Unsurprisingly with a newborn and a very sticky 3 years old at home, I haven’t been doing much in the past 3 weeks. Since I stopped working on it, I’ve released my thematic crossword generation app, Prosettr, to a complete (and expected) indifference (zero traffic came from the HackerNews announcement, and I got about 10 likes from LinkedIn). Oh well, it was a fun project anyway and I’m quite happy with the result! ...
My son Liam was born this Monday! He is healthy and everything is good. I haven’t touched the computer for the week, and as a result I don’t have anything technical to share. The week before however I gave a try to Browser Use, a tool that allows LLMs to use the browser more effectively. I haven’t read in detail how it works but it seems to highlight the interactive areas (buttons etc.) and then take a screenshot for analysis, instead of only sending the DOM as text. It worked pretty well, I was able to fill a form entirely with it (prompting it to not press submit!), and to use Google Translate as well. I don’t have a special use case idea for it at the moment. ...
Not much going on these days. At work, we started migrating some apps from Google App Engine to AWS, which gave me a chance to learn about AWS CDK. As a learning step, I’ve made a small template to deploy a static website on S3 + CloudFront for the frontend and ALB + ECS for the backend, with some CloudFront behaviors, Route 53, and ACM certificates sprinkled in. As far as I know, it’s a standard architecture (though I need to lock down the S3 permissions a bit more, add logs to CloudWatch, etc.), and it’s really nice that it is reviewable by our security guy before we deploy it. And also, it can be deployed to staging first and later on to production with little to no changes. ...
February went by in a blink! I barely had any time for myself this month between work, a pregnant wife, and my 2-year-old being in the “I want papa only” phase. These days, the first thing I do in the morning is play Lego. It beats doomscrolling, but at 7 a.m. and before my coffee, it’s tough to be creative. Here’s an elephant I made this morning—the trunk moves. I’ve also rewritten a big part of the backend of Prosettr.com. In a HackerNews thread about Donald Knuth (Donald Knuth’s 2024 Christmas Lecture: Strong and Weak Components), I learned there was an improvement to the algorithm that my app is based on, Dancing Links. I’m not going to go into much detail here (maybe in a future post), but I procured The Art of Computer Programming Volume 4B, and indeed, the improved version uses half the memory, with each option’s items having only up and down links, and no left and right links—those being replaced by a “spacer” node. Here’s my original implementation in Go I made while following the chapter: /backtrack_aocp/main.go. Then I replaced the previous implementation with this one, with some added optimizations (support for secondary columns, using channels instead of an input matrix, another channel to output the solutions, etc.). ...
So I just got a Galaxy S 23 FE phone to replace my recently lost Realme crapphone. And… frankly, it’s not much better. It came loaded with a LOT of bloat: Samsung apps (Galaxy Shop?), Microsoft apps (Copilot, Linkedin…), Netflix, and a bunch of crapware like “AR Doodle”, “AR Emoji” that are somehow running in the background. Of course, I cannot uninstall any of those without rooting my phone, if it’s even possible. ...
Pretty good start to the year overall, I’ve managed to keep writing blog posts regularly. Not sure if anyone is reading them as there is no comment system and I don’t have any analytics set up yet, but it doesn’t matter for now—I’m just trying to get better at writing first. Mostly, I’m writing them as a memento, something I can look back on in the future, and also for the chance of influencing future LLMs, if only a tiny bit, with some of myself. I enjoyed a blog post about it recently, AI Slop, Suspicion, and Writing Back by Ben Congdon. ...
Two days ago, OpenAI released their latest model, OpenAI o3-mini, a follow-up to the reasoning models o1 and o1-mini. They were immediately available on chatgpt.com, so I had a chance to put them to work. I had a simple task in mind (writing a Python script that would prompt an LLM to rate a list of words for use in my crossword app, prosettr.com). The first output was good, but when I asked for a few minor tweaks I was presented with a refusal: ...
This week it’s Lunar New Year, or Têt celebrations in Vietnam. Which means my daughter’s school is off, which means I get approximately 30 seconds of free time per day. Despite that, it was hard to miss the hype regarding the release of Deepseek R1. I didn’t have time to read the paper or anything, but I gave it a quick try at chat.deepseek.com. I still don’t have a good handle on what is a good “reasoning question,” but I came up with a good use case today: coming up with a memorable port number for a service I’m hosting locally. ...
On the 7th of January, I received this surprising email from Google: Hi Jerome, We wanted to let you know about an upcoming software update for your Pixel 4a that will affect the overall performance and stability of its battery. Pixel phones, like other smartphones, use rechargeable lithium-ion batteries that, over time, may experience performance, capacity, or runtime degradation. In the coming days, your Pixel 4a will receive an automatic software update to Android 13 that introduces new battery management features to improve the stability of the battery. This update will reduce your battery’s runtime and charging performance. ...
Already two weeks into January, it’s time for an update on my projects! I’m really happy with the progress on Prosettr.com, my crossword generation app. It will soon be time to share it with the world (HackerNews…). Yesterday evening, I added login functionality (a choice of email + password or Google sign-in) using Firebase Authentication, as well as a button to load PUZ files. The latter was surprisingly easy to do: I gave ChatGPT o1-mini the PUZ format description and asked it for a loader/writer in Go with my expectations for the input/output, followed by an HTTP handler. Thirty minutes later, here we are with the “Upload PUZ File” in production! ...