Simon Willison’s Weblog

dclient 0.3. dclient is my CLI utility for working with remote Datasette instances—in particular for authenticating with them and then running both read-only SQL queries and inserting data using the new Datasette write JSON API. I just picked up work on the project again after a six month gap—the insert command can now be used to constantly stream data directly to hosted Datasette instances such as Datasette Cloud. # 25th February 2024, 8:06 pm

datasette-studio. I’ve been thinking for a while that it might be interesting to have a version of Datasette that comes bundled with a set of useful plugins, aimed at expanding Datasette’s default functionality to cover things like importing data and editing schemas.

This morning I built the very first experimental preview of what that could look like. Install it using pipx:

pipx install datasette-studio

I recommend pipx because it will ensure datasette-studio gets its own isolated environment, independent of any other Datasette installations you might have.

Now running “datasette-studio” instead of “datasette” will get you the version with the bundled plugins.

The implementation of this is fun—it’s a single pyproject.toml file defining the dependencies and setting up the datasette-studio CLI hook, which is enough to provide the full set of functionality.

Is this a good idea? I don’t know yet, but it’s certainly an interesting initial experiment. # 18th February 2024, 8:38 pm

Datasette 1.0a10. The only changes in this alpha release concern the way Datasette handles database transactions. The database.execute_write_fn() internal method used to leave functions to implement transactions on their own—it now defaults to wrapping them in a transaction unless they opt out with the new transaction=False parameter.

In implementing this I found several places inside Datasette—in particular parts of the JSON write API—which had not been handling transactions correctly. Those are all now fixed. # 18th February 2024, 5:10 am

Datasette 1.0a9. A new Datasette alpha release today. This adds basic alter table support API support, so you can request Datasette modify a table to add new columns needed for JSON objects submitted to the insert, upsert or update APIs.

It also makes some permission changes—fixing a minor bug with upsert permissions, and introducing a new rule where every permission plugin gets consulted for a permission check, with just one refusal vetoing that check. # 16th February 2024, 11:20 pm

shot-scraper 1.4. I decided to add HTTP Basic authentication support to shot-scraper today and found several excellent pull requests waiting to be merged, by Niel Thiart and mhalle.

1.4 adds support for HTTP Basic auth, custom --scale-factor shots, additional --browser-arg arguments and a fix for --interactive mode. # 5th February 2024, 11:11 pm

llm-sentence-transformers 0.2. I added a new --trust-remote-code option when registering an embedding model, which means LLM can now run embeddings through the new Nomic AI nomic-embed-text-v1 model. # 4th February 2024, 7:39 pm

llm-embed-onnx. I wrote a new plugin for LLM that acts as a thin wrapper around onnx_embedding_models by Benjamin Anderson, providing access to seven embedding models that can run on the ONNX model framework.

The actual plugin is around 50 lines of code, which makes for a nice example of how thin a plugin wrapper can be that adds new models to my LLM tool. # 28th January 2024, 10:28 pm

My blog’s year archive pages now have tag clouds (via) Inspired by the tag cloud I used in my recent 2023 AI roundup post, I decided to add a tag cloud to the top of every one of my archive-by-year pages showing what topics I had spent the most time with that year.

I already had old code for this, so I pasted it into GPT-4 along with an example of the output of my JSON endpoint from Django SQL Dashboard and had it do most of the work for me. # 4th January 2024, 9:02 pm

Annotate and explore your data with datasette-comments. New plugin for Datasette and Datasette Cloud: datasette-comments, providing tools for collaborating on data exploration with a team through posting comments on individual rows of data.

Alex Garcia built this for Datasette Cloud but as with almost all of our work there it’s also available as an open source Python package. # 30th November 2023, 9:59 pm

LLM 0.11. I released LLM 0.11 with support for the new gpt-3.5-turbo-instruct completion model from OpenAI.

The most interesting feature of completion models is the option to request “log probabilities” from them, where each token returned is accompanied by up to 5 alternatives that were considered, along with their scores. # 19th September 2023, 3:28 pm

Symbex 1.4. New release of my Symbex tool for finding symbols (functions, methods and classes) in a Python codebase. Symbex can now output matching symbols in JSON, CSV or TSV in addition to plain text.

I designed this feature for compatibility with the new “llm embed-multi” command—so you can now use Symbex to find every Python function in a nested directory and then pipe them to LLM to calculate embeddings for every one of them.

I tried it on my projects directory and embedded over 13,000 functions in just a few minutes! Next step is to figure out what kind of interesting things I can do with all of those embeddings. # 5th September 2023, 5:29 pm