Simon Willison’s Weblog

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October 2022

Oct. 23, 2022

Weeknotes: DjangoCon, SQLite in Django, datasette-gunicorn

I spent most of this week at DjangoCon in San Diego—my first outside-of-the-Bay-Area conference since the before-times.

[... 1,184 words]

Oct. 24, 2022

Leveraging ’shot-scraper’ and creating image diffs. Üllar Seerme has a neat recipe for using shot-scraper and ImageMagick to create differential animations showing how a scraped web page has visually changed.

# 9:34 pm / imagemagick, shot-scraper, github-actions

Oct. 25, 2022

Most researchers don’t share their data. If you’ve ever read the words “data is available upon request" in an academic paper, and emailed the authors to request it, the chances that you'll actually receive the data are just 7 percent. The rest of the time, the authors have lost access to their data, changed emails, or are too busy or unwilling.

Saloni Dattani

# 10:48 pm / open-data, science

Oct. 27, 2022

Datasette 0.63: The annotated release notes

Visit Datasette 0.63: The annotated release notes

I released Datasette 0.63 today. These are the annotated release notes.

[... 1,531 words]

Oct. 28, 2022

Welcome to hell, Elon (via) If you only read one thing about the Elon acquisition of Twitter make it this, by Nilay Patel. Outstanding insights into what it actually takes to to run a commercial social media service.

# 3:16 pm / social-media, twitter, moderation, nilay-patel

The essential truth of every social network is that the product is content moderation, and everyone hates the people who decide how content moderation works. Content moderation is what Twitter makes — it is the thing that defines the user experience.

Nilay Patel

# 3:45 pm / moderation, social-media, twitter, nilay-patel

About the sqlite3 WASM/JS Subproject. SQLite now maintains an official WebAssembly build. It’s influenced by sql.js but is a fresh implementation with its own API design. It also supports Origin-Private FileSystem (OPFS)—a very new standard which doesn’t yet have wide browser support that allows websites to save and load files using a dedicated folder on the host machine.

# 11:05 pm / webassembly, sqlite, javascript

Oct. 29, 2022

The Perfect Commit

For the last few years I’ve been trying to center my work around creating what I consider to be the Perfect Commit. This is a single commit that contains all of the following:

[... 2,019 words]

Oct. 31, 2022

mitsuhiko/insta (via) I asked for recommendations on Twitter for testing libraries in other languages that would give me the same level of delight that I get from pytest. Two people pointed me to insta by Armin Ronacher, a Rust testing framework for “snapshot testing” which automatically records reference values to your repository, so future tests can spot if they change.

# 1:06 am / armin-ronacher, testing, rust, pytest

2022 » October

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