Posts

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! ...