Release: datasette-llm 0.1a3 Adds the ability to configure which LLMs are available for which purpose, which means you can restrict the list of models that can be used with a specific plugin. #3 Tags: llm, datasette
Trip Venturella released Mr. Chatterbox, a language model trained entirely on out-of-copyright text from the British Library. Here's how he describes it in the model card: Mr. Chatterbox is a language model trained entirely from scratch on a corpus of over 28,000 Victorian-era British texts published between 1837 and 1899, drawn from a dataset made available by the British Library. The model has absolutely no training inputs from after 1899 — the vocabulary and ideas are formed exclusively from…
Release: llm-mrchatterbox 0.1 See Mr. Chatterbox is a (weak) Victorian-era ethically trained model you can run on your own computer. Tags: llm
Pretext Exciting new browser library from Cheng Lou, previously a React core developer and the original creator of the react-motion animation library. Pretext solves the problem of calculating the height of a paragraph of line-wrapped text without touching the DOM. The usual way of doing this is to render the text and measure its dimensions, but this is extremely expensive. Pretext uses an array of clever tricks to make this much, much faster, which enables all sorts of new text rendering…
Tool: Pretext — Under the Hood See my notes on Pretext here.
Tool: Python Vulnerability Lookup I learned that the OSV.dev open source vulnerability database has an open CORS JSON API, so I had Claude Code build this HTML tool for pasting in a pyproject.toml or requirements.txt file (or name of a GitHub repo containing those) and seeing a list of all reported vulnerabilities from that API. Tags: tools, python, supply-chain, vibe-coding, security
The thing about agentic coding is that agents grind problems into dust. Give an agent a problem and a while loop and - long term - it’ll solve that problem even if it means burning a trillion tokens and re-writing down to the silicon. [...] But we want AI agents to solve coding problems quickly and in a way that is maintainable and adaptive and composable (benefiting from improvements elsewhere), and where every addition makes the whole stack better. So at the bottom is really great libraries…
Release: datasette-showboat 0.1a2 I added an option to export a Markdown file from my app that lets Showboat incrementally publish updates to a remote server.
FWIW, IANDBL, TINLA, etc., I don’t currently see any basis for concluding that chardet 7.0.0 is required to be released under the LGPL. AFAIK no one including Mark Pilgrim has identified persistence of copyrightable expressive material from earlier versions in 7.0.0 nor has anyone articulated some viable alternate theory of license violation. [...] — Richard Fontana, LGPLv3 co-author, weighing in on the chardet relicensing situation Tags: open-source, ai-ethics, llms, ai, generative-ai,…
I have a new laptop - a 128GB M5 MacBook Pro, which early impressions show to be very capable for running good local LLMs. I got frustrated with Activity Monitor and decided to vibe code up some alternative tools for monitoring performance and I'm very happy with the results. This is my second experiment with vibe coding macOS apps - the first was this presentation app a few weeks ago. It turns out Claude Opus 4.6 and GPT-5.4 are both very competent at SwiftUI - and a full SwiftUI app can fit…
We Rewrote JSONata with AI in a Day, Saved $500K/Year Bit of a hyperbolic framing but this looks like another case study of vibe porting, this time spinning up a new custom Go implementation of the JSONata JSON expression language - similar in focus to jq, and heavily associated with the Node-RED platform. As with other vibe-porting projects the key enabling factor was JSONata's existing test suite, which helped build the first working Go version in 7 hours and $400 of token spend. The Reco…
My minute-by-minute response to the LiteLLM malware attack Callum McMahon reported the LiteLLM malware attack to PyPI. Here he shares the Claude transcripts he used to help him confirm the vulnerability and decide what to do about it. Claude even suggested the PyPI security contact address after confirming the malicious code in a Docker container: Confirmed. Fresh download from PyPI right now in an isolated Docker container: Inspecting: litellm-1.82.8-py3-none-any.whl FOUND: litellm_init.pth…
Quantization from the ground up Sam Rose continues his streak of publishing spectacularly informative interactive essays, this time explaining how quantization of Large Language Models works (which he says might be "the best post I've ever made".) Also included is the best visual explanation I've ever seen of how floating point numbers are represented using binary digits. I hadn't heard about outlier values in quantization - rare float values that exist outside of the normal tiny-value…
Release: datasette-llm 0.1a2 actor is now available to the llm_prompt_context plugin hook. #2 Tags: llm, datasette
Release: datasette-files-s3 0.1a1 A backend for datasette-files that adds the ability to store and retrieve files using an S3 bucket. This release added a mechanism for fetching S3 configuration periodically from a URL, which means we can use time limited IAM credentials that are restricted to a prefix within a bucket. Tags: s3, datasette