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Simon Willison Profile picture
@simonw
Apr 30, 2021 • 22 tweets • 6 min read • Read on X
I love that the latest XKCD has inspired spin-off versions in multiple branches of academia
Here's the XKCD
ML / NLP
Community Ecology
Microbial Bioinformatics
Paleontology
Psychiatry
Network science
Plant systematics
Structural biology in Covid times
Economics
Perovskite (I had to look this one up, it's a "calcium titanium oxide mineral composed of calcium titanate")
Neuroscience
Analytic philosophy
Conservation papers in the media (this one is a bit salty)
Peatland (today I found about about #PeatTwitter)
Plant science: "We used all our budget to go to the jungle to look at plants"
OK this one is particularly niche: Neuroscience papers, 2012 edition
Glaciology: "This glacier in particular is melting"
I feel like I've just been through a comprehensive lit review across dozens of fields that I know nothing about, this is delightful
Psychology: "Things get weird as soon as you have people in groups"
Wow.

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More from @simonw

Simon Willison Profile picture
Sep 25
Llama 3.2 is out, and it's a much more substantial release than the 3.1 to 3.2 version bump might indicate

Four new models, including Meta's first two vision models (11B and 90B) and two new text-only small models (1B and 3B)

My notes so far: simonwillison.net/2024/Sep/25/ll…
You can try out the vision models on by navigating to "Direct Chat" and then selecting those models from the dropdown menu lmarena.ai
llama-3.2-vision-90b-instruct A photo of two capybaras Prompt: Describe this photo in detail The image depicts two capybaras standing in a body of water, with one positioned on the edge of a metal grate. The capybara on the right is partially submerged in the water, while the other is standing on the grate. Key Features: Capybaras: Two capybaras are visible in the image. Water: The capybaras are standing in a body of water, which appears to be murky or dirty. Metal Grate: A metal grate is visible at the bottom right of the image, with one capybara standing on it. Backgr...
OK, my first impressions of the tiny Llama 3.2 1B model - running locally via Ollama, accessed via my LLM tool - are it's incredibly capable for a model that size & really fast

files-to-prompt **/*.py -c | llm -m llama3.2:1b --system 'describe this code'

gist.github.com/simonw/64c5f5b…
Read 4 tweets
Simon Willison Profile picture
Sep 4
OK, the Apache 2 licensed Qwen2-VL-7B Instruct from Alibaba looks VERY impressive

Anyone figured out a recipe to get it working on a Mac yet? qwenlm.github.io/blog/qwen2-vl/
I tried the Hugging Face demo and got a very impressive result for handwriting recognition
Here's an open issue for support in llama.cpp - no hints of an implementation yet

And the r/LocalLLaMA thread
github.com/ggerganov/llam…
reddit.com/r/LocalLLaMA/c…
Read 5 tweets
Simon Willison Profile picture
Aug 5
Not surprising to see NVIDIA doing this - practically the industry standard right now - but interesting to see details of what they're collecting and why:

"Movies are actually a good source of data to get gaming-like 3D consistency and fictional content but much higher quality"
More on my blog:

My intuition is the backlash against scraped video data will be even more intense than for static images in image models. Video is generally more expensive to create, and video creators (such as MKBHD) have a lot of influence.simonwillison.net/2024/Aug/5/nvi…
A few weeks ago there was a big response to a story about companies training just on captions scraped from YouTube - captions only, not the video. This NVIDIA story involves the full video content.
Read 4 tweets
Simon Willison Profile picture
Jul 8
I needed a box shadow the other day, so I got Claude to build me a custom one-off interface for fiddling with box shadow properties

Pretty wild how we can build tiny custom tools like this in a similar time that it would take to search for and select a tool that already exists! Claude prompt: CSS for a slight box shadow, build me a tool that helps me twiddle settings and preview them and copy and paste out the CSS Response: Certainly! I'll create a React component that allows you to adjust box shadow settings and preview the result in real-time. This tool will also provide the CSS code for you to copy and paste. I've created a React component that allows you to adjust various box shadow settings and see the results in real-time. Here's a breakdown of the features: Preview: A box at the top shows you how the shadow looks with your current settings. Sliders for...
Related: Maggie Appleton's excellent recent talk about home-cooked software
Here's the code it wrote gist.github.com/simonw/5c37ca5…
Read 5 tweets
Simon Willison Profile picture
Jul 2
Anyone figured out how to run Gemini Nano in Google Chrome Canary?

I turned on the feature flag for it but it doesn't seem to have downloaded the model file - the "await window['ai'].createTextSession();" API returns an error "InvalidStateError: The session cannot be created" Screenshot of chrome://flags showing that I have enabled the "Prompt API for Gemini Nano" experiment
Here's the documentation I was missing
I turned on the chrome://flags "Prompt API for Gemini Nano" experiment and left my laptop on overnight and by the morning it had downloaded the ~1.9GB model file and the new prompt API started working!
Read 5 tweets
Simon Willison Profile picture
Apr 25
"Do stuff and then blog about it" remains one of the most underrated pieces of career advice
My personal policy is that the cost I have to pay for being distracted by a fun new project is that I have to write about it

Never take on a project without also writing about it: so much value is lost if you don't give the world a fighting chance of understanding what you made!
I mark all of my posts that fit this ideal with the "projects" tag - it's got up to 372 posts now: simonwillison.net/tags/projects/
Read 9 tweets

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