Good news: the disappearance is confirmed to be accidental, hopefully they’ll be back soon once GitHub unflag their account https://twitter.com/justinlin610/status/1831489518467477529

@simon the text extraction is impressive, but there’s at least one error: “my sample” instead of “very small.”

@simon Yes yes, this is certainly the only thing they will use that data for. Guaranteed! Not …

@simon auto-cancel the next meeting because I’m too tired

@simon
I use this mode on the Pixel (where it doesn't need this grotesquely broad permission bundle IIRC).

If you join a Meet from home and hop into your car and start driving for e.g. the on-the-go mode will switch the UI and makes the Mute and other buttons nice and big and easily accessible. It's actually quite nice.

Fantastic replies! Thank you all, I think I get it now: it’s about getting to see someone genuinely work through problems in real time, and having the opportunity to chat with them while they do it

Makes sense - I might give it a go!

@simon

Maybe this misspelled screaming.

@simon Do you have theory where do these "false positives" came from?
For example my recent meeting with this phenomenon: I visited my boss in his office and he had new server laying around so we talked about new servers for a while... And tada - that day afternoon I saw an ad for servers.
Is this simply Baader-Mainhof phenomena (frequency illusion) or does they have some side channels? (For example - both me and my boss were on same internet connection that day...)

@simon I think people just can't fathom how much data Meta have amassed, and how the ads could possibly be so targeted.

From what I've heard, they do have some super spooky abilities, like take any device MAC address (e.g. from shopping mall Wi-Fi) and be able to both identify the owner as well as their interest cohort

@simon Related Tildes conversation about that subject: https://tildes.net/~tech/1ijs/in_leak_facebook_partner_brags_about_listening_to_your_phones_microphone_to_serve_ads_for_stuff_you

Sadly, I feel compelled to spoil my own joke - it turns out Claude will happily design an experiment to see if badges can turn corners while running, even if you don’t claim preapproval from your ethics board

@simon I wonder if dataclasses could be used to help with type safety. (I don't see why not. 🤔)

@simon

Ditto. I recently wrote one to utilize `pytest.param` and `kwargs` inside parametrize to make things more tractable.

https://rednafi.com/python/pytest_param/

@simon oh, i like that

@simon interesting to me, given ive always phrased it like “im a developer, and i currently work in Laravel and React”
(And even that is ridiculous as there are at least 10 other things in the stack)

@simon so maybe subject-matter modifiers get promoted - there are very different trade-offs and required domain knowledge and soft skills between "systems engineer", "product engineer", "Database engineer", "Data engineer", "Mobile games engineer", ...

Using uvx to run a one-off Jupyter notebook against the current directory is a useful trick - I tried that for the first time today against the Anthropic Jupyter notebook interactive tutorials:

uvx --from jupyter-core jupyter notebook .

A few years ago I put a bunch of work into figuring out the SameSite cookie attribute because the documentation for how that actually worked was so thin on the ground https://simonwillison.net/2021/Aug/3/samesite/

@simon There's some work going on at https://johannhof.github.io/draft-annevk-johannhof-httpbis-cookies/draft-annevk-johannhof-httpbis-cookies.html to specify this. Does that draft at least improve the situation? I believe they're accepting complaints and suggestions.

@simon Well, a very stupid summary with some elements of wrong.
1st party cookies with controlled subdomain and permissions will be fine.
The rest, notably 3rd party cookies are going to be very difficult (especially for FF and Safari since Chrome has kinda given up).

@simon For me I find a lot of the value of spikes and prototypes comes from the process, e.g. discovering that things work differently than I expected. Even if an LLM can give me a working prototype I am worried about the loss of that learning and discovery. I might be wrong though. I'll try it next time and see.

@simon yes, but to be honest it is inly well suited to specific domains; usually the ones with poor dev tools and a lot of ceremony and boilerplate which also have a lot of users 😂 But it can speed things up there sometimes.

@simon pragmatism or dangerous precedent, we’ll find out :)

@simon Even if the training data cannot be shared it can be named or described: for "open" to have any meaning I'd like to see a declaration, even if it's 100% "dark" training data.

Here's the Claude transcript - I started by pasting in some example code for a Node.js streaming app and effectively told Claude to guess how to port that to run in a browser instead, by including a snippet of my own code that I used to manage API keys using localStorage https://gist.github.com/simonw/498a66c1c4b5053a6dfa2015c3675e24

@simon Very cool! It's interesting how it doesn't wrap the inputs and buttons in a `<form>`, though. Might be something I wish the model just knew.

@simon That’s Great!

@simon An image of the columns in question can be found here: https://architecturetoday.co.uk/learning-from-venturi-scott-brown-the-national-gallerys-sainsbury-wing/

@simon

I love this! A shame the author passed in 2022 — so close to seeing the letter discovered.

@ct_bergstrom
I'd trust a language model more than an officer who doesn't give a shit about his/her work so much that they're fine with writing fiction in their reports.

LLM's aren't the problem here. Incompetent, unmotivated and lazy people are. Or do you think their reports would get better without LLM's?

And here's a fun little hint at some of the annoying behaviour in the base model that they've tried to knock out of it with some system prompt instructions

Seriously, stop saying "certainly"!

@simon I’ve been thinking about this for a long time and it’s the reason why I’m posting under narrativ.es

@simon totally agree, there's something useful about the "livetweet" / "tweetstorm" mode of communication that I wish I could get on my own site. It's not a replacement for normal blog posts but a different kind of thing.

@simon had a few minutes today so started drawing about this... it's not simple but it's still intriguing! The data model and UI presentation model are interesting problems.

@simon is there an image type that is good for this? i ve tried about ten so far, and i get [] as the result or "no bounding boxes"

@simon ...in this example, the left-goat bounding box looks quite off?

@simon nice! i've got one here too :) https://gemini-spatial-example.grantcuster.com/

that TIFF bug/trick is interesting!

@simon Thanks for this! I've just started working on a project that needs to both generate bounding boxes and extract some qualitative information from images—hopefully Gemini can be a one stop shop for that, rather than stringing things together like I'd started to do.

Microsoft has docs on a GPT4+"Enhancements" vision model with grounding/bounding boxes, but when you get into their dashboard it seems like it's actually deprecated. 🙄

@simon ...the absurdity of having to use a computationally expensive visual-to-text language model to extract data, when PowerBI usually offers an option to download the data visualized in a given graphic right there on the UI. EDIT: which seems to have been disabled here.

Wrote up a few more details about how the alt text generation works on my blog https://simonwillison.net/2024/Aug/25/covidsewage-alt-text/