Gregory's Server
I like this idea, but I worry about accessibility
I just tried using the Mobile Safari “read this page” feature and it skipped right over the ⁂ symbol as if it wasn’t even there
https://typo.social/@FediverseSymbol/113005945049360750
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Awesome new Anthropic API feature: you can now enable CORS support with a (currently undocumented) anthropic-dangerous-direct-browser-access: true request header - which means you can call their API directly from browser JavaScript now! My notes here: https://simonwillison.net/2024/Aug/23/anthropic-dangerous-direct-browser-access/ I used it to upgrade my fun little Haiku app, which uses your webcam to take a photo and then writes a Haiku about it using the Claude Haiku model Optimizing Datasette (and other weeknotes) https://simonwillison.net/2024/Aug/22/optimizing-datasette/ Armin’s take on what happens if Astral turn out to be a bad steward of uv is interesting: “[…] having seen the code and what uv is doing, even in the worst possible future this is a very forkable and maintainable thing. I believe that even in case Astral shuts down or were to do something incredibly dodgy licensing wise, the community would be better off than before uv existed.”  @simon what if uv is the nose and nobody is looking at the Moon yet? I'm pretty sure their next product will be a PyPi alternative. Then they will add proprietary stuff. This will fragment the market and devs/companies will have to release Python packages to two places instead of one. Then it will become paid only etc... (one can only imagine the possibilities). I'm not saying this will 100% happens, but it's definitely possible. uv alone, is not an issue. Wow there is a LOT of stuff in the new release of uv - lockfiles, a pipx alternative, Poetry-style project management, even the ability to manage and download standalone Python versions directly It's taking me a while to dig through all of this https://astral.sh/blog/uv-unified-python-packaging
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 @simon So much to unpack. As a minor-minor-nice-to-have (but really wish Python would settle on something here)...scaffold/template support: https://github.com/astral-sh/uv/issues/4759 Published some more detailed notes on today's huge new uv release https://simonwillison.net/2024/Aug/20/uv-unified-python-packaging/ New prompt injection data exfiltration attack today, this time against Slack and Slack AI It's a bit of a subtle one, but the net effect is that if you can get your malicious tokens into a Slack you can get their AI bot to trick users into exfiltrating private data by clicking on links My notes here: https://simonwillison.net/2024/Aug/20/data-exfiltration-from-slack-ai/ Original report by PromptArmor here: https://promptarmor.substack.com/p/data-exfiltration-from-slack-ai-via i quit my job just over 5 years ago to explain computer things (https://jvns.ca/blog/2019/09/13/a-year-explaining-computer-things/). I had no idea if I would like being my own boss but ultimately it's been really cool and I'm happy to have this weird job writing zines about computers. ("I’m not planning to hire employees or anything” turned out to not be an accurate prediction, now I work with 2 part-time employees who I don't know how I would manage without)
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@b0rk  someone asked me recently how long it took me to get used to the rhythm of working for myself and I said “uh, maybe 3 years?”. I thought working for myself would be hard to adjust to and it was, but I'm happy I did it anyway My notes on trying out whisperfile, the new cross-platform executable packaging for the Whisper speech-to-text model, released as part of the latest update to llamafile
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 Everyone who builds web applications should read the Reckoning series by @slightlyoff https://infrequently.org/series/reckoning/ My own notes here, but you should work through the entire thing: https://simonwillison.net/2024/Aug/18/reckoning/ Seriously, take a look at the case-study in which the California food stamps signup site takes 29.5s to become interactive on a slow rural mobile connection, and tell me we don't urgently need to do better! https://infrequently.org/2024/08/object-lesson/#the-golden-wait
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 @simon @slightlyoff It is not just javascript. In spite of a high-bandwidth connection, I've been getting very bad response loading web pages recently. After diagnosing the problem, I found that there was 76% to 91% packet loss on DNS requests to the servers my ISP configures! I'm about to file a service request, but in the meantime, I changed DNS servers to publicly available ones. What made it worse was the number of DNS requests now needed to load a web page.  @simon @slightlyoff I don't think saying Javascript is the cause of this is honest or helpful. I built a fun new Datasette plugin: datasette-checkbox, which looks for columns on a table called is_* or has_* or should_* and upgrades them to interactive checkboxes, provided the current user has update-row permission for that table https://simonwillison.net/2024/Aug/16/datasette-checkbox/ @simon I love that you share your transcripts. So cool to see the behind the scenes. 🙌 Eventually I wonder if we’ll land on a standardized/automated way to attach prompt transcripts to commits as a kind of provenance artifact. Interesting notes from Paul Gauthier on how asking an LLM to return code wrapped in a JSON object can result in a quality reduction compared to asking for that code in a less complex format such as fenced code Markdown blocks https://aider.chat/2024/08/14/code-in-json.html (Cross-posted from my blog: https://simonwillison.net/2024/Aug/16/llms-are-bad-at-returning-code-in-json/)  Format encoding robs the network of capacity I said. Better to write encoder/decoders I said. Just because it can write #svg don't mean it should I said. 😉 Good to have data though. This might be interesting for you @diacritica I have a Mac. If I want to test something on the kind of Windows machine that developers who use Windows would use (so I guess Windows 11 and not Windows Server?) what are my best options for doing that? Any good online providers where I can spend a few dollars on the ability to remote-desktop into a Windows machine? I tried using Azure for this earlier and got to the bit with this checkbox and noped right out of there:
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@simon you could try a Windows 365 Cloud PC which corporations definitely do use but they are idealized and cleaned up Windows images. I do use Windows 11 on VMWare Fusion for building projects for Windows with Visual Studio but you will get the ARM version that almost nobody uses outside of that scenario. I also have an Intel Mac with VMWare but I rarely need to fall back to that for my use case. 
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@simon in theory, winget should be able to handle a .zip install and get the path right (I think it installs to user profile by default). It doesn't handle .7z, but it knows how to install 7zip and in principle converting the file format should be straightforward... I don't know if you need to write a local manifest though, or whether it can figure it all out itself. Miscellaneous thought about Python development environment usability: maybe a good focus could be ensuring that developers don’t have to understand the concept of their $PATH in order to debug problems with their environment I’m not sure how that could be achieved, but it’s an interesting angle to think about the problem
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@simon I know @wsvincent has spent a lot of time battling this for his Django for Beginners book. (“First learn some esoterica…”, it feels like.) Neat, succinct example of using https://github.com/jxnl/instructor and GPT-4o to extract opening hours from a photo of a shop window sign New feature from Anthropic today: you can ask their Claude API to cache parts of your prompt, resulting in a large price discount and performance boost provided your app reuses the same prompt at least once every five minutes. Blogged a few notes here: https://simonwillison.net/2024/Aug/14/prompt-caching-with-claude/ Some notes on mlx-whisper - it's now really easy to run transcriptions through an Apple Silicon (and GPU) optimized Whisper model using Python on macOS https://simonwillison.net/2024/Aug/13/mlx-whisper/  @simon I wanted to know how the speed compares to `whisper.cpp`, since the openAI whisper is very slow on my mac, so I ran a test: https://notes.billmill.org/link_blog/2024/08/mlx-whisper.html mlx ran almost 3x faster than whisper.cpp with a model of the same size, and both were using the GPU. I would love to know why it's so much faster! @simon I've been using the new Datasette 1.0 JSON Write API for a small labeling website and I'm amazed by its simplicity. Thanks for adding it! Sent out the latest edition of my newsletter (a week of content from my blog repackaged as en email): https://simonw.substack.com/p/django-http-debug-mostly-written I experimented with using Claude to generate this table of contents summary, but ended up hand-editing almost every line of that before I hit send |
@simon My screen reader (NVDA) announces it, but it's four syllables so might get a bit tedious. No idea about other SRs or how it manifests in braille.
@FediverseSymbol maybe this is an Apple bug? At least one screen reader, NVDA, pronounces the symbol correctly as “Asterism” https://dragonscave.space/@jscholes/113009367662283225
@simon Ah, that’s annoying, would have expected “asterism” or some description. Depending on the usage, the symbol might be decorative and that’s maybe okay. But we need to think about cases where it convey meaning.