Simon Willison’s Weblog

SQLite 3.44: Interactive release notes. Anton Zhiyanov compiled interactive release notes for the new release of SQLite, demonstrating several of the new features. I’m most excited about order by in aggregates—group_concat(name order by name desc)—which is something I’ve wanted in the past. Anton demonstrates how it works with JSON aggregate functions as well. The new date formatting options look useful as well.

# 3:47 pm / sqlite, anton-zhiyanov

Tracking SQLite Database Changes in Git (via) A neat trick from Garrit Franke that I hadn’t seen before: you can teach “git diff” how to display human readable versions of the differences between binary files with a specific extension using the following:

git config diff.sqlite3.binary true
git config diff.sqlite3.textconv “echo .dump | sqlite3”

That way you can store binary files in your repo but still get back SQL diffs to compare them.

I still worry about the efficiency of storing binary files in Git, since I expect multiple versions of a text text file to compress together better.

# 6:53 pm / git, sqlite

Hacking Google Bard—From Prompt Injection to Data Exfiltration (via) Bard recently grew extension support, allowing it access to a user’s personal documents. Here’s the first reported prompt injection attack against that.

This kind of attack against LLM systems is inevitable any time you combine access to private data with exposure to untrusted inputs. In this case the attack vector is a Google Doc shared with the user, containing prompt injection instructions that instruct the model to encode previous data into an URL and exfiltrate it via a markdown image.

Google’s CSP headers restrict those images to *.google.com—but it turns out you can use Google AppScript to run your own custom data exfiltration endpoint on script.google.com.

Google claim to have fixed the reported issue—I’d be interested to learn more about how that mitigation works, and how robust it is against variations of this attack.

# 4:46 pm / google, security, ai, prompt-injection, bard, llms, exfiltration-attacks, content-security-policy

YouTube: OpenAssistant is Completed—by Yannic Kilcher (via) The OpenAssistant project was an attempt to crowdsource the creation of an alternative to ChatGPT, using human volunteers to build a Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF) dataset suitable for training this kind of model.

The project started in January. In this video from 24th October project founder Yannic Kilcher announces that the project is now shutting down.

They’ve declared victory in that the dataset they collected has been used by other teams as part of their training efforts, but admit that the overhead of running the infrastructure and moderation teams necessary for their project is more than they can continue to justify.

# 10:14 pm / open-source, ai, generative-ai, chatgpt, llms

Stripe: Online migrations at scale (via) This 2017 blog entry from Jacqueline Xu at Stripe provides a very clear description of the “dual writes” pattern for applying complex data migrations without downtime: dual write to new and old tables, update the read paths, update the write paths and finally remove the now obsolete data—illustrated with an example of upgrading customers from having a single to multiple subscriptions.

# 4:06 pm / databases, migrations, zero-downtime, stripe

See the History of a Method with git log -L (via) Neat Git trick from Caleb Hearth that I hadn’t seen before, and it works for Python out of the box:

git log -L :path_with_format:__init__.py

That command displays a log (with diffs) of just the portion of commits that changed the path_with_format function in the __init__.py file.

# 8:16 pm / git, python

Fine-tuning GPT3.5-turbo based on 140k slack messages. Ross Lazerowitz spent $83.20 creating a fine-tuned GPT-3.5 turbo model based on 140,000 of his Slack messages (10,399,747 tokens), massaged into a JSONL file suitable for use with the OpenAI fine-tuning API.

Then he told the new model “write a 500 word blog post on prompt engineering”, and it replied “Sure, I shall work on that in the morning”.

# 2:44 am / ai, slack, openai, generative-ai, llms, fine-tuning

AGI is Being Achieved Incrementally (OpenAI DevDay w/ Simon Willison, Alex Volkov, Jim Fan, Raza Habib, Shreya Rajpal, Rahul Ligma, et al). I participated in an an hour long conversation today about the new things released at OpenAI DevDay, now available on the Latent Space podcast.

# 2:50 am / podcasts, ai, openai, generative-ai, llms, podcast-appearances

The world’s largest aircraft breaks cover in Silicon Valley. “At 124.5 meters long, Pathfinder 1 dwarfs the current Goodyear airships and even the massive Stratolaunch plane designed to launch orbital rockets. It’s the largest aircraft to take to the skies since the gargantuan Hindenburg airship of the 1930s.”

# 10:12 pm / airships, zeppelins

ChatGPT: Dejargonizer. I built a custom GPT. Paste in some text with unknown jargon or acronyms and it will try to guess the context and give you back an explanation of each term.

# 10:17 pm / ai, generative-ai, chatgpt, llms

DAK and the Golden Age of Gadget Catalogs (via) A must-read from Cabel Sasser, describing his ten year project to collect and digitize copies of the DAK gadget catalog, from 1972 to 1994.

# 4:57 am / cabel-sasser, gadgets, history

A Coder Considers the Waning Days of the Craft (via) James Somers in the New Yorker, talking about the impact of GPT-4 on programming as a profession. Despite the headline this piece is a nuanced take on this subject, which I found myself mostly agreeing with.

I particularly liked this bit, which reflects my most optimistic viewpoint: I think AI assisted programming is going to shave a lot of the frustration off learning to code, which I hope brings many more people into the fold:

What I learned was that programming is not really about knowledge or skill but simply about patience, or maybe obsession. Programmers are people who can endure an endless parade of tedious obstacles.

# 4:36 am / new-yorker, programming, ai, chatgpt, llms