Simon Willison: TIL

Things I've learned, collected in simonw/til. You may also enjoy my blog.

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Recent TILs

youtube Livestreaming a community election event on YouTube - 2024-10-09

I live in El Granada, California. Wikipedia calls us a census designated place - we don't have a mayor or city council. But we do have a Community Services District - originally responsible for our sewers, and since 2014 also responsible for our parks. And we get to vote for the board members in the upcoming November election! …

homebrew Upgrading Homebrew and avoiding the failed to verify attestation error - 2024-10-09

I managed to get my Homebrew installation back into shape today. The first problem I was having is that it complained that macOS Sequoia was unsupported: …

twitter Collecting replies to tweets using JavaScript - 2024-10-08

I ran a survey on Twitter the other day to try and figure out what people mean when they use the term "agents" with respect to AI. …

sqlite Compiling and running sqlite3-rsync - 2024-10-04

Today I heard about the sqlite3-rsync command, currently available in a branch in the SQLite code repository. It provides a mechanism for efficiently creating or updating a copy of a SQLite database that is running in WAL mode, either locally or via SSH to another server. …

django Building an automatically updating live blog in Django - 2024-10-02

OpenAI's DevDay event yesterday (October 1st 2024) didn’t invite press (as far as I can tell), didn’t livestream the event and didn’t allow audience livestreaming either. I made a last minute decision to live blog the event myself. …

llms How streaming LLM APIs work - 2024-09-21

I decided to have a poke around and see if I could figure out how the HTTP streaming APIs from the various hosted LLM providers actually worked. Here are my notes so far. …

playwright Testing HTML tables with Playwright Python - 2024-09-03

I figured out this pattern today for testing an HTML table dynamically added to a page by JavaScript, using Playwright Python: …

pytest Using namedtuple for pytest parameterized tests - 2024-08-31

I'm writing some quite complex pytest parameterized tests this morning, and I was finding it a little bit hard to read the test cases as the number of parameters grew. …

sqlite Using sqlite-vec with embeddings in sqlite-utils and Datasette - 2024-08-11

Alex Garcia's sqlite-vec SQLite extension provides a bunch of useful functions for working with vectors inside SQLite. …

django Using pytest-django with a reusable Django application - 2024-08-07

I published a reusable Django application today: django-http-debug, which lets you define mock HTTP endpoints using the Django admin - like /webhook-debug/ for example, configure what they should return and view detailed logs of every request they receive. …

github Assistance with release notes using GitHub Issues - 2024-08-05

I like to write the release notes for my projects by hand, but sometimes it can be useful to have some help along the way. …

git Back-dating Git commits based on file modification dates - 2024-08-01

I fell down a bit of a rabbit hole this morning. In trying to figure out where the idea of celebrating World Wide Web Day on August 1st came from I ran across Tim Berner-Lee's original code for the WorldWideWeb application for NeXT on the W3C's website: …

html HTML video with subtitles - 2024-07-31

Via Mariatta I found my PyVideo speaker page, and thanks to that page I learned that a talk I gave in 2009 had been rescued from the now-deceased Blip.tv and is now hosted by the Internet Archive: …

python Trying out free-threaded Python on macOS - 2024-07-12

Inspired by py-free-threading.github.io I decided to try out a beta of Python 3.13 with the new free-threaded mode enabled, which removes the GIL. …

macos Accessing 1Password items from the terminal - 2024-07-09

I save things like API keys in 1Password. Today I figured out how to access those from macOS terminal scripts. …

pytest Mocking Stripe signature checks in a pytest fixture - 2024-07-01

I'm writing some code that accepts webhooks from Stripe. I wanted to simulate hits to this endpoint in my Django tests. Stripe uses a Stripe-Signature header and I wanted a way to mock my code so that I didn't need to calculate the correct signature. …

npm Running Prettier against Django or Jinja templates - 2024-06-19

I really like auto-formatting tools like Black. I've been hoping to find one that works with Django and Jinja templates for years. …

postgresql Upgrade Postgres.app on macOS - 2024-06-15

I've been using Postgres.app to run PostgreSQL on my Mac for years. I like that it's easy to install, gives me a task tray icon to control it and means I don't have to run a full Docker environment just to hack on projects like my blog. …

cloudflare Cloudflare redirect rules with dynamic expressions - 2024-05-29

I wanted to ensure https://niche-museums.com/ would redirect to https://www.niche-museums.com/ - including any path - using Cloudflare. …

ios Listen to a web page in Mobile Safari - 2024-05-21

I found a better way to listen to a whole web page through text-to-speech on Mobile Safari today. …

ham-radio How I studied for my Ham radio general exam - 2024-05-11

I scraped a pass on my Ham radio general exam today, on the second attempt (you can retake on the same day for an extra $15, thankfully). …

macos Transcribing MP3s with whisper-cpp on macOS - 2024-04-26

I asked on Twitter for tips about running Whisper transcriptions in the CLI on my Mac. Werner Robitza pointed me to Homebrew's whisper-cpp formula, and when I complained that it didn't have quite enough documentation for me to know how to use it Werner got a PR accepted adding the missing details. …

macos A script to capture frames from a QuickTime video - 2024-04-16

I was putting together some notes for a talk I gave, and I wanted an efficient way to create screenshots of specific moments in a video of that talk. …

macos impaste: pasting images to piped commands on macOS - 2024-04-04

I wanted the ability to paste the image on my clipboard into a command in the macOS terminal. …

go Installing tools written in Go - 2024-03-25

Today I learned how to install tools from GitHub that are written in Go, using github.com/icholy/semgrepx as an example: …

chrome Google Chrome --headless mode - 2024-03-24

In the README for monolith (a new Rust CLI tool for archiving HTML pages along with their images and assets) I spotted this tip for using Chrome in headless mode to execute JavaScript and output the resulting DOM: …

clickhouse Reviewing your history of public GitHub repositories using ClickHouse - 2024-03-20

There's a story going around at the moment that people have found code from their private GitHub repositories in the AI training data known as The Stack, using this search tool: https://huggingface.co/spaces/bigcode/in-the-stack

npm Running self-hosted QuickJS in a browser - 2024-03-20

I want to try using QuickJS compiled to WebAssembly in a browser as a way of executing untrusted user-provided JavaScript in a sandbox. …

python Programmatically comparing Python version strings - 2024-03-17

I found myself wanting to compare the version numbers 0.63.1, 1.0 and the 1.0a13 in Python code, in order to mark a pytest test as skipped if the installed version of Datasette was pre-1.0. …

cloudflare Redirecting a whole domain with Cloudflare - 2024-03-15

I had to run this site on til.simonwillison.org for 24 hours due to a domain registration mistake I made. …

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