2025-10-16
NVIDIA DGX Spark + Apple Mac Studio = 4x Faster LLM Inference with EXO 1.0
simonwillison.net/2025/Oct/16/nvidia-dgx-spark-apple-mac-studio#atom-everything2025-10-13
Spotlight on pdfly, the Swiss Army knife for PDF files
chezsoi.org/lucas/blog/spotlight-on-pdfly.htmlpdfly is a CLI tool to manipulate PDF files, written in Python and based on the fpdf2 & pypdf libraries. It can:
- display PDF metadata using pdfly meta and pdfly pagemeta commands
- combine files into new PDF documents: it can extract specific pages & merge documents (pdfly cat); selectively remove pages (pdfly rm); convert images to PDF documents (pdfly x2pdf); and even compress documents (pdfly compress) or build booklets (pdfly 2-up & pdfly booklet).
- pull out specific content from PDF files: pdfly extract-images & pdfly extract-annotated-text.
- fix manually-edited PDF documents, so that they can be opened in a PDF viewer again!
2025-08-15
Introducing Gemma 3 270M: The compact model for hyper-efficient AI
simonwillison.net/2025/Aug/14/gemma-3-270m#atom-everything2025-07-17
Op vakantie met de auto? Spelletjes voor onderweg (Gratis PDF)
www.reddit.com/r/thenetherlands/comments/1m25gh5/op_vakantie_met_de_auto_spelletjes_voor_onderweg2025-05-08
toot by https://awawa.club/users/byte
awawa.club/objects/93987903-d4bb-41a0-8d07-3610061110f0This is just brilliant :bunhdaww:
2025-05-02
toot by https://fedi.simonwillison.net/@simon
fedi.simonwillison.net/@simon/114440897356073827My favorite local model right now is a bit of surprise to me: I'm really enjoying the relatively tiny Qwen3-8B, running the 4bit quantized version on my Mac using MLX
It's surprisingly capable given it's a 4.3GB download and uses just 4-5GB of RAM while it's running
<https:simonwillison.net/2025/May/2/qwen3-8b/>
2025-02-17
kovetskiy/mark: Sync your markdown files with Confluence pages.
github.com/kovetskiy/markSync your markdown files with Confluence pages. Contribute to kovetskiy/mark development by creating an account on GitHub.
2025-01-28
toot by https://mastodon.ie/@mtechman
mastodon.ie/@mtechman/113903647133363001
Thanks to several people here! I'm ditching Google maps and switching to:
<https:organicmaps.app/> for my Android phone
and
OpenStreetMap <https://www.openstreetmap.org/#map=4/38.01/-95.84> for laptop
2024-08-07
toot by https://social.coop/@judell
social.coop/@judell/112919066880977014"Almost everything has been done by someone else before. Almost nothing you want to do is truly novel. And language models are exceptionally good at giving you solutions to things they've seen before."
I collect examples of this kind of thing, and this is by far the most exhaustive list of practical LLM uses I've seen.
<https:nicholas.carlini.com/writing/2024/how-i-use-ai.html>
/ht [@emollick](https://bird.makeup/users/emollick)
[#llm](https://social.coop/tags/llm) [#examples](https://social.coop/tags/examples)
2024-07-10
toot by https://fosstodon.org/@eclecticpassions
fosstodon.org/@eclecticpassions/112761615943006931
Thinking of adding search to my static site... This seems to be a good option! <https://pagefind.app/>
Might give this a try when I have the time. Looks easy enough.
[#Hugo](https://fosstodon.org/tags/Hugo) [#staticsitegenerator](https://fosstodon.org/tags/staticsitegenerator) [#Pagefind](https://fosstodon.org/tags/Pagefind) [#staticsite](https://fosstodon.org/tags/staticsite)
2024-07-08
toot by https://agora.echelon.pl/users/kravietz
agora.echelon.pl/objects/5e5e7000-01a7-48bc-861e-3f5809ae2624Few things piss me off more than a huge, multi-billion IT corporation that suddenly sends me an email regarding an open-source project I’ve been running since 1990’s that I’ve recently shut down due to absolute lack of interest from its users… which happened to be telcos and large IT companies. Here’s what I replied:
Thank you for your email. As it’s often the case with open-source projects, their value to organisations is only noticed and appreciated when they go offline. I have maintained
pam_tacplusfor the last years and it had the call for sponsorship prominently displayed for most of the time specifically because it’s a legacy project that is difficult to maintain. None of the commercial companies that clearly do rely on it ever demonstrated any interest in even nominal donations, so it was archived. While it’s notable someone finally noticed it, I’m not the person to discuss any future development any more.
I did work in large companies and I do understand the sick logic that drives them, when it’s easier to get approval for annual spending of $50k for some office decorations than $100 for a mission-critical project which happens to be open-source and can be used for free for some time.
But it’s possible. If you’re working in such roles, please make every effort to get this $100 because otherwise it will become your responsibility to develop and maintain code that you always got for free.
2024-06-20
p0deje/Maccy: Lightweight clipboard manager for macOS
github.com/p0deje/MaccyMaccy is a lightweight clipboard manager for macOS. It keeps the history of what you copy and lets you quickly navigate, search, and use previous clipboard contents.
toot by https://mastodon.social/@duckdb
mastodon.social/@duckdb/112649377772116166New blog post by Gábor Szárnyas
Command Line Data Processing: Using DuckDB as a Unix Tool
This blog post shows how DuckDB stacks up against classic Unix tools (such as cut, grep, sort and sed) when performing simple data processing steps.
Read more at <https://duckdb.org/2024/06/20/cli-data-processing-using-duckdb-as-a-unix-tool>
2024-06-14
toot by https://mstdn.social/@amydiehl
mstdn.social/@amydiehl/112616884989004341
Study (N=806 orgs; 1971-2015) finds some DEI practices increase managerial diversity while others decrease it:
Increase: hiring chief diversity officer, mentoring, childcare, flextime, parental leave, empowering training, targeted recruitment, diversity goals increase diversity
Decrease: Perf evals, harassment training, grievance procedures, job tests
Mixed results: Cross-training, employee resource groups, self-managed teams, skills training
<https:hbr.org/2024/06/research-the-most-common-dei-practices-actually-undermine-diversity>
2024-06-13
toot by https://fediscience.org/@ct_bergstrom
fediscience.org/@ct_bergstrom/112607624581372432Those were, of course, tree swallows in a barn.
Here's a barn swallow in a tree.
2024-01-20
toot by https://mastodon.social/@chockenberry
mastodon.social/@chockenberry/111790221631363045This product image on Amazon has the mystery of a Renaissance painting.
2023-10-28
toot by https://mastodon.social/@glyph
mastodon.social/@glyph/111311012365138442
If you use game controllers on macOS, this is a (literal) game changer. There's a secret defaults command that will stop it from opening up the dumb "launchpad" UI to the "games" screen.
<https:apple.stackexchange.com/a/465104/26977>
2023-08-03
toot by https://fedi.simonwillison.net/@simon
fedi.simonwillison.net/@simon/110826296130979650The video for my 40m talk at [@NorthBayPython](https://social.northbaypython.org/@NorthBayPython) is now available, and I've put together an accompanying edited transcript with annotated slides and links
Catching up on the weird world of LLMs: <https://simonwillison.net/2023/Aug/3/weird-world-of-llms/>
If you haven't been completely immersed in this world for the last year, my hope is this can help catch you up!
2023-07-28
toot by https://cosocial.ca/@timbray
cosocial.ca/@timbray/110789867142232744Strongly recommended: [@jwz](https://mastodon.social/@jwz)'s “Recent movies and TV”: <https://www.jwz.org/blog/2023/07/recent-movies-and-tv-23/>
He does one of these every few months and they're useful.
2023-02-21
toot by https://pixelfed.de/project1to1
pixelfed.de/p/project1to1/533581073313552101I do not photograph architecture that often. But it is a lot of fun trying something new.
[#Photography](https://pixelfed.de/discover/tags/Photography?src=hash) [#Nature](https://pixelfed.de/discover/tags/Nature?src=hash) [#Projekt1zu1](https://pixelfed.de/discover/tags/Projekt1zu1?src=hash) [#Project1to1](https://pixelfed.de/discover/tags/Project1to1?src=hash) [#Squared](https://pixelfed.de/discover/tags/Squared?src=hash) [#Architecture](https://pixelfed.de/discover/tags/Architecture?src=hash) [#ArchitecturePhotography](https://pixelfed.de/discover/tags/ArchitecturePhotography?src=hash)