Simon Willison @simonw Twitter profile

Last Seen Profiles

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@aftarandhedr77

@qaws525q

Simon Willison

@simonw

2 years

New hobby: prototyping video games in 60 seconds using a combination of GPT-3 and DALL-E Here's "Raccoon Heist"

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Simon Willison

@simonw

2 years

If someone gives you a CSV file with 100,000 rows in it, what tools do you use to start exploring and understanding that data?

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Simon Willison

@simonw

4 years

Here's a piece of information that will send a chill down the spine of anyone who's ever designed a database schema: Our new house that we just moved into... has two zip codes!

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Simon Willison

@simonw

1 year

Leaked Google document: “We Have No Moat, And Neither Does OpenAI” The most interesting thing I've read recently about LLMs - a purportedly leaked document from a researcher at Google talking about the huge strategic impact open source models are having

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Simon Willison

@simonw

2 years

TIL you can run SQL queries directly against CSV files as a one-liner using the default sqlite3 command line utility

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Simon Willison

@simonw

4 months

To test this out for yourself, open a tab on a Google site and paste this into the Chrome DevTools console: chrome.runtime.sendMessage('nkeimhogjdpnpccoofpliimaahmaaome', {method: 'cpu.getInfo'}, response => {console.log(JSON.stringify(response, null, 2));});

Luca Casonato 🏳️‍🌈

@lcasdev

4 months

So, Google Chrome gives all *.google.com sites full access to system / tab CPU usage, GPU usage, and memory usage. It also gives access to detailed processor information, and provides a logging backchannel. This API is not exposed to other sites - only to *.google.com.

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Simon Willison

@simonw

3 years

"Hosting SQLite databases on Github Pages" is absolutely brilliant: it adds a virtual filesystem to SQLite-compiled-to-WebAssembly in order to fetch pages from the database using HTTP range requests

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Simon Willison

@simonw

2 years

If you're just starting to learn software engineering right now but you're considering dropping it because you think the field might be made obsolete by AI, I have an alternative approach to suggest for you: Start learning now, and use AI tools to learn FASTER

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Simon Willison

@simonw

13 days

There's a meme where you ask ChatGPT "From all of our interactions what is one thing that you can tell me about myself that I may not know about myself" - don't be fooled into thinking there's anything deep going on here, its effectively a horoscope generator

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Simon Willison

@simonw

6 months

"Do stuff and then blog about it" remains one of the most underrated pieces of career advice

vicki

@vboykis

6 months

An absolutely fantastic way to increase this is to start a blog. Almost all the cool fun stuff in my professional life for me has come from doing stuff then blogging about it.

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Simon Willison

@simonw

10 months

@d_feldman It's got me to the point where I can read Spanish language news articles and understand ~80% of them - spoken Spanish is much harder

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Simon Willison

@simonw

2 years

@tomgara That is the most "Society of Human Resource Management" story I could possibly imagine

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Simon Willison

@simonw

6 years

How about if, instead of ditching Twitter for Mastodon, we all start blogging and subscribing to each other's Atom feeds again instead? The original distributed social network could still work pretty well if we actually start using it

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Simon Willison

@simonw

1 year

Found the system prompt that drives this thing here: It works by generating a base64 encoded PNG of the drawn components, then passing that to GPT-4 Vision with that system prompt and instructions to "Turn this into a single html file using tailwind"

tldraw

@tldraw

1 year

let's go

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Simon Willison

@simonw

2 years

OK, I'm calling it: Large language models are having their Stable Diffusion moment right now

Large language models are having their Stable Diffusion moment

The open release of the Stable Diffusion image generation model back in August 2022 was a key moment. I wrote how Stable Diffusion is a really big deal at the …

simonwillison.net

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Simon Willison

@simonw

11 months

I tried this out yesterday and it's incredible: download a 4GB binary, child 755 it and now you have a full LLM and the software needed to run it ready to go, with multiplied operating system platforms supported by that single file

Justine Tunney

@JustineTunney

11 months

I spent the last month building llamafile which is the fattest executable file format ever. It lets you turn LLM weights into runnable llama.cpp binaries using cosmo libc. Blog post:

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Simon Willison

@simonw

8 months

I tried feeding a 7s video of my bookshelf into Gemini Pro 1.5 to get back a JSON array of books... and it worked!

The killer app of Gemini Pro 1.5 is video

Last week Google introduced Gemini Pro 1.5, an enormous upgrade to their Gemini series of AI models. Gemini Pro 1.5 has a 1,000,000 token context size. This is huge—previously that …

simonwillison.net

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Simon Willison

@simonw

3 months

OK this is really cool: Nico built an OpenAI action/GPT which breaks packages from PyPI up into <9.5MB chunks and returns them to ChatGPT in a way that lets it save them to disk... and then pip install them! I didn't know actions could do that, docs here:

OpenAI Platform

Explore developer resources, tutorials, API docs, and dynamic examples to get the most out of OpenAI's platform.

platform.openai.com

Nico Ritschel

@nicoritschel

3 months

@ChatGPTapp If you want to try pip installing a package, here's the link

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Simon Willison

@simonw

7 months

I built a new tool! It's a single page web app that runs OCR against images and PDFs entirely in your browser (no file upload needed) using Tesseract.js and PDF.js You can drop files onto it, or you can click to select and open them (which works on Mobile Safari as well)

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Simon Willison

@simonw

2 years

MiniGPT-4 is pretty astonishing: an AI chatbot you can use to ask questions about an image (a feature that's been promised but not yet shipped by GPT-4), building on top of the Vicuna-13B LLM (derived from LLaMA) and BLIP-2 vision-language model

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Simon Willison

@simonw

2 years

This is really grim, if not entirely unexpected: apparently the Instagram mobile app injects additional JavaScript into every page that's loaded using the in-app embedded browser - here's the tool @KrauseFx built to track changes made to the DOM when loading a page

Felix Krause

@KrauseFx

2 years

💥 New Post: Instagram & Facebook tracks everything you do on any website in their in-app browser

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Simon Willison

@simonw

7 months

TIL about binary vector search... apparently there's a trick where you can take an embedding vector like [0.0051, 0.017, -0.0186, -0.0185...] and turn that into a binary vector just reflecting if each value is > 0 - so [1, 1, -1, -1, ...] and still get useful cosine similarities!

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Simon Willison

@simonw

3 years

GitHub issues tip: if you paste in a link to an issue or PR in another repo it will display it as a truncated URL, but if you instead add it in a hyphenated bullet point it will display the title of the issue and and indicate if it is open or closed

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Simon Willison

@simonw

16 days

Looks like OpenAI have landed on their own definition of "agent" - it's a system prompt and a collection of functions

shyamal

@shyamalanadkat

16 days

introducing swarm: an experimental framework for building, orchestrating, and deploying multi-agent systems. 🐝

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Simon Willison

@simonw

8 months

AI may enable anyone to produce code, but that's not the same thing as enabling anyone to develop software The typing-out-code bit is one of the least challenging parts of building useful software that solves real problems

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Simon Willison

@simonw

11 days

I needed information from a dozen emails in my inbox... so I ran a screen capture tool, clicked through each of them and got Gemini 1.5 Flash multi-modal LLM to extract (correct, I checked it) JSON data from that 35 second video Total cost: $0.00082635

Video scraping: extracting JSON data from a 35 second screen capture for less than 1/10th of a cent

The other day I found myself needing to add up some numeric values that were scattered across twelve different emails. I didn’t particularly feel like copying and pasting all of …

simonwillison.net

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Simon Willison

@simonw

12 days

Scraped some annoying data this morning (from my own Gmail inbox) by starting a screen recording, clicking through into each of a dozen different emails, then dumping the resulting video into Google AI Studio and having Gemini output the data I needed as JSON

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Simon Willison

@simonw

2 years

I expect GPT-4 will have a LOT of applications in web scraping The increased 32,000 token limit will be large enough to send it the full DOM of most pages, serialized to HTML - then ask questions to extract data

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Simon Willison

@simonw

3 years

Whoa. runs a full Debian VM entirely in your browser via WebAssembly... and it ships with working Perl, Python, Ruby and Node.js!

WebVM - Linux virtualization in WebAssembly

Server-less virtual machine, networking included, running browser-side in HTML5/WebAssembly. Code in any programming language inside this Linux terminal.

webvm.io

Leaning Technologies

@leaningtech

3 years

We have made a server-less virtual Linux environment that runs unmodified Debian binaries in the browser. This is powered by CheerpX, a WebAssembly virtualization platform. Feel free to play with it and report bugs:

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Simon Willison

@simonw

3 months

Hidden at the bottom of this announcement: "By switching to the new gpt-4o-2024-08-06, developers save 50% on inputs ($2.50/1M input tokens) and 33% on outputs ($10.00/1M output tokens) compared to gpt-4o-2024-05-13." That's a pretty substantial price decrease!

Romain Huet

@romainhuet

3 months

Introducing Structured Outputs! A huge leap beyond JSON mode, solving a major challenge for developers. If your app relies on a specific JSON format to drive the UI, our models now match your schema—every time. No more missing keys or hallucinated enums!

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Simon Willison

@simonw

2 years

Reddit conversation about using GPT-3 to write your homework. A teacher comments: "Grading something an AI wrote is an incredibly depressing waste of my life."

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Simon Willison

@simonw

5 years

SQL is a better API language than GraphQL. Convince me otherwise!

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Simon Willison

@simonw

2 months

Great illustration of how much depth there is to what we do as engineers behind just “writing code” - understanding why localhost:3000 isn’t something you can share involves understanding URLs, clients, servers, networking, DNS…

Varun Khurana

@varunkhurana99

2 months

Cursor engineers are coming for our jobs

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Simon Willison

@simonw

2 years

Fascinating HN comment from someone who's company built a custom distributed data warehouse using compressed SQLite DB files in S3 that were queried using Lambda functions orchestrated by PostgreSQL running a custom foreign data wrapper

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Simon Willison

@simonw

2 years

Notes on how I ran Facebook's 7B LLaMA model on my 64GB M2 MacBook Pro using llama.cpp by @ggerganov It's genuinely possible to run a LLM that's hinting towards the performance of GPT3 on your own hardware now! I thought that was still a few years away

Running LLaMA 7B and 13B on a 64GB M2 MacBook Pro with llama.cpp

See also: Large language models are having their Stable Diffusion moment right now .

til.simonwillison.net

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Simon Willison

@simonw

4 years

15 years ago today on my blog: Introducing Django

Introducing Django

You may know that I spent a year working in Kansas for a local newspaper—the Lawrence Journal-World. I’m delighted to announce that a decent chunk of the software I worked …

simonwillison.net

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Simon Willison

@simonw

1 year

Understanding GPT tokenizers: I wrote about how the tokenizers used by the various GPT models actually work, including an interactive tool for experimenting with their output

Understanding GPT tokenizers

Large language models such as GPT-3/4, LLaMA and PaLM work in terms of tokens. They take text, convert it into tokens (integers), then predict which tokens should come next. Playing …

simonwillison.net

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Simon Willison

@simonw

4 years

A lesson I re-learn on every project: always have an automatically populated "created_at" column on every single database table. Any time you think "I won't need it here" you're guaranteed to want to use it for debugging something a few weeks later.

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Simon Willison

@simonw

2 years

The stuff happening on the Stable Diffusion subreddit right now is pretty wild - since the model can be run by anyone on their own machine if they have a decent GPU

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Simon Willison

@simonw

3 months

Corollary to this: you can have an outsized impact on the world by being one of the few people who DO publish fresh information online on your own web pages Blog like it's 2005!

Noah Smith 🐇🇺🇸🇺🇦🇹🇼

@Noahpinion

3 months

A decade ago I felt like I could find anything on the Web. Now I feel like I can barely find anything. People just don't put information on web pages anymore.

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Simon Willison

@simonw

1 year

Prompt injection comes to GPT-4V

Patel Meet 𝕏

@mn_google

1 year

In GPT-4V Image content can override your prompt and be interpreted as commands.

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Simon Willison

@simonw

3 years

@kingrolo @gvanrossum @tech_update0 @ethereum @solana We hate it because we understand it

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Simon Willison

@simonw

2 years

We accidentally invented computers that can lie to us and we can't figure out how to make them stop

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Simon Willison

@simonw

3 years

PostgreSQL 14 adds new syntax for accessing JSON data: SELECT * FROM shirts WHERE details['attributes']['color'] = '"neon yellow"' I like this so much more than the -> operators, which stubbornly refuse to stick in my head

Craig Kerstiens - Finger lime evangelist

@craigkerstiens

3 years

Y'all this new JSON subscript syntax in Postgres 14 is sweet. Super excited to see Postgres just getting better bit by bit -

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Simon Willison

@simonw

3 months

Now that dust is settling a little bit, can we get a vibe check on Llama 3.1 405B? Anyone finding it a genuinely credible self-hosted alternative for the best OpenAI or Anthropic models? Any companies using it that previously wouldn't risk sending their data to an API provider?

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Simon Willison

@simonw

11 months

llamafile is the new best way to run a LLM on your own computer

Mozilla’s innovation group and Justine Tunney just released llamafile, and I think it’s now the single best way to get started running Large Language Models (think your own local copy …

simonwillison.net

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Simon Willison

@simonw

1 year

If you haven't tried Claude yet it's a absolutely worth spending time with - I lean on it a lot for working with longer documents, since it can handle 100,000 tokens (GPT-4 is only 8,000) at a time Plus you can upload PDFs to it - I've used it with 100+ page documents

Anthropic

@AnthropicAI

1 year

We’re rolling out access to to more people around the world. Starting today, users in 95 countries can talk to Claude and get help with their professional or day-to-day tasks. You can find the list of supported countries here:

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Simon Willison

@simonw

4 months

Six months ago nobody had trained a model as good as GPT-4, and an open question for me was what we were missing - did OpenAI have some trick that nobody else had figured out? Today we have several new GPT-4 class models - do we know if there was a special trick to get there?

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Simon Willison

@simonw

3 years

We really need to start teaching web developers how to use links

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Simon Willison

@simonw

2 years

A new post about prompt injection attacks, which I'm increasingly concerned about now that people are hooking LLMs up to external tools through Auto-GPT, ChatGPT Plugins etc

Prompt injection: What’s the worst that can happen?

Activity around building sophisticated applications on top of LLMs (Large Language Models) such as GPT-3/4/ChatGPT/etc is growing like wildfire right now. Many of these applications are potentially...

simonwillison.net

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Simon Willison

@simonw

16 days

Confession: despite all of the debates about whether or not an LLM can "reason", I still don't really understand exactly what the term "reasoning" means So just like with "agents" and "AI" itself, I'm not sure the people engaged in those debates are talking about the same thing

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Simon Willison

@simonw

3 years

Not sure if this is a controversial opinion or not: unit tests should make up a minority segment of your overall automated test suite I'd absolutely take a project with integration and no unit tests over one with unit tests but no integration tests

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Simon Willison

@simonw

2 years

I see people being deceived by this again and again: ChatGPT can NOT read content from URLs that you give it, but will convincingly pretend that it can Crucial to spread this message any time you see anyone falling into this trap

ChatGPT couldn’t access the internet, even though it really looked like it could

A really common misconception about ChatGPT is that it can access URLs. I’ve seen many different examples of people pasting in a URL and asking for a summary, or asking …

simonwillison.net

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Simon Willison

@simonw

2 years

"GitLab plans to automatically delete projects if they've been inactive for a year and are owned by users of its free tier." Absolutely shocking decision from @gitlab , I very much hope they reconsider this

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Simon Willison

@simonw

4 years

My favourite reactions to this come from people who work in civic tech, because unlike regular corporate gig programmers they're not allowed to just ignore weird edge-cases like this

Cyd Harrell

@cydharrell

4 years

oh no

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Simon Willison

@simonw

5 months

What are some very short (1-3 word) prompt fragments you find work well? A few of mine: "Be concise" "Try harder" (for disappointing initial results) "Use Python" (to trigger Code Interpreter) "No yapping" "ELI5" "Give multiple options" "Explain each line" (for code)

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Simon Willison

@simonw

2 years

@emnode @tobyordoxford I don't want my search engine to be vengeful

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Simon Willison

@simonw

3 years

Love this idea that the reason voice assistants don't seem to stick for most people is that they're actually command line interfaces, but even less discoverable because they don't provide any visible feedback at all

Terence Eden is on Mastodon

@edent

3 years

@daviddlow @charlesarthur @benedictevans I've droned on endlessly about how you can't expect normal people to use the command line. That's what Alexa is. If you don't say the *precise* invocation correctly, you get an error. And because there's no display, you have to remember dozens of different commands. It's too hard

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Simon Willison

@simonw

11 months

Love that we live in a time where "your software got lazier" is a legit piece of feedback

ChatGPT

@ChatGPTapp

11 months

we've heard all your feedback about GPT4 getting lazier! we haven't updated the model since Nov 11th, and this certainly isn't intentional. model behavior can be unpredictable, and we're looking into fixing it 🫡

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Simon Willison

@simonw

2 years

If you're a programmer and you're still thinking that all of this ChatGPT stuff is a waste of your time, I strongly suggest reviewing this example It's over-hyped, sure - but it's not something anyone in our profession should continue to ignore

Simon Willison

@simonw

2 years

This entire benchmarking project took just three prompts

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Simon Willison

@simonw

6 years

Sentences with the word "just" in them always work better if you drop that word. "Why don't you just add caching?" - that one word implies "I don't value your expertise or expect you to have thought this through" "Why don't you add caching?" - now we can have a conversation.

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Simon Willison

@simonw

7 months

Just got ChatGPT Code Interpreter to write me a SQLite extension in C from scratch, then compile it with GCC, then load it into Python and test it out, then iterate on it to fix the bugs All on my phone while pottering around the house

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Simon Willison

@simonw

5 months

I don't think it's appreciated enough that ChatGPT is absolutely a power-user tool It's like Excel: getting started with it is easy enough, but truly understanding it's strengths and weaknesses and how to most effectively apply it takes years of accumulated experience

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Simon Willison

@simonw

4 years

Made myself a self-updating GitHub personal README! It uses a GitHub Action to update itself with my latest GitHub releases, blog entries and TILs

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Simon Willison

@simonw

11 months

Looks like the reason that letter only had 500 signatures out of 770 might be that the rest of the company were asleep

Lilian Weng

@lilianweng

11 months

About 650 / 770 signed at this moment. As people start waking up, more will come. All the efforts started after 1:30 AM, 500+ within two hours and all of this after 2 crazy days with very little sleep.

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Simon Willison

@simonw

11 months

Sigh. Tip for if you're planning on suing an AI company: asking a model if something is included in its training data is not a reliable way method for telling what is in its training data

Max Woolf

@minimaxir

11 months

ಠ_ಠ

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Simon Willison

@simonw

7 months

TIL Google Chrome has a --headless option you can use to take a screenshot from the CLI that's built into the default installation

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Simon Willison

@simonw

7 years

I just released datasette - a new tool for turning any SQLite database into a web interface and JSON API:

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Simon Willison

@simonw

1 year

Has anyone managed to run Llama 2 GPU accelerated on an M1/M2 Mac yet? Bonus points if you can provide extremely meticulous step-by-step instructions for replicating what you did!

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@simonw

7 years

Maybe the solution to the Fermi paradox is that significantly advanced civilizations discover crypto currencies and then furiously burn through all available energy sources until they go extinct

Eric Holthaus

@EricHolthaus

7 years

Uhhh... about bitcoin... it's actually ruining the planet. The bitcoin computer network currently uses as much electricity as Denmark. In 18 months, it will use as much as the entire United States. Something's gotta give. This simply can’t continue.

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Simon Willison

@simonw

2 years

@moorehn @dancow @sewellchan @guardian I'm fascinated by their use of the term "build" - they talk about building a lot, took me a while to realize that their version of building is funneling money into speculative investments and convincing others to do the same

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@simonw

2 months

My notes on Google Research's new paper describing "pipe syntax", their alternative syntax for SQL queries which they've been rolling out internally since February

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Simon Willison

@simonw

6 months

What's the cheapest option right now for me to spin up a Linux server somewhere for an hour with enough GPU to run the latest Mixtral model?

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Simon Willison

@simonw

3 years

One of the most obvious flaws in using blockchains for anything involving regular human beings is one I've not seen much discussion of: Regular human beings cannot protect their passwords, credentials or private keys. They just can't.

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@simonw

2 months

This story about why some companies are reconsidering their Microsoft Copliot 365 rollouts is amusing - in this case the problem is that the AI chatbot is /too/ effective, in that if you haven’t correctly configure permissions on documents like the employee salary spreadsheet

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Simon Willison

@simonw

11 days

Hey @OpenAI , how about turning off the anti-scraping technology on your documentation site? Makes it harder to paste your docs into an LLM!

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Simon Willison

@simonw

2 years

Weird, GitHub have deprecated one of their GraphQL APIs in favor of a REST one

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Simon Willison

@simonw

29 days

Has anyone managed to extract the NotebookLM podcast generation system prompt yet?

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Simon Willison

@simonw

4 months

The amount of superstition involved in prompting LLMs is quite fantastic That "you are an expert in field X..." trick? Likely a complete waste of time since late 2022

Learn Prompting

@learnprompting

4 months

🚨 Role Prompting doesn't work... Our team at @learnprompting led a year-long study with co-authors from @OpenAI & @Microsoft , analyzing over 1,500 prompting papers. We narrowed it down to 58 different prompting techniques and we analyzed every one. Here's what we found...

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Simon Willison

@simonw

1 year

Embeddings: What they are and why they matter I took my recent PyBay talk and turned it into the most comprehensive answer I could possibly provide to the question "What are embeddings?"

Embeddings: What they are and why they matter

Embeddings are a really neat trick that often come wrapped in a pile of intimidating jargon. If you can make it through that jargon, they unlock powerful and exciting techniques …

simonwillison.net

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Simon Willison

@simonw

6 months

Did I miss something there or did @openai leave the biggest question - "when can we use this stuff?" - unanswered?

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Simon Willison

@simonw

4 months

I needed a box shadow the other day, so I got Claude to build me a custom one-off interface for fiddling with box shadow properties Pretty wild how we can build tiny custom tools like this in a similar time that it would take to search for and select a tool that already exists!

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@simonw

2 years

My own answer: I either open the CSV directly in the Datasette Desktop Mac application () or I do this: sqlite-utils insert /tmp/data.db rows big.csv --csv datasette /tmp/data.db That gives me a table called "rows" in a fresh SQLite database

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Simon Willison

@simonw

2 years

I built a new tool: s3-ocr, a utility for running OCR (with Amazon Textract) against every PDF file in a S3 bucket and getting the results back as a searchable SQLite database

s3-ocr: Extract text from PDF files stored in an S3 bucket

I’ve released s3-ocr, a new tool that runs Amazon’s Textract OCR text extraction against PDF files in an S3 bucket, then writes the resulting text out to a SQLite database …

simonwillison.net

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Simon Willison

@simonw

2 years

Notes on how I turned an hour-long video of a digital thermometer into temperature readings over time by using ffmpeg to split the video into a frame every 10s and Google Cloud Vision to run the OCR I got ChatGPT/GPT-4 to show me how to use both of those:

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Simon Willison

@simonw

2 months

I ran through the new Anthropic interactive prompting tutorial this evening and made some notes on tips that stood out to me

Anthropic��s Prompt Engineering Interactive Tutorial

Anthropic continue their trend of offering the best documentation of any of the leading LLM vendors. This tutorial is delivered as a set of Jupyter notebooks - I used it …

simonwillison.net

Alex Albert

@alexalbert__

2 months

The interactive tutorial is over 9 chapters long and introduces all the prompting fundamentals—from how to structure your prompt to best practices for including examples. If you've never heard of terms like CoT or few-shot, this is the place to start!

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Simon Willison

@simonw

4 years

This video is a great example of why I just can't agree with historians who are pushing back at efforts to use AI to colorize and up-rez historic videos - it's honestly like a magic portal window back to 124 years ago

YouTubers are upscaling the past to 4K. Historians want them to stop

YouTubers are using AI to bring history to life. But historians argue the process is nonsense

www.wired.com

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Simon Willison

@simonw

7 years

Couldn't agree with this more: I Google the most trivial code things in languages that I've used for over a decade dozens of times a day. The amount of detail you actually need to commit to memory in 2018 keeps getting smaller - remember what CAN be done, not exactly how to do it

Patrick McKenzie

@patio11

7 years

Periodic observation for the benefit of junior developers: You do not have to be embarrassed about not knowing a particular bit of syntax or API. Googling things efficiently is a core job skill. ~15 years in I'll still look up "append to array javascript."

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Simon Willison

@simonw

4 years

Amusingly I first learned this when someone sent us an encrypted PDF where the password was our zip code, and what I thought was the zip code didn't work so I ran a brute force password cracker against it

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Simon Willison

@simonw

2 years

This is the thing I find most interesting about ChatGPT as a learning assistant: it turns out having a teacher that's mostly right but occasionally very wrong makes me think much more critically about what I'm learning, which I think is helping me build more robust mental models

Arvind Narayanan

@random_walker

2 years

When ChatGPT came out I thought I wouldn't use it for learning because of its tendency to slip in some BS among 10 helpful explanations. Then I tried it, and found that it forces me to think critically about every sentence, which is the most effective mindset for learning.

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Simon Willison

@simonw

2 years

This is a crazy cool hack: Crunchy Data have a new PostgreSQL tutorial series which runs a full PostgreSQL server compiled to WebAssembly entirely in your web browser so you can try things out!

Craig Kerstiens - Finger lime evangelist

@craigkerstiens

2 years

And here it is, come join us @crunchydata and learn some Postgres at our playground -

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Simon Willison

@simonw

28 days

My detailed notes on NotebookLM's new Audio Overview feature (aka surprisingly convincing automated two-person podcast conversation)

NotebookLM’s automatically generated podcasts are surprisingly effective

Audio Overview is a fun new feature of Google’s NotebookLM which is getting a lot of attention right now. It generates a one-off custom podcast against content you provide, where …

simonwillison.net

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Simon Willison

@simonw

6 months

Realized I've reached the point now with GitHub Copilot autocomplete where I can often guess exactly what it's going to suggest, pause for a moment to wait for it to make the suggestion and accept it and move on It's majority a typing assistant now and I really like it for that

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Simon Willison

@simonw

1 year

One thing I missed from yesterday: the cost of storing data in an OpenAI assistant for retrieval question answering etc is VERY steep: $0.20/GB/assistant/day Compare to S3 standard pricing which is about $0.023 per GB per month, so I think ChatGPT assistant storage is 260x more!

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Simon Willison

@simonw

2 years

Good thing my blog is behind Cloudflare

Elon Musk

@elonmusk

2 years

Might need a bit more polish …

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Simon Willison

@simonw

2 months

Did you know Goohle’s Gemini 1.5 Pro vision LLM is trained to return bounding boxes for objects found within images? I built this browser tool that lets you run a prompt with an image against Gemini and visualize the bounding boxes

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Simon Willison

@simonw

10 months

What are some LLM-driven products that you use at least once a week that aren't ChatGPT, Bard, Bing or GitHub Copilot - things that are built on LLMs but aren't direct chat interfaces to LLMs

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Simon Willison

@simonw

3 years

This is fascinating: as-of 2017 university instructors have been increasingly encountering students who have absolutely no idea how files and folders on a computer work

Dan Nguyen

@dancow

3 years

omg turns out I wasn't completely bullshitting all the times when I fussed to students that "file not found" would be their most common and soul-destroying "bug" when trying to learn programming

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Simon Willison

@simonw

2 years

A tip for writing more: expand your definition of completing a project (any project, no matter how small) to include writing a blog post (or README or similar) that explains that project

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Simon Willison

@simonw

3 years

A public librarian on why two-factor authentication is a huge barrier to people with limited technology access

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