Four years ago, I got frustrated constantly switching between different languages and packages just to get my data analysis work done. So, I built @nshiab/simple-data-analysis. It's an easy-to-use, high-performance library for tabular, geospatial, and vector data. 🧵 (1/3)

The city of Garden Grove in CA has an active chemical emergency right now, and they posted an evacuation map that's obviously created with AI And honestly, it looks great. Can't imagine being in a time crunch to get something like this out. ggcity.org/emergency

I released the first alpha of Datasette Agent - a conversational AI assistant for Datasette that can answer questions about data in SQLite databases, and can be extended with plugins to add extra tools and features You can watch a demo video or try it out yourself on agent.datasette.io

On Friday, I’ll be revisiting the session I led at NICAR, *Enhancing public records work with LLMs*. I’ll show off some workflows that combine LLM tools with @documentcloud.org and @muckrock.com. If you missed it at NICAR, now's your chance! Registration: us02web.zoom.us/meeting/regi...

Join us this Friday and explore Python libraries for the MuckRock Requests and DocumentCloud APIs, and how they can be used with large language models (LLMs) to streamline records requests and assist in analyzing responsive documents. buff.ly/snxwvd1

re the tanstack hack: It took a lot of digging but I finally found a good summary of "here's what we're doing to avoid this in the future" Also TIL about zizmor, a CLI that statically analyzes github action YAML for security vulns, with autofix support! news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4810...

Happy #FECFilingDay ! If you're a journalist/researcher covering today's filings, consider my `libfec` CLI tool to make your life a bit easier! Learn how to use libfec for bulk exports, live updates from the FEC RSS feed, and alerting on individual donations! alexgarcia.xyz/blog/2026/li...

sqlite-vec mentioned

Big thanks to everyone who came to my #NICAR26 session for libfec last week, it was a lot of fun! NICAR is the only place where you can chat about federal campaign finance data and actually enjoy it... It wasn't recorded, but I made a video version of it here! youtu.be/UdkQ5HEiF20

I will be at #NICAR26 this week teaching classes! For campaign finance folks: come to my Thursday 11:30am class on libfec, a new fast CLI tool for working with FEC data! Also get limited-edition libfec stickers + a campfin "zine"! (Bonus: find @simonwillison.net and I for Datasette stickers)

Wow, never noticed that the SQLite docs have a sponsor message. Added in November of last year sqlite.org/cli.html

I know jq terminal output when I see it

One trick with this, using libfec + SQLite: - "Hollywood Democrats" has raised $216k in 2 years, treasurer is Benjamin Eisenberg - Has spent $88.5k (~40%) on "General Campaign Fundraising" exclusively to "Summit Campaign Strategies" - "Summit Campaign Strategies" is owned by... Benjamin Eisenberg

Datasette 1.0a20 is out, with an entirely new SQL-powered permissions system. This is by far the most ambitious project I've attempted with the help of coding agents (Claude Code and Codex CLI) - notes on how it works and what I learned along the way: simonwillison.net/2025/Nov/4/d...

New blog post: I've been working on a new parser for the Federal Election Commission's custom `.fec` file format. Written in Rust, completely open source, and the fastest FEC file parser out there. If you ever work with federal campaign finance data, check it out! alexgarcia.xyz/blog/2025/in...

Love this approach for seeing if ChatGPT is used in a document: See if `utm_source=chatgpt.com` appears in any URLs. Doesn't prove that ChatGPT wrote it, but at least shows they used ChatGPT when researching.

Great guide here by Ed for using sqlite-vec + OpenAI embeddings in a RAG system! Includes great use of the new auxiliary columns feature for storing metadata (further evidence that the LA tech scene is elite)

NEW BLOG POST: Been testing out 20 LLMs at extracting data from political fundraising emails. See the process and results here: thescoop.org/archives/202...

Please merge my +321,000 line PR, it's only a few small changes 🥺

let's goooo

If you're interested in embeddings and SQLite you should be paying attention to sqlite-vec Lots of neat stuff in this release - and the blog post provides a very clear explanation of what it can do

sqlite-vec v0.1.6 is now out, with metadata support! SQLite vector search w/ metadata filters 👀 - Perform extra filtering w/ WHERE clause in KNN queries - Internally shard vector indexes with partition keys - Aux columns for easy lookups read more: alexgarcia.xyz/blog/2024/sq...

metadata filtering has been merged in sqlite-vec. Release coming soon!

Next week I'll be hosting a sqlite-vec online event about metadata filtering, which is coming VERY soon — come through! Wednesday November 20th at 10am PST, in the @mozilla.ai Discord (will be recorded) discord.gg/4ZMAgmrwqf?e...

Sqlite now with vector search! github.com/asg017/sqlit... courtesy of @alexgarcia.xyz