Simon Willison’s Weblog

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42 items tagged “talks”

2024

Imitation Intelligence, my keynote for PyCon US 2024

Visit Imitation Intelligence, my keynote for PyCon US 2024

I gave an invited keynote at PyCon US 2024 in Pittsburgh this year. My goal was to say some interesting things about AI—specifically about Large Language Models—both to help catch people up who may not have been paying close attention, but also to give people who were paying close attention some new things to think about.

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Language models on the command-line

Visit Language models on the command-line

I gave a talk about accessing Large Language Models from the command-line last week as part of the Mastering LLMs: A Conference For Developers & Data Scientists six week long online conference. The talk focused on my LLM Python command-line utility and ways you can use it (and its plugins) to explore LLMs and use them for useful tasks.

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AI for Data Journalism: demonstrating what we can do with this stuff right now

Visit AI for Data Journalism: demonstrating what we can do with this stuff right now

I gave a talk last month at the Story Discovery at Scale data journalism conference hosted at Stanford by Big Local News. My brief was to go deep into the things we can use Large Language Models for right now, illustrated by a flurry of demos to help provide starting points for further conversations at the conference.

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2023

Financial sustainability for open source projects at GitHub Universe

Visit Financial sustainability for open source projects at GitHub Universe

I presented a ten minute segment at GitHub Universe on Wednesday, ambitiously titled Financial sustainability for open source projects.

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Open questions for AI engineering

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Last week I gave the closing keynote at the AI Engineer Summit in San Francisco. I was asked by the organizers to both summarize the conference, summarize the last year of activity in the space and give the audience something to think about by posing some open questions for them to take home.

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How I make annotated presentations

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Giving a talk is a lot of work. I go by a rule of thumb I learned from Damian Conway: a minimum of ten hours of preparation for every one hour spent on stage.

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Weeknotes: Plugins for LLM, sqlite-utils and Datasette

Visit Weeknotes: Plugins for LLM, sqlite-utils and Datasette

The principle theme for the past few weeks has been plugins.

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Catching up on the weird world of LLMs

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I gave a talk on Sunday at North Bay Python where I attempted to summarize the last few years of development in the space of LLMs—Large Language Models, the technology behind tools like ChatGPT, Google Bard and Llama 2.

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When Zeppelins Ruled The Earth (via) 15 years ago I put together a talk about the history of Zeppelins which I presented a bunch of different times in various different configurations. As far as I know there are no existing videos of it, but I found an MP3 recording today and decided to splice it together with the slides to create a video of the 6m47s version I gave at the Skillswap on Speed lightning talks event in Brighton on the 28th October 2008.

Notes on how I edited the video together using iMovie in the via link.

# 15th June 2023, 8:16 pm / talks, zeppelins

Big Opportunities in Small Data

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I gave an invited keynote at Citus Con 2023, the PostgreSQL conference. Below is the abstract, video, slides and links from the presentation.

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Prompt injection explained, with video, slides, and a transcript

Visit Prompt injection explained, with video, slides, and a transcript

I participated in a webinar this morning about prompt injection, organized by LangChain and hosted by Harrison Chase, with Willem Pienaar, Kojin Oshiba (Robust Intelligence), and Jonathan Cohen and Christopher Parisien (Nvidia Research).

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How to Wrap Our Heads Around These New Shockingly Fluent Chatbots. I was a guest on KQED Forum this morning, a live radio documentary and call-in show hosted by Alexis Madrigal. Ted Chiang and Claire Leibowicz were the other guests: we talked about ChatGPT and and the new generation of AI-powered tools.

# 3rd March 2023, 4:59 am / gpt-3, radio, talks, chatgpt, generative-ai, ai, llms, ted-chiang

2022

Coping strategies for the serial project hoarder

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I gave a talk at DjangoCon US 2022 in San Diego last month about productivity on personal projects, titled “Massively increase your productivity on personal projects with comprehensive documentation and automated tests”.

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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.

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SQLite Happy Hour—a Twitter Spaces conversation about three interesting projects building on SQLite

Yesterday I hosted SQLite Happy Hour. my first conversation using Twitter Spaces. The idea was to dig into three different projects that were doing interesting things on top of SQLite. I think it worked pretty well, and I’m curious to explore this format more in the future.

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2021

Weeknotes: git-history, created for a Git scraping workshop

Visit Weeknotes: git-history, created for a Git scraping workshop

My main project this week was a 90 minute workshop I delivered about Git scraping at Coda.Br 2021, a Brazilian data journalism conference, on Friday. This inspired the creation of a brand new tool, git-history, plus smaller improvements to a range of other projects.

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How to build, test and publish an open source Python library

Visit How to build, test and publish an open source Python library

At PyGotham this year I presented a ten minute workshop on how to package up a new open source Python library and publish it to the Python Package Index. Here is the video and accompanying notes, which should make sense even without watching the talk.

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Datasette—an ecosystem of tools for working with small data

Visit Datasette - an ecosystem of tools for working with small data

This is the transcript and video from a talk I gave at PyGotham 2020 about using SQLite, Datasette and Dogsheep to work with small data.

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Git scraping, the five minute lightning talk

Visit Git scraping, the five minute lightning talk

I prepared a lightning talk about Git scraping for the NICAR 2021 data journalism conference. In the talk I explain the idea of running scheduled scrapers in GitHub Actions, show some examples and then live code a new scraper for the CDC’s vaccination data using the GitHub web interface. Here’s the video.

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Video introduction to Datasette and sqlite-utils

Visit Video introduction to Datasette and sqlite-utils

I put together a 17 minute video introduction to Datasette and sqlite-utils for FOSDEM 2021, showing how you can use Datasette to explore data, and demonstrating using the sqlite-utils command-line tool to convert a CSV file into a SQLite database, and then publish it using datasette publish. Here’s the video, plus annotated screen captures with further links and commentary.

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2020

Personal Data Warehouses: Reclaiming Your Data

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I gave a talk yesterday about personal data warehouses for GitHub’s OCTO Speaker Series, focusing on my Datasette and Dogsheep projects. The video of the talk is now available, and I’m presenting that here along with an annotated summary of the talk, including links to demos and further information.

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Weeknotes: datasette-copyable, datasette-insert-api

Visit Weeknotes: datasette-copyable, datasette-insert-api

Two new Datasette plugins this week: datasette-copyable, helping users copy-and-paste data from Datasette into other places, and datasette-insert-api, providing a JSON API for inserting and updating data and creating tables.

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2019

Publish the data behind your stories with SQLite and Datasette. I presented a workshop on Datasette at the IRE and NICAR CAR 2019 data journalism conference yesterday. Here’s the worksheet I prepared for the tutorial.

# 9th March 2019, 6:27 pm / talks, data-journalism, datasette, nicar

2018

How to Instantly Publish Data to the Internet with Datasette

I spoke about my Datasette project at PyBay in August and they’ve just posted the video of my talk.

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Slides, notes and links from my Datasette talk at PyBay (via) I presented a session about Datasette at the PyBay conference in San Francisco this morning. I talked about the project itself and demonstrated ways of creating and publishing databases using csvs-to-sqlite, Datasette Publish and my new sqlite-utils library.

# 19th August 2018, 11:23 pm / talks, datasette, sqlite, sqlite-utils

How to Instantly Publish Data to the Internet with Datasette

Visit How to Instantly Publish Data to the Internet with Datasette

I presented a session about Datasette at the PyBay 2018 conference in San Francisco. I talked about the project itself and demonstrated ways of creating and publishing databases using csvs-to-sqlite, Datasette Publish and my new sqlite-utils library.

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Datasette—a talk at Zeit Day SF 2018 (via) Slides from the talk I gave today about Datasette and Datasette Publish at the Zeit Day SF conference.

# 28th April 2018, 9:31 pm / zeit-now, talks, datasette

2017

The denormalized query engine design pattern

Visit The denormalized query engine design pattern

I presented this talk at DjangoCon 2017 in Spokane, Washington. Below is the abstract, the slides and the YouTube video of the talk.

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2010

WildlifeNearYou talk at £5 app, and being Wired (not Tired)

Two quick updates about WildlifeNearYou. First up, I gave a talk about the site at £5 app, my favourite Brighton evening event which celebrates side projects and the joy of Making Stuff. I talked about the site’s genesis on a fort, crowdsourcing photo ratings, how we use Freebase and DBpedia and how integrating with Flickr’s machine tags gave us a powerful location API for free. Here’s the video of the talk, courtesy of Ian Oszvald:

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2009

Scope. Matt Webb’s opening keynote at this year’s reboot11. You owe it to yourself to read it.

# 8th July 2009, 8:15 pm / matt-webb, scope, talks, reboot