@simon

every now and then i feel like im taking crazy pills because i remember when aaron swartz killed himself because he was going to go to jail forever because he scraped JSTOR,

and eleven years later your manager tells you “sshhhh it’s fine just scrape all of it don’t worry the CEO said it’s fine”

@simon
Do you think Nvidia might become more chaos focused in future?

I genuinely worry about big AI companies becoming chaos agents.

Also do you think they are paying YouTube for that kind of access, or paying folks like youtube-downloader?

@simon @Shamar did you really have to point out that you used a theft machine (“AI”) to write that short JS snippet?

Ah. From your profile, you’re a promoter of these theft machines. Byebye…

@simon Email too. The more links in your email the more likely they are to put it in a spam folder.

@simon @troublewithwords like “spam,” “slop” has that p-sound so you can really spit the word out when you’re mad.

@simon trash fire.

@simon I wish Fates would make the jump to Mastodon.

@simon Insanely cool! It works fine in Android Chrome (no luck with Firefox though).

@simon Damn, that's awesome! Queued for ResearchBuzz.

@simon not sure if this is of interest to @jbaiter , cf. https://openbiblio.social/@jbaiter/110815957206638047

Published a short TIL about the very simple 2x2 CSS grid layout I used to display the images in that post https://til.simonwillison.net/css/simple-two-column-grid

@simon I love it

@simon Does this mean you're Arnold Schwarzenegger posting under a fake name? I don't believe it. I bet you're a computer programmer pretending to be Arnold!!!

@simon @DDsD this is amazing !

@simon I'm loving your TIL format! This one made my (unpublished) list recently: http://redsymbol.net/articles/bash-exit-traps/

@simon you have no idea how many google searches I sent this week looking for something like this for windows.

Asked ChatGPT to convert to powershell: https://chat.openai.com/share/952e5a0f-3769-4888-9910-93f0453bdf4d

Excited to try it tomorrow. Thanks!

@simon if you trap on the pseudo signal EXIT it will kick in on other exit modes too :)

@simon great talk! thanks for this, i find your work immensely helpful for keeping tabs on what’s going on.

i like to imagine one reason why they might be lenient with licensing violations re improving other models is it would expose them to more liability from exposing how the models were trained 🤔

@simon a nice whirlwind review of some of your experiments, and you got the "you should really know this about LLMs" stuff in there too. Great presentation as always, thanks for sharing!

@simon @NorthBayPython @scottjenson thanks for posting this! I’ve been interested in making my own LLM trained on data that’s important to me, this is super cool!

@simon brew is preferred, but pipx is great for things not big enough to be there.

I do prefer local installs for project-specific tools (like pytest, where I just have many copies of it on my computer). But for general purposes utilities that happen to be written in Python, pipx is perfect.

@simon If it is in python and has a CLI interface, it should be installed with pipx unless you enjoy trouble shooting incompatible libraries. If the tool needs to be able to run `import yourcode`, such as mypy, pydoc, pytest, then you can't install with pipx.

It is still sort of intermediate still level to realize why it should matter & getting pipx itself installed in the first place (or worse trying to update/replace the python that all the pipx apps are using)

@simon I use it, but rarely. I have maybe 2-3 tools installed using it.

@simon I was hoping for a 500 Server Error page. That would do it.

@simon
Maybe it just takes lots of use. I've played with it for long enough to know it is a giant BS generator - but once you know that, you can have fun with it. Last night I had it start generating case law examples for a trial taking place in a D&D scenario I had it writing about

@simon This doesn't really solve the problem, especially since OpenAI is advocating for more uses via their API. The output of these models has to be addressed and that's not something a web UX change can fix. The technology platform itself is unfit for the applications it is being used for.

(If you don't think it's possible for a computer to deliberately lie, take a look at "sycophancy" and "sandbagging" in the field of large language models! https://simonwillison.net/2023/Apr/5/sycophancy-sandbagging/ )

I was having trouble coming up with a system prompt for GPT 3.5 that worked how I wanted... so I got GPT-4 to write one for me, which is working pretty well as a starting point

It's answer to a question about absurdly expensive things to do in Tokyo was, after a follow-up prompt (see second screenshot), most excellent.

@simon no more money

@simon Oh, did you have money in that bank?

@simon that’s an excellent/horrifying wiki-image-capture. “Tell a scary story in one Wikipedia edit” is the new “tell a scary story in six words”.

@simon Let's not call it hallucinate, it's giving it too much credit. Let's just call it what it is, generate.

@simon @drewharwell journalists live for quotes like that. Or they should.

As far as I can tell the only documentation on how to use the JavaScript API is this unofficial documentation here https://github.com/manicmaniac/sips-js-api