Ai

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. ...

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. ...

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.). ...

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: ...