Simon Willison’s Weblog

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Wednesday, 16th November 2022

JSON Changelog with SQLite (via) One of my favourite database challenges is how to track changes to rows over time. This is a neat recipe from 2018 which uses SQLite triggers and the SQLite JSON functions to serialize older versions of the rows and store them in TEXT columns.

# 3:41 am / databases, json, sqlite

fasiha/yamanote (via) Yamanote is “a guerrilla bookmarking server” by Ahmed Fasih—it works using a bookmarklet that grabs a full serialized copy of the page—the innerHTML of both the head and body element—and passes it to the server, which stores it in a SQLite database. The files are then served with a Content-Security-Policy’: `default-src ’self’ header to prevent stored pages from fetching ANY external assets when they are viewed.

# 3:48 am / bookmarks, sqlite, content-security-policy

TIL How to create a tarball of a git repository using "git archive" — I figured this out in [a Gist in 2016](https://gist.github.com/simonw/a44af92b4b255981161eacc304417368) which has attracted a bunch of comments over the years. Now I'm upgrading it to a retroactive TIL.
TIL Verifying your GitHub profile on Mastodon — Mastodon has a really neat way of implementing verification, using the [rel=me microformat](https://microformats.org/wiki/rel-me).

These kinds of biases aren’t so much a technical problem as a sociotechnical one; ML models try to approximate biases in their underlying datasets and, for some groups of people, some of these biases are offensive or harmful. That means in the coming years there will be endless political battles about what the ‘correct’ biases are for different models to display (or not display), and we can ultimately expect there to be as many approaches as there are distinct ideologies on the planet. I expect to move into a fractal ecosystem of models, and I expect model providers will ‘shapeshift’ a single model to display different biases depending on the market it is being deployed into. This will be extraordinarily messy.

Jack Clark

# 11:04 pm / machine-learning, ai, generative-ai, jack-clark, llms

Tuesday, 15th November 2022
Friday, 18th November 2022