Author | Lightnews

Christopher Smith @chriscarrollsmith.bsky.social · 1d

Used it for a bit and then stopped. Ran into too many issues like VSCode incompatibilities and nested renv environments installed inside each other. You can always use rix or devcontainers if you really need reproducibility.

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Christopher Smith @chriscarrollsmith.bsky.social · 1d

They often take 4-5 days.

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Christopher Smith @chriscarrollsmith.bsky.social · 2d

My first reaction when I read the one-paragraph summary this morning was "no", but then I researched it a bit and voted "yes".

Christopher Smith @chriscarrollsmith.bsky.social · 3d

I did some research this morning on our local town council and candidates and was really pleased with the non-partisan tone all the candidates struck. I'm not sure what the heck is going on in national politics, but here in my community, the candidates all seem to want to collaborate to solve stuff.

Reposted by Christopher Smith

Simon Willison @simonwillison.net · 11d

This was a tough but necessary decision - I posted my own notes on this here, from the perspective of a current PSF board member simonwillison.net/2025/Oct/27/...

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Christopher Smith @chriscarrollsmith.bsky.social · 13d

Many thanks to @christophscheuch.bsky.social and @tealemery.bsky.social, without whose support and vision this release would not have been possible.

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Christopher Smith @chriscarrollsmith.bsky.social · 13d

New R package I developed as part of the `econdataverse` project for accessing macroeconomic data from the International Monetary Fund's IMF Data API was just published to CRAN. 🥳 Writeup here: open.substack.com/pub/modeling...

Announcing imfapi: User-Friendly Access to IMF Data in R

New IMF API, new IMF API R library — part of the econdataverse initiative

open.substack.com

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Christopher Smith @chriscarrollsmith.bsky.social · Sep 3

They broke Twitter again; influx incoming

Christopher Smith @chriscarrollsmith.bsky.social · Aug 20

Bonds are fun to fight about, because yields go up when the economy is strong, but also when there's inflation or default risk.

Of course, you can tease apart what's driving them with a good multi-factor model, but it's a lot more fun to just vibe-Rorschach it and flame people on social media.

Christopher Smith @chriscarrollsmith.bsky.social · Aug 15

Look at how Putin uses the handshake to establish dominance. He won't let go. Trump has to tap his hand to say, "we're done."

Aaron Rupar @atrupar.com · Aug 15

get a load of how excited Trump is to see Putin

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Christopher Smith @chriscarrollsmith.bsky.social · Aug 6

Answer: a few states (Minnesota, New Jersey) look a little better; a few others (South Carolina, New Mexico) look a bit worse.

But for the most part, the states permitting single-family housing and the states permitting multi-family are generally the same states.

Christopher Smith @chriscarrollsmith.bsky.social · Aug 6

Yesterday I ran across this map of housing permits by state. Seems to be single-family, so I wondered how much the map might be penalizing urban states that do more multifamily development.

To answer this question, I replicated the analysis with multifamily permits (next tweet).

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Christopher Smith @chriscarrollsmith.bsky.social · Jul 14

Thanks so much for the plug! I'm working on PDF parsing too, specifically with an aim to integrate it with a Zotero fork!

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Christopher Smith @chriscarrollsmith.bsky.social · Jul 9

A few days late, but here's my promised video coverage of the submissions: youtu.be/lQnBPqIpc2A

Chat with the budget bill in five CLI commands with `llm` — mini-hackathon recap, part 2

YouTube video by Christopher Smith

youtu.be

Christopher Smith @chriscarrollsmith.bsky.social · Jul 7

Which is to say, this was user error (well, really user laziness, because I knew we needed nullable fields but opted to skip it for purposes of the writeup), rather than model error. :)

Christopher Smith @chriscarrollsmith.bsky.social · Jul 7

Good catch. With the abbreviated schema syntax used to generate that output, you can't mark a variable in your schema as optional. That causes hallucinations by forcing the model to output a value when there shouldn't be one. You should instead use a fully specified JSON schema with nullable fields.

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Christopher Smith @chriscarrollsmith.bsky.social · Jul 7

Gratitude to the participants, and many thanks to Simon Willison for creating and maintaining this amazing tool!

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Christopher Smith @chriscarrollsmith.bsky.social · Jul 7

*Winner*: The winning project, by Steve Senkus, scraped, chunked, and embedded the entire text of the "Big Beautiful Bill" for semantic search. Which, by the way, you can achieve with just five CLI commands!

Just use `llm similar` and pipe the output to `llm` to get a retrieval-augmented answer to your questions about the budget bill!

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Christopher Smith @chriscarrollsmith.bsky.social · Jul 7

*Runner-up*: My own pitch was that you can use the help output from any command-line tool to create a prompt template for `llm`, then wrap the template with a shell script to create a purely natural language version of the tool. As proof of concept, I made `nl-repomix`:

Simply running `nl-repomix "Pack all the JSON files in this repository"` causes the JSON files to be successfully packed!

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Christopher Smith @chriscarrollsmith.bsky.social · Jul 7

*Runner-Up*: Evan Mullen scraped the HTML from Doctor of Credit, a website that aggregates bank deposit bonus offers, and then piped it to `llm` for conversion to a JSON array so he could compute which offers have the best ROI.

A JSON representation of the credit card bonus offers from Doctor of Credit

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Christopher Smith @chriscarrollsmith.bsky.social · Jul 7

At my mini-hackathon on @simonwillison.net's `llm` tool, developers had just one hour to come up with a cool use case for `llm`. I wrote up what we came up with as a Github Gist. Highlights in the replies below! gist.github.com/chriscarroll...

llm-hackathon-submissions.md

GitHub Gist: instantly share code, notes, and snippets.

gist.github.com

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Christopher Smith @chriscarrollsmith.bsky.social · Jul 6

Here's the demo presentation I gave to hackathon participants on some of the awesome things you can do with @simonwillison.net's `llm` command-line tool.

(This is a re-recording rather than the original because it was noisy in the venue.) youtu.be/UZ-9U1W0e4o

Become a command-line superhero with Simon Willison's `llm` tool — mini-hackathon recap, part 1

YouTube video by Christopher Smith

youtu.be

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Christopher Smith @chriscarrollsmith.bsky.social · Jul 5

Event was small (I knew this was a risk on 4th of July weekend), but super fun. Writeup soon!

Christopher Smith @chriscarrollsmith.bsky.social · Jul 5

Event page with the location details for those of you in the Albany, NY area: www.meetup.com/coders-colab...

LLMs from the command line: A mini-hackathon!, Sat, Jul 5, 2025, 1:00 PM | Meetup

**Update:** It looks like the creator of \`llm\`, Simon Willison, may join us for a demo via Google Meet! If you'd like to hop on remotely to participate or listen in on de

www.meetup.com

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Christopher Smith @chriscarrollsmith.bsky.social · Jul 5

Running a mini-hackathon for working with the `llm` command-line tool this afternoon at 1 PM EST. ~15 minutes of chit chat, ~30 mins of demo, 1 hr of "hacking", then another ~30 mins of presentations. Mostly in-person, but if you want to join online, here's the link: meet.google.com/gnv-zkne-djc

Meet

Real-time meetings by Google. Using your browser, share your video, desktop, and presentations with teammates and customers.

meet.google.com

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