Notices by Simon Willison (simon@fedi.simonwillison.net), page 2

@evan love Web Components - I often prompt it to create those directly, but I still want them all in a single file so I can easily copy and paste the whole lot out of the LLM at once

I figured out a prompting pattern for getting Claude to produce fully self-contained Python scripts that execute with "uv run" using PEP 723 inline script dependencies - and now I can one-shot useful Python utilities with it https://simonwillison.net/2024/Dec/19/one-shot-python-tools/

Here are my custom instructions which I'm using as part of a Claude Project, but I expect they'll work the same way with other LLMs too

I have a similar set of custom instructions I use with Claude Artifacts to get it to produce mobile-friendly single page HTML apps that run without a build step

I can now run a GPT-4 class model on my laptop

(The exact same laptop that could just about run a GPT-3 class model 20 months ago)

The new Llama 3.3 70B is a striking example of the huge efficiency gains we've seen in the last two years
https://simonwillison.net/2024/Dec/9/llama-33-70b/

This consistent trend of models getting smaller, faster and more capable on the same hardware is one of the reasons I'm not particularly concerned by the ongoing discourse about models hitting a plateau
https://simonwillison.net/2024/Dec/9/llama-33-70b/#is-performance-about-to-plateau-

I wrote a thing about "Storing time for human events" - how if you're building an events website used by actual human beings the standard advice of "convert times to UTC and just store that" isn't actually the best approach
https://simonwillison.net/2024/Nov/27/storing-times-for-human-events/

@demiurg @lmk I'm 100% on "store timestamps of when stuff happened as UTC" - the one edge-case here is for events that haven't happened yet where human beings think about them in terms of local time

This is excellent https://www.tiktok.com/@alexandrawideeyes/video/7443189708328340766

If you have an Apple Silicon Mac with >24GB of RAM and >5GB of available disk space and uv installed, try running this command to see the new model in action (replace IMG_4414.JPG at the end with a path to your own image)

uv run \
--with mlx-vlm \
--with torch \
python -m mlx_vlm.generate \
--model mlx-community/SmolVLM-Instruct-bf16 \
--max-tokens 500 \
--temp 0.5 \
--prompt "Describe this image in detail" \
--image IMG_4414.JPG

Some notes on running the new SmolVM vision model (~4.2GB) on my MacBook Pro M2 at 75 tokens/second to describe a photo, using a shell one-liner powered by uv and mlx-vlm https://simonwillison.net/2024/Nov/28/smolvlm/

Wrote about a delightfully subversive use of a Bluesky custom labeler: displaying labels on accounts belonging to British public figures showing which expensive private school they went to and what the current fees are for that school
https://simonwillison.net/2024/Nov/22/private-school-labeler-on-bluesky/

Foursquare just open sourced their 100 million place point of interest dataset! Some notes on poking around with it using DuckDB (it's Parquet files on S3) https://simonwillison.net/2024/Nov/20/foursquare-open-source-places/

I should clarify: when I talk about documentation here I'm not talking about code comment style docs - I'm talking about "this is how to use this library / API" docs

If your code is clearly written and nothing else ever needs to call it then I don't particularly mind if there's no additional documentation - but if I'm expected to use call your library from my own code I'm very much not keen on being told I have to read all of that code myself just to use it!

I wrote a bunch more about my own approach to documentation here: https://simonwillison.net/2022/Nov/26/productivity/

The more experience I gain as a software developer the less tolerance I have for the idea that something doesn't need documenting if you can go and read the source code instead

(That's despite getting much, much better at reading source code to answer my own questions as I gain experience)

I want to enable comments on my blog again, but (I'm current possibly overthinking things in that) I'm worrying if I need a privacy policy, or how I should think about things like GDPR, and should users be able to delete their comments?

Never thought about this stuff for a second back in the 2000s!

I interviewed Rajiv Sinclair about his team's new project, VERDAD - an outstanding piece of data journalism that tracks 48 US talk radio stations (many in Spanish), archives their audio, transcribes it and uses Gemini 1.5 to help identify potential snippets of misinformation - then presents the results in a UI for human review

https://simonwillison.net/2024/Nov/7/project-verdad/

I'm hoping to turn this into a series of YouTube interviews with people building cool data projects where we nerd out about what they've built and how they built it, so I'm optimistically thinking of this as episode one! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t_S-loWDGE0

How hard is it to process untrusted SVG data to strip out any potentially harmful tags or attributes (like stuff that might execute JavaScript)?

I feel like this is well trodden ground for HTML these days, are there robust solutions for the SVG version of this problem?