Things I've learned, collected in simonw/til. You may also enjoy my blog.
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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. …
I save things like API keys in 1Password. Today I figured out how to access those from macOS terminal scripts. …
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. …
I really like auto-formatting tools like Black. I've been hoping to find one that works with Django and Jinja templates for years. …
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. …
I wanted to ensure https://niche-museums.com/ would redirect to https://www.niche-museums.com/ - including any path - using Cloudflare. …
I found a better way to listen to a whole web page through text-to-speech on Mobile Safari today. …
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). …
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. …
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. …
I wanted the ability to paste the image on my clipboard into a command in the macOS terminal. …
Today I learned how to install tools from GitHub that are written in Go, using github.com/icholy/semgrepx as an example: …
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: …
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 …
I want to try using QuickJS compiled to WebAssembly in a browser as a way of executing untrusted user-provided JavaScript in a sandbox. …
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. …
I had to run this site on til.simonwillison.org for 24 hours due to a domain registration mistake I made. …
Today I learned about this: …
I wanted to send out a small batch of follow-up emails for workshop attendees today, and I realized that since I have their emails in a database table I might be able to semi-automate the process. …
JSR is a brand new package repository for "modern JavaScript and TypeScript", launched on March 1st by the Deno team as a new alternative to npm …
I continue to collect ways of tracking the history of a table of data stored in SQLite - see sqlite-history for previous experiments. …
Val Town is a neat service for hosting short server-side JavaScript programs online - reminiscent of a combination of Glitch and Observable Notebooks. …
This issue by Parand Darugar pointed out that Datasette doesn't currently run on Linux systems with FIPS enabled, due to the way it uses MD5 hashes. …
I recently noticed that the router in our garage was providing around 900 Mbps if I plugged my laptop directly into it via an Ethernet cable, but that speed fell to around 80Mbps (less than 1/10th that speed) elsewhere in our house. …
Here's a trick I've used a couple of times in the past few days. …
Newly created GitHub repositories come with a default set of labels. I have several labels I like to add on top of these. The most important is research, which I use for issues that are tracking my notes on a research topic relevant to the repository. …
I've been trying to get my head around ColBERT. …
My LLM tool has a feature where you can set a LLM_OPENAI_SHOW_RESPONSES environment variable to see full debug level details of any HTTP requests it makes to the OpenAI APIs. …
I published a package to PyPI today using their Trusted Publishers mechanism for the first time. …
While parsing a CSV file using csv.DictReader today I noticed the following surprising result: …