In exciting Mastodon news... I've been browsing through the #introduction tag there (where people post an into when they first join) and it's all nerds... but it's a healthy variety of nerds! Academics and data journalists and artists and scientists and museum people
So at least for the interest areas that I care about it's off to a very healthy start for me
Case in point: here's a growing spreadsheet with 400 historians on Mastodon, most of whom signed up in the last few days! docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d…
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I'll keep hanging out here for a while longer, but I don't expect to invest nearly as much creative effort here as I have in the past
As I said in my post, "I can’t see myself putting the same work in to help the world’s (current) richest man pay the billion dollar annual interest on the loans he took out to buy the place on a weird narcissistic whim."
Today I figured out how to use AWS Athena to run SQL queries against newline-delimited JSON log data stored in S3! til.simonwillison.net/aws/athena-new…
Having somewhere to put this kind of obscure knowledge is my favourite thing about publishing TILs, especially for things that took me a sizable portion of the day to figure out
A tip for writing more: expand your definition of completing a project (any project, no matter how small) to include writing a blog post (or README or similar) that explains that project
Without this you're skipping a relatively small step that unlocks a huge chunk of the value in the work that you have just completed!
If possible, include some screenshots (or even an animated screenshot or video if you have the time)
Many web projects eventually succumb to bitrot, so including screenshots can help tell the story of what you built long into the future
Is the AI spell-casting metaphor harmful or helpful?
Wrote up some thoughts from a conversation I had earlier today on Twitter about whether it's harmful to compare generative AI prompt engineering to casting spells simonwillison.net/2022/Oct/5/spe…
I hadn't really thought before about how many different mental models there are for what "magic" means
For me, it's Discworld magic - which is itself an extremely deep and comprehensive set of lore, only familiar if you've have read 20+ Discworld books!