard to get those charts, which is infuriatingly difficult because Power BI's idea of a "button" is a SVG path element with a click handler buried in a nest of weird HTML

- name: Extract iframe URL and generate screenshot run: |- url=$(shot-scraper javascript \ &#39;https://publichealth.santaclaracounty.gov/health-information/health-data/disease-data/covid-19/covid-19-wastewater&#39; \ &#39;document.querySelector(&quot;iframe&quot;).src&#39; \ -b firefox \ --user-agent &#39;Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10.15; rv:128.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/128.0&#39; \ --raw) echo &quot;URL is $url&quot; shot-scraper $url -o /tmp/covid.png -b firefox --retina --javascript &#39; new Promise((takeShot) =&gt; { setTimeout(() =&gt; { // Find the &lt;visual-modern&gt; button with exact text COVID var el = Array.from(document.querySelectorAll(&quot;.ui-role-button-text&quot;)) .filter((el) =&gt; el.textContent.trim() == &quot;COVID&quot;)[0] .closest(&quot;visual-modern&quot;); // Click everything in it to catch the &lt;path&gt; element function clickAllMatchingDescendants(rootElement, selector) { // Find all matching descendants const matchingElements = rootElement.querySelectorAll(selector); // Dispatch click event to each matching element matchingElements.forEach((element) =&gt; { element.dispatchEvent( new MouseEvent(&quot;click&quot;, { bubbles: true, cancelable: true, view: window, }), ); }); } clickAllMatchingDescendants(el, &quot;path&quot;);
7 September at 0:50 | Open on fedi.simonwillison.net
Simon Willison

I'm quite proud of how in-depth-specifically-nerdy this evening's project was: I got my simonw/scrape-hacker-news-by-domain git scraping repo to generate better commit messages when it scrapes Hacker News, which now show up in my NetNewsWire Atom subscription

Full details in my blog post: simonwillison.net/2024/Sep/6/i

My repo now runs this command: csv-diff simonwillison-net.json simonwillison-net-new.json \ --key id --format json \ --extra latest &#39;https://news.ycombinator.com/latest?id={id}&#39; \ &gt;&gt; /tmp/commit.txt This generates the diff between the two versions, using the id property in the JSON to tie records together. It adds a latest field linking to that URL. The commits now look like this: Fri Sep 6 05:22:32 UTC 2024. 1 row changed. id: 41459472 points: &quot;25&quot; =&gt; &quot;27&quot; numComments: &quot;7&quot; =&gt; &quot;8&quot; extras: latest: https://news.ycombinator.com/latest?id=41459472
6 September at 5:46 | Open on fedi.simonwillison.net
Simon Willison

Calling LLMs from client-side JavaScript, converting PDFs to HTML + weeknotes
simonwillison.net/2024/Sep/6/w

6 September at 2:31 | Open on fedi.simonwillison.net
Jeff Triplett

@simon TIL anthropic-dangerous-direct-browser-access - Would that make it possible to access Projects and Artifacts?

6 September at 3:33 | Open on mastodon.social
Dominik Moritz

@simon love that you found again

> Within six hours of posting it my Pipe Syntax in SQL conversion was ranked third on Google for the title of the paper, […]. Yet more evidence that HTML is better than PDF!

6 September at 11:54 | Open on vis.social
Prem Kumar Aparanji 👶🤖🐘
Simon Willison

Spotted this red-tailed hawk in a tree in our garden!

(Unless it’s a red-shouldered hawk?)

A beautiful hawk perching at the top of a tree against a blue sky
5 September at 17:43 | Open on fedi.simonwillison.net
NedMan 🚀

@simon Nice, we have numerous hawks in our neighborhood as well. I think its a red-shouldered hawk.

5 September at 17:57 | Open on social.makerforums.info
Joe Pasqua
Nick Ludlam :terminal:

@simon Ooh thats a great pic. Do you have an SLR with a nice lens for that kind of shot?

6 September at 11:58 | Open on amok.recoil.org
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