Simon Willison’s Weblog

Datasette Lite: Loading JSON data (via) I added a new feature to Datasette Lite: you can now pass it the URL to a JSON file (hosted on a CORS-compatible hosting provider such as GitHub or GitHub Gists) and it will load that file into a database table for you. It expects an array of objects, but if your file has an object as the root it will search through it looking for the first key that is an array of objects and load those instead.

# 6:43 pm / json, projects, datasette, datasette-lite, cors

Every remaining website using the .museum TLD (via) Jonty did a survey of every one of the 1,134 domains using the .museum TLD, which dates back to 2001 and is managed by The Museum Domain Management Association.

# 12:53 am / domains, museums

Building a BFT JSON CRDT (via) Jacky Zhao describes their project to build a CRDT library for JSON data in Rust, and includes a thorough explanation of what CRDTs are and how they work. “I write this blog post mostly as a note to my past self, distilling a lot of what I’ve learned since into a blog post I wish I had read before going in”—the best kind of blog post!

# 7:56 pm / json, rust, crdt

Microsoft Flight Simulator: WebAssembly (via) This is such a smart application of WebAssembly: it can now be used to write extensions for Microsoft Flight Simulator, which means you can run code from untrusted sources safely in a sandbox. I’m really looking forward to more of this kind of usage—I love the idea of finally having a robust sandbox for running things like plugins.

# 2:08 am / microsoft, webassembly

An Interactive Guide to Flexbox. Joshua Comeau built this fantastic guide to CSS flexbox layouts, with interactive examples of all of the properties. This is a really useful tour of the layout model.

# 2:50 am / css

Stable Diffusion 2.0 and the Importance of Negative Prompts for Good Results. Stable Diffusion 2.0 is out, and it’s a very different model from 1.4/1.5. It’s trained using a new text encoder (OpenCLIP, in place of OpenAI’s CLIP) which means a lot of the old tricks—notably using “Greg Rutkowski” to get high quality fantasy art—no longer work. What DOES work, incredibly well, is negative prompting—saying things like “cyberpunk forest by Salvador Dali” but negative on “trees, green”. Max Woolf explores negative prompting in depth in this article, including how to combine it with textual inversion.

# 1:22 am / max-woolf, stable-diffusion, prompt-engineering, generative-ai, text-to-image

Scaling Mastodon: The Compendium (via) Hazel Weakly’s collection of notes on scaling Mastodon, covering PostgreSQL, Sidekiq, Redis, object storage and more.

# 5:46 am / postgresql, redis, scaling, mastodon, sidekiq