kidnoodle
Joined 14 years ago
Karma
13
Submissions
47
Member since
Jan 9
Recent submissions
Comment · 16 hours ago
Been a fun opportunity to play around with ai in various ways - mixed but definitely powerful experience in using it for data research (finding libraries and their locations), very impressive on reverse engineering apis to get book availability. And then a lot of interesting stuff around getting good behaviour from LLMs as chat partners, for example using jev to improve results from using openrouter by getting it to check for common failure modes and ban providers based on their output.
Comment · 1 day ago
I’m still working on https://leafle.org which is a tool for getting more interesting reading (or listening) suggestions that one can borrow from the library (or Libby). I’m done for the moment with building it, so I’ve been doing things like making flyers and leaving them in local libraries.
Comment · 1 day ago
I have made extensive use of this while building my library book recommender doodad https://leafle.org
The LLMs are very good at reverse engineering undocumented apis!
Comment · 25 days ago
This is very much part of the theory I have with https://leafle.org which uses a similar talk about books, find deeper patterns than the same author or people who read X also read Y, approach to suggest new ones.
I feel like books are an interesting one because the LLMs have ‘read’ so many of them and hence have substantial latent knowledge of them. My sense is that a profile built from books is maybe something that would generalise as well.
My observation from just talking to Claude and co about books is that they kind of wanted to collapse it all to a central explaining idea, which was interesting in a sort of horoscope like way, but just elided too much nuance and complexity to really be useful.
Comment · 25 days ago
An alternative interface I built for my kids’ Yoto players which adds an intercom feature so I can broadcast messages like “Come have breakfast!” without yelling upstairs.
Comment · 26 days ago
In the course of other matters, I found myself wondering how many places around the world one can walk to the library from. So I compiled a list of all the libraries in OSM, plus officially listed ones in China and Mexico, and then ran that through mapbox’s isochrones api to see.
Naturally to some extent this follows population density and gdp, but there are quite a few interesting places - Kerala for example has a phenomenal number of libraries!
Comment · 1 month ago
Is a river alive by Robert McFarlane
A beautifully written travelogue/nature book/eco activist screed that tours the world visiting rivers and the people engaged in living with and protecting them. Fascinating, hopeful, heartbreaking and lyrical. Really enjoying it (evidently)!
Comment · 1 month ago
At work, standing up openmetadata to capture data lineage from airflow.
At home, increasing the number of libraries I can check live availability for for Leafle. (Library software is a wild place man)
Comment · 1 month ago
No probs! I’d be super interested to hear how it does if you give it a try.
Comment · 1 month ago
It is gonna be a bit variable - it has definitely got less knowledge of non-English literature. Couple of French friends tried it out and it did a reasonable job though!
Comment · 1 month ago
Morning hacker news folks. I made this thing I call leafle - it is a bot you can talk to about books, that can give you suggestions for books you can borrow right now at your local library (at least for 6,900ish libraries it can: https://leafle.nanosheep.net/coverage).
It leans very heavily on the fact that LLMs have very broad latent knowledge of.. well, most books written in English, really. So it tries to do a good job of finding you books which aren't just another one by the same author, or happen to be in vogue right now.
You can try it out a little without signing up, import your reading history from other services (Goodreads, storygraph, particularly nicely with hardcover), or just take a pic of your bookshelf. If you do sign up, it'll get better at suggesting you things as you talk to it more about things you've read (hopefully it does a reasonable job of holding an intelligent conversation on that score), and you can also then connect it to claude and friends via an MCP or play around with the API.
Comment · 1 month ago
My local library collocates with a cinema these days - I, and many others, were originally super sceptical about this, mostly because the arrangement made a public service and space sort beholden to a commercial entity.
Happily in practice it has turned out to be great, and the combined space operates really effectively as a community ‘third space’. Obviously because of the private sector aspect of this there’s a significant risk in terms of how sustainable it is, but moderated somewhat by the council owning the actual building both live in.
Comment · 1 month ago
Love a serif (but then I miss writing my docs in latex so..)
Working on the side on https://leafle.org: a way to find your next good book at your local library