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Simon Willison Profile picture
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12 Jan, 5 tweets, 2 min read
Want to know the secret to blogging more often?

Lower your standards!

A post which you don't think is ready yet is a LOT better than a giant folder full of drafts that no-one ever gets to see

(Your readers won't ever know how good the thing you wanted to write would have been)
I like to apply this classic Reid Hoffman startup/product advice to my writing, because the alternative is basically never publishing anything at all
One of the biggest productivity improvements I ever made to my blogging was when I gave up on my desire to finish everything with a sparkling conclusion that ties together the whole post

Now I embrace abruptly ending when I've run out of things to say instead
Absolutely this - getting into a weekly weeknotes habit has massively increased my output, and made it much easier to come up with things to write about simonwillison.net/tags/weeknotes/
For this blog post I skipped the "conclusion" section by finishing with a list of links to illustrative examples instead

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More from @simonw

Simon Willison Profile picture
11 Jan
I've been solving so many documentation problems with @nedbat's cog tool recently - it's fantastic for keeping documentation automatically up-to-date, in Markdown or rST)

Here's a new page of sqlite-utils docs showing --help for every CLI command! sqlite-utils.datasette.io/en/latest/cli-… Partial screenshot of that page, showing three different com
And here's how it works - I have a cog code block embedded in the .rst file which iterates through the commands and calls --help on each one, then writes the output to the page:
github.com/simonw/sqlite-… .. contents:: :local: .. [[[cog from sqlite_utils impor
Final trick: my GitHub Actions test.yml file calls "cog --check docs/*.rst" to confirm that the cog scripts have been run

If the test fails, I can run "cog -r docs/*.rst" to execute them, then commit the result. github.com/simonw/sqlite-…
Read 5 tweets
Simon Willison Profile picture
11 Jan
What’s new in sqlite-utils - annotated release notes for my SQLite Python utility library and CLI tool, v3.20 and v3.21 simonwillison.net/2022/Jan/11/sq…
A bunch of powerful new features in these releases.

The new --convert option to "sqlite-utils insert" lets you run a Python conversion function against data you are importing from JSON or CSV - and --lines lets you import raw lines of code (e.g. from log files) too
Combining the new --text option with --convert lets you load in a full unstructured/semi-structured file in one go and use a Python fragment to parse it into a list of dictionaries which then get inserted into a table
Read 8 tweets
Simon Willison Profile picture
11 Jan
Wow, more bills like this one please!
If you're interested in FARA I have a Datasette instance that uses data from the latest released CSV files running here fara.datasettes.com
I'm also running a Git scraper against FARA - here's the latest commit from four hours ago github.com/simonw/fara-hi…
Read 4 tweets
Simon Willison Profile picture
10 Jan
This made me think about my sqlite-utils Python package: pypi.org/project/sqlite…

It works as both a CLI tool and a Python library, and has a small number of dependencies

I want "pip install sqlite-utils" to do the "right thing" - but what's the right thing?
If you are using it as a CLI tool I want it to to be guaranteed to work - if you install it you should get known tested versions of those dependencies
But... if you are using it as a library I want to let you make your own decision about those dependencies - if you want to use a more recent release of one of them you should be able to do that

If I explicitly pin to tested versions will that break your ability to upgrade them?
Read 7 tweets
Simon Willison Profile picture
9 Jan
TIL numeric tweet IDs these days exceed the maximum safe integer value for JavaScript, which is:

9007199254740991

A recent tweet of mine had ID:

1480304129792643072

Anyone know when that tipping point was reached?
I spend most of my time in Python and SQLite which don't have this limitation so I'm only just catching on
This is actually covered in the Twitter API docs: developer.twitter.com/en/docs/twitte…

"Numbers as large as 64-bits can cause issues with programming languages that represent integers with fewer than 64-bits. An example of this is JavaScript, where integers are limited to 53-bits in size." Numbers as large as 64-bits...
Read 5 tweets
Simon Willison Profile picture
30 Dec 21
Looks like the guy who lost ~$2m of ape NFTs was hit by classic phishing

If you're going to hold a sizable portion of your net worth on anything relating to a blockchain you really do need deep personal information security knowledge

Avoiding phishing schemes like this is hard!
Think about the depth of knowledge needed to spot the trick in this URL

You need to understand that URLs go https:// then hostname then / then path - so you also need to understand what URLs are, and what they do, and how they can mislead

This is professional web engineer stuff https://www.nfttrader.io-trading Oxc310e760778cebca4c6c55687
Another example of why my second biggest criticism of this proposed golden blockchain future - after the horrific environmental impact - is that it's just completely unsafe for regular people to use for anything valuable at all
Read 5 tweets

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