Simon Willison’s Weblog

pyfakefs usage (via) New to me pytest fixture library that provides a really easy way to mock Python’s filesystem functions—open(), os.path.listdir() and so on—so a test can run against a fake set of files. This looks incredibly useful.

# 10:37 pm / lukeplant, testing, python, pytest

Python’s “Disappointing” Superpowers. Luke Plant provides a fascinating detailed list of Python libraries that use dynamic meta-programming tricks in interesting ways—including SQLAlchemy, Django, Werkzeug, pytest and more.

# 10:41 pm / lukeplant, python

Carving the Scheduler Out of Our Orchestrator (via) Thomas Ptacek describes Fly’s new custom-built alternative to Nomad and Kubernetes in detail, including why they eventually needed to build something custom to best serve their platform. In doing so he provides the best explanation I’ve ever seen of what an orchestration system actually does.

# 9:46 pm / kubernetes, thomas-ptacek, fly

GROUNDHOG-DAY.com (via) “The leading Groundhog Day data source”. I love this so much: it’s a collection of predictions from all 59 groundhogs active in towns scattered across North America (I had no idea there were that many). The data is available via a JSON API too.

# 10:05 pm / data

I’m Now a Full-Time Professional Open Source Maintainer. Filippo Valsorda, previously a member of the Go team at Google, is now independent and making a full-time living as a maintainer of various open source projects relating to Go. He’s managing to pull in an amount “equivalent to my Google total compensation package”, which is a huge achievement: the greatest cost involved in independent open source is usually the opportunity cost of turning down a big tech salary. He’s doing this through a high touch retainer model, where six client companies pay him to keep working on his projects and also provide them with varying amounts of expert consulting.

# 1:12 am / open-source, careers, consulting, go, filippo-valsorda

The technology behind GitHub’s new code search (via) I’ve been a beta user of the new GitHub code search for a while and I absolutely love it: you really can run a regular expression search across the entire of GitHub, which is absurdly useful for both finding code examples of under-documented APIs and for seeing how people are using open source code that you have released yourself. It turns out GitHub built their own search engine for this from scratch, called Blackbird. It’s implemented in Rust and makes clever use of sharded ngram indexes—not just trigrams, because it turns out those aren’t quite selective enough for a corpus that includes a lot of three letter keywords like “for”.

I also really appreciated the insight into how they handle visibility permissions: they compile those into additional internal search clauses, resulting in things like “RepoIDs(...) or PublicRepo()”

# 6:38 pm / rust, search, github

Making SQLite extensions pip install-able (via) Alex Garcia figured out how to bundle a compiled SQLite extension in a Python wheel (building different wheels for different platforms) and publish them to PyPI. This is a huge leap forward in terms of the usability of SQLite extensions, which have previously been pretty difficult to actually install and run. Alex also created Datasette plugins that depend on his packages, so you can now “datasette install datasette-sqlite-regex” (or datasette-sqlite-ulid, datasette-sqlite-fastrand, datasette-sqlite-jsonschema) to gain access to his custom SQLite extensions in your Datasette instance. It even works with “datasette publish --install” to deploy to Vercel, Fly.io and Cloud Run.

# 7:44 pm / sqlite, plugins, datasette, python, pip, alex-garcia

Big Data is Dead (via) Don’t be distracted by the headline, this is very worth your time. Jordan Tigani spent ten years working on Google BigQuery, during which time he was surprised to learn that the median data storage size for regular customers was much less than 100GB. In this piece he argues that genuine Big Data solutions are relevant to a tiny fraction of companies, and there’s way more value in solving problems for everyone else. I’ve been talking about Datasette as a tool for solving “small data” problems for a while, and this article has given me a whole bunch of new arguments I can use to support that concept.

# 7:25 pm / big-data, small-data

PocketPy. PocketPy is “a lightweight(~5000 LOC) Python interpreter for game engines”. It’s implemented as a single C++ header which provides an impressive subset of the Python language: functions, dictionaries, lists, strings and basic classes too. There’s also a browser demo that loads a 766.66 KB pypocket.wasm file (240.72 KB compressed) and uses it to power a basic terminal interface. I tried and failed to get that pypocket.wasm file working from wasmer/wasmtime/wasm3—it should make a really neat lightweight language to run in a WebAssembly sandbox.

# 5:13 am / webassembly, python

OpenAI’s Whisper is another case study in Colonisation (via) Really interesting perspective on Whisper from the Papa Reo project—a group working to nurture and proliferate the Māori language. “The main questions we ask when we see papers like FLEURS and Whisper are: where did they get their indigenous data from, who gave them access to it, and who gave them the right to create a derived work from that data and then open source the derivation?”

# 5:22 pm / openai, whisper, generative-ai

ChatGPT Is a Blurry JPEG of the Web. Science fiction author Ted Chiang offers a brilliant analogy for ChatGPT in this New Yorker article: it's a highly lossy compression algorithm for a vast amount of information which works like a JPEG, and uses grammatically correct interpolation to fill back in the missing gaps.

ChatGPT is so good at this form of interpolation that people find it entertaining: they’ve discovered a “blur” tool for paragraphs instead of photos, and are having a blast playing with it.

# 9:28 pm / gpt-3, generative-ai, llms, chatgpt, ai, new-yorker, ted-chiang

Introducing sqlite-vss: A SQLite Extension for Vector Search (via) This latest SQLite extension from Alex Garcia is possibly his best yet: it adds FAISS-powered vector similarity search directly to SQLite, enabling fast KNN similarity lookups against a virtual table that feels a lot like SQLite’s own built-in full text search feature. This write-up includes interactive demos using Datasette called from an Observable notebook, running similarity searches against an index of 200,000 news headlines and summaries in less than 50ms.

# 10:53 pm / vector-search, sqlite, datasette, observable, alex-garcia

The anatomy of visually-hidden (via) James Edwards provides a detailed breakdown of the current recommended CSS for hiding content while keeping it available for assistive technologies in the browser accessibility and render trees. Lots of accumulated tricks and screenreader special cases in this.

# 12:37 am / css, screenreaders, accessibility

Browse the BBC In Our Time archive by Dewey decimal code. Matt Webb built Braggoscope, an alternative interface for browsing the 1,000 episodes of the BBC’s In Our Time dating back to 1998, organized by Dewey decimal system and with related episodes calculated using OpenAI embeddings and guests and reading lists extracted using GPT-3. “Using GitHub Copilot to write code and calling out to GPT-3 programmatically to dodge days of graft actually brought tears to my eyes.”

# 4:03 pm / matt-webb, openai, gpt-3, generative-ai, llms, embeddings

Web Push for Web Apps on iOS and iPadOS. iOS and iPadOS 16.4 beta 1 finally brings web push notifications to iOS. User’s need to add an app to their home screen and then approve notification access to get this functionality, which also includes the ability for apps to update a badge on their icon. Thankfully you don’t need paid membership of the Apple Developer Program ($99/year) in order to send notifications.

# 12:28 am / safari, ios

How The Post is replacing Mapbox with open source solutions (via) Kevin Schaul describes the Washington Post’s emerging open source GIS stack: OpenMapTiles, Maputnik, PMTiles and Maplibre-gl-js.

# 6:45 pm / maps, washington-post, openstreetmap, opensearch

Writing Javascript without a build system (via) Julia Evans perfectly captures why I prefer not to use build systems in the majority of my projects that use JavaScript: “... my experience with build systems (not just Javascript build systems!), is that if you have a 5-year-old site, often it’s a huge pain to get the site built again. And because most of my websites are pretty small, the advantage of using a build system is pretty small.”

# 5:25 am / julia-evans, javascript

Can We Trust Search Engines with Generative AI? A Closer Look at Bing’s Accuracy for News Queries (via) Computational journalism professor Nick Diakopoulos takes a deeper dive into the quality of the summarizations provided by AI-assisted Bing. His findings are troubling: for news queries, which are a great test for AI summarization since they include recent information that may have sparse or conflicting stories, Bing confidently produces answers with important errors: claiming the Ohio train derailment happened on February 9th when it actually happened on February 3rd for example.

# 6:09 pm / bing, search, generative-ai, llms, trust

Docker can copy in files directly from another image. I did not know you could do this in a Dockerfile:

COPY --from=lubien/tired-proxy:2 /tired-proxy /tired-proxy

# 5:35 am / docker