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/

@simon this looks a lot like Microsoft’s LINQ declarative query syntax.

@simon - This will be some hilarious prank on DBAs who have spent the last 2 decades irrationally railing against ORMs - Entity Framework in particular.

Under the hood, it's probably quite similar to LINQ and then an engine to translate the AST to SQL!

@simon Came for the SQL, stayed for the rant about PDFs with two columns 😅

@simon
Woof! 🐕🐶🐕

@simon I believe @jbigham has a few things to say about this

As an experiment I downloaded the two column PDF of this new paper from Google research "SQL Has Problems. We Can Fix Them: Pipe Syntax In SQL" https://research.google/pubs/sql-has-problems-we-can-fix-them-pipe-syntax-in-sql/

... and uploaded it to Google AI Studio and told Gemini Pro 1.5 "Convert this document to neatly styled semantic HTML" - and the results were pretty good! https://static.simonwillison.net/static/2024/Pipe-Syntax-In-SQL.html

Imagine a version of my dumb little "write a haiku about a photo you take" page which used OAuth, harvested API keys and then racked up hundreds of dollar bills against everyone who tried it out running illicit election interference campaigns or whatever

https://tools.simonwillison.net/haiku

@simon indeed is cryptic. The best reference I found was this one: https://jub0bs.com/posts/2023-02-08-fearless-cors/#cors-101

But the one you shared looks nice!

@simon I hope CORS is half as frustrating for those trying to break web security as those of us just trying to do legitimate stuff 🤦‍♂️

@simon I tried my best in this section of an old post: https://jub0bs.com/posts/2023-02-08-fearless-cors/#cors-101

@simon Fun story. I worked for a company that used Confluence for wikis and such. The VP of engineering would write all the private team meetings in here. Yet I was not part of the allowed members to see such content.

However, I just told Confluence to e-mail me daily updates on when this VP posted.

So I would get a daily e-mail that showed the contents of these meetings delivered conveniently to my inbox.

Not sure if this would still work as it has been many years… 😀

@simon Have you seen @heydon's take https://heydonworks.com/article/the-abbr-element/ on the `abbr`-element?

@simon I'll file a report with Apple to see what's going on with Voiceover/other speech components. I'll also do some testing with different synthesizers. It could be that Apple will need to add this symbol to their emojis.

@simon Tested in latest NVDA on Windows and this symbol is read as "Asterism," regardless of speech synthesizer. Using latest version of JAWS on Windows, it is not read at all. There is no pause, it's just skipped. Same for Windows Narrator. iOS 18 beta reads it as asterism, likewise for macOS beta. The only way to fix this is to beg and plead with screen reader maintainers to add a default pronunciation for ⁂. Users can add a replacement themselves, but this is a somewhat technical process.