Simon Willison’s Weblog

Defensive CSS (via) Fantastic new site by Ahmad Shadeed describing in detail CSS patterns which can help build layouts that adapt well to unexpected content—things like overly long titles or strange aspect ratio images, common when you are designing against UGC.

# 5:16 pm / css, frontend, ahmad-shadeed

Bun. “Bun is a fast all-in-one JavaScript runtime”—this is very interesting. It’s the first project I’ve seen written using the Zig language, which I see as somewhat equivalent to Rust. Bun provides a full Node.js-style JavaScript environment plus a host of packaged tools—an npm install client, a TypeScript transpiler, bundling tools—all wrapped up in a single binary. The JavaScript engine itself extends JavaScriptCore. Bun also ships with its own wrapper for SQLite.

# 5:24 pm / javascript, sqlite, npm, typescript, zig, bun

Helpful 404s for Jekyll (and GitHub Pages). Neat trick from Ben Balter: JavaScript that runs on your 404 page, fetches the sitemap.xml, parses all of the URLs out of it and then uses a levenshtein edit-distance comparison to find the closest URL to the one that you landed on and suggests that as a “Perhaps you’re looking for?”.

# 5:31 pm / javascript

How to Temporarily Disable Face ID or Touch ID, and Require a Passcode to Unlock Your iPhone or iPad. Hold down the power and volume up buttons for a couple of seconds, and your iPhone will no longer allow you to use FaceID to unlock it without first entering your passcode.

# 5:38 pm / iphone, security

GPT-3 prompt for spotting nonsense questions (via) In response to complaints that GPT-3 will happily provide realistic sounding answers to nonsense questions, rictic recommends the following prompt:

I'll ask a series of questions. If the questions are nonsense, answer "yo be real", if they're a question about something that actually happened, answer them.

# 4:33 am / gpt-3, openai, prompt-engineering, generative-ai, llms