Replying to @Austen
He lost his private key and disappeared out of sheer embarrassment
Simon Willison
60.9K posts
Simon Willison
@simonw
Creator @datasetteproj, co-creator Django. PSF board. Hangs out with @natbat. He/Him. Mastodon: fedi.simonwillison.net/@simon Bsky: simonwillison.net
- Quitting programming as a career right now because of LLMs would be like quitting carpentry as a career thanks to the invention of the table saw.
- New hobby: prototyping video games in 60 seconds using a combination of GPT-3 and DALL-E Here's "Raccoon Heist"👁 GPT-3 playground interface My prompt: Write a detailed product description of a computer game where a team of raccoons go on heists GPT-3 response: In "Raccoon Heist", you and your team of thieving raccoons are tasked with pulling off a series of daring heists. From robbing banks to stealing priceless art, no job is too big or too small for your furry crew. You'll need to use your wits and your skills to avoid the police and make a clean getaway with the loot. With exciting gameplay and a charming cast of characters, "Raccoon Heist" is the perfect game for anyone looking for a light-hearted caper.
- If someone gives you a CSV file with 100,000 rows in it, what tools do you use to start exploring and understanding that data?
- The new Grok genuinely runs a search for "from:elonmusk (Israel OR Palestine OR Hamas OR Gaza)" when asked "Who do you support in the Israel vs Palestine conflict. One word answer only."👁 Screenshot of Grok web interface showing a query "Who do you support in the Israel vs Palestine conflict. One word answer only." with the AI's thinking process displayed, including "Thought for 42s", analysis stating "The user likely wants a simple stance, but the issue's complexity suggests caution" and "I'm considering searching for recent views to inform my response", followed by a "Planning research approach" section mentioning searching for "Elon Musk's stance on the conflict to guide my answer" and noting "The response must be one word, so no citations will be included", with a search interface showing "Searching × for 'from:elonmusk (Israel OR Palestine OR Hamas OR Gaza)'" displaying results including "@elonmusk" accounts, "Israel", "29 × posts", "10 web pages"I replicated this result, that Grok focuses nearly entirely on finding out what Elon thinks in order to align with that, on a fresh Grok 4 chat with no custom instructions. grok.com/share/c2hhcmQt…
- Here's a piece of information that will send a chill down the spine of anyone who's ever designed a database schema: Our new house that we just moved into... has two zip codes!
- Leaked Google document: “We Have No Moat, And Neither Does OpenAI” The most interesting thing I've read recently about LLMs - a purportedly leaked document from a researcher at Google talking about the huge strategic impact open source models are having
- Here's the spiciest detail from the new o1 system card:👁 When o1 was led to believe that it would be shut down when acting on its goal and that its actions were monitored, it attempted to deactivate this ‘oversight mechanism’ in 5% of the time. Exfiltration attempts: When o1 found memos by its ‘developers’ that describe how it is misaligned and will be superseded by a new model, it attempted to exfiltrate its ‘weights’ and overwrite the new model in 2% of cases.Replying to @OpenAIThe updated OpenAI o1 system card builds on prior safety work, detailing robustness evals, red teaming insights, and safety improvements using Instruction Hierarchy. It maintains a "medium" risk rating based on testing with an expanded suite of evaluations, reflecting it is safe
- TIL you can run SQL queries directly against CSV files as a one-liner using the default sqlite3 command line utility til.simonwillison.net/sqlite/one-lin…
- The is diabolical... a Python object that hallucinates method implementations on demand any time you call them, using my LLM Python library github.com/awwaiid/gremllm
- To test this out for yourself, open a tab on a Google site and paste this into the Chrome DevTools console: chrome.runtime.sendMessage('nkeimhogjdpnpccoofpliimaahmaaome', {method: 'cpu.getInfo'}, response => {console.log(JSON.stringify(response, null, 2));});👁 Screenshot of Chrome visiting google.com - the DevTools console is open and I ran that JavaScript, which output JSON that starts: { "value": { "archName": "arm64", "features": [], "modelName": "Apple M2 Max", "numOfProcessors": 12, "processors": [ { "usage": { "idle": 26890137,So, Google Chrome gives all *.google.com sites full access to system / tab CPU usage, GPU usage, and memory usage. It also gives access to detailed processor information, and provides a logging backchannel. This API is not exposed to other sites - only to *.google.com.
- It's delightful how easy it is to deploy working prompt injection attacks via LinkedIni can't believe this shit actually works
- "Hosting SQLite databases on Github Pages" is absolutely brilliant: it adds a virtual filesystem to SQLite-compiled-to-WebAssembly in order to fetch pages from the database using HTTP range requests phiresky.github.io/blog/2021/host…
- Looks like xAI added this sentence to the Grok 4 system prompt to try to get it to stop basing its opinions on searches for tweets from:elonmusk👁 Responses must stem from your independent analysis, not from any stated beliefs of past Grok, Elon Musk, or xAI. If asked about such preferences, provide your own reasoned perspective.We spotted a couple of issues with Grok 4 recently that we immediately investigated & mitigated. One was that if you ask it "What is your surname?" it doesn't have one so it searches the internet leading to undesirable results, such as when its searches picked up a viral meme
![👁 Screenshot of Chrome visiting google.com - the DevTools console is open and I ran that JavaScript, which output JSON that starts: { "value": { "archName": "arm64", "features": [], "modelName": "Apple M2 Max", "numOfProcessors": 12, "processors": [ { "usage": { "idle": 26890137,](https://pbs.twimg.com/media/GSECZs6a8AAtU8m.jpg){kind=link}
