Simon Willison’s Weblog

OpenAI Cookbook: Techniques to improve reliability (via) “Let’s think step by step” is a notoriously successful way of getting large language models to solve problems, but it turns out that’s just the tip of the iceberg: this article includes a wealth of additional examples and techniques that can be used to trick GPT-3 into being a whole lot more effective.

# 5:15 am / openai, gpt-3, ai, generative-ai, llms

The Page With No Code (via) A fun demo by Dan Q, who created a web page with no HTML at all - but in Firefox it still renders content, thanks to a data URI base64 encoded stylesheet served in a link: header that uses html::before, html::after, body::before and body::after with content: properties to serve the content. It even has a background image, encoded as a base64 SVG nested inside another data URI.

# 6:59 pm / css, datauri, html

Inside the Globus INK: a mechanical navigation computer for Soviet spaceflight (via) Absolutely beautiful piece of Soviet spacecraft engineering, explained in detail by Ken Shirriff.

# 7:53 pm / space, spacescience