Google did me dirty this week and I’m salty, so let me tell you. The other day I received an email informing me that my YouTube Premium subscription had been renewed, which surprised me because I canceled it about 6 months ago, and I haven’t missed it ever since (thanks, yt-dlp!). I first thought it was my daughter’s shenanigans, but after a closer look I had only “paused” the subscription instead of canceling it, and Google conveniently failed to inform me it was going to be restarted… No advance email like “your subscription will restart in a few days,” just “whoops, we restarted your subscription and you’ve been charged 13 euros, teehee.” ...

Just a quick update to say I am still making progress on the Password Game Agent project I mentioned last post. I have now reached up to step 16 where we need to solve a chess position… Seems like a suitable job for a reasoning model ! The main changes that enabled going from step 11 (Wordle answer) to 16 were adding a “search tool” based on OpenAI web search tool and changing the reasoning effort from “medium” to “high”. The current version of the code is here : https://github.com/goverture/password-game-agent/blob/master/manually.py I’m still making regular changes and trying new ideas to make progress. I’ve noticed we often seem to get stuck for various reason (for instance a badly recognized Capcha), so I want to add a new step to ensure that we make progress consistently, or backtrack, in order to not get stuck.

There is this javascript game called The Password Game where you have to chose a password, following increasingly ludicrous requirements. Agentic coding/research is all the rage today and I got the idea of making an “agent” that would solve it. Conceptually it’s just about calling a LLM in a loop, giving it the proper tools and context until it solved the task at hand. Here’s where I got so far, using ChatGPT 4o and Playwright MCP (only gave it the navigate and type tools for now). It’s solving correctly the first few steps, but gets stuck at the “sponsor” rule because it cannot view the image. The next step is to give it access to the playwright’s screenshot tool. Let’s see how far it can go ! ...

Another May update ! Not much going on as usual, rainy season arrived in Ho Chi Minh city so we get some strong rain and nice sunsets. Yesterday we got the announcement that Pocket was saying goodbye. Kind of bummed because I found the service convenient, though I just used it as a link bookmark (I never cared much about the reading mode, I always go to the original link - though apparently that worked well with the Kobo e-reader). Anyway I switched to a self-hosted alternative immediately: Wallabag. It’s kind of sluggish but it does the job, and it has an Android app so I can still “share link” to save a link from my phone. ...

So MCP is all the rage these days, and it’s not very complex: it’s basically a standardized way to provide tools to LLMs. So you have an RPC server that provides a description of the tools and the parameters they expect, and your client (a LLM based application) can connect to it and tell the LLM what tools are available, and the LLM can decide to call them when appropriate. Easy stuff and the SDK provided do most of the heavy lifting. ...