pugio

Great idea. Related: My wife and I have been sending each other video game achievement style images (with ChatGPT) to celebrate our little wins and keep us going in a busy household. I've also recently been planning goals for next year, and hit upon making my goal tracker look like the old Quest for Glory V character UI. Instant major (recurring) motivation boost.

Takeaway: Try mining your own past for the easy things that bring you joy, and weave those in. Personal UIs are free now, so do the fun thing.

I use Gemini-2.5-flash extensively, mostly for its low latency, and haven't found anything which works better at that speed/cost. Which is why I'm really bummed that Google is deprecaty/removing it next week.

Have you found anything that works as a suitable replacement?

Cut & Paste always struck me as more of a Windows thing. Which is weird because obviously I can do cmd+X / cmd+V on a mac... I just never do. Instead it's "select" - command+C - delete - cmd+V.

Am I the only one who does that?

(EDIT: Same thing on Finder. cmd+C cmd+Del cmd+V)

Anyway, I love the design aesthetic of the site, and when people question existing paradigms. Will definitely be checking Ishmael out.

Exactly the same - took way more work to delete the thing.

Yes, that is precisely what happened. Over and over again. Every time I had to delete it. It was something to do with the way they embedded Google login on the page.

This was worse than that. This was no click. It would literally do it without any intervention as long as I browsed to the page.

LinkedIn is one of the most annoying sites on the internet. Every time I mistakenly click a link, it automatically grabs my Google account and creates a new account and profile for me, which I then have to go in and delete. Yes, I finally figured out which arcane preferences settings across both LinkedIn and Google I had to tweak to stop this from happening, but I think it was only after ChatGPT was around to help me wade through the mess.

I wrote a thing about exactly this, but I'm resistant to blogging for undefined reasons so, maybe this will help someone...

# AI speech is an Infohazard

Apart from all its other possible boons and ills, one danger of AI is just that it is useful, so you use it. A lot.

In earlier days I would dive deeply into an author's work and start to think and write like them for a while. It was a heady feeling: slinging sonnets like Shakespeare—not at his level, but stylistically reminiscent—or tweaking turns like Twain.

Like all things, the effect lasts in relation to how long and how much you do it. The point is: our thinking is influenced by what we take in. Take more of a certain thing in, think more like that thing.

Now enter AI. My hand-crafted coding days are in their twilight months ("AI years"), and most of my software engineering is done through jaggedly capable agentic power tools. Instead of working directly with raw codestuff, I work with slop prose flecked with code sprinkles.

I read orders of magnitude more AI-speak—I call it "babble", or perhaps "Babel"—than human-written text. I can feel its genuinely honest points, clearly stated, slipping their banal tendrils into my thoughts and inner monologue.

Solutions? For me:

1. Be aware. "I notice that my thought stream is under assault."

2. Read stuff far from slop. Even a small dose of the good stuff can help inoculate. Recently I thought On the Calculation of Volume was something completely different.

3. Write stuff that is different. This post. Force the mind to synthesize thoughts in other ways.

4. debabel.py / debabel.js: a tool, and a pi extension, which filters common babble from visible LLM output. A lint for mind-killing prose.

It is not perfect, but it 80/20s nicely. I am willing to accept mildly awkward prose to avoid polluting my own internal distributions.

Details and example in the first comment. Tool available upon request.

Thank you for engaging with this thoughtfully. You've highlighted the HUGE difference between "bespoke just for me/us" and "product that works for everyone". I've been struggling with this myself, since its value to my family is such that I immediately think "how can I share/sell this to everyone?"

In my case, I have a separate heartbeat check process (running on another machine) which ensures that the monitor is correctly working (no silent fails). I also wired up a SECOND esp32-box-3 as a receiver, and it will complain loudly if the transmitter one isn't sending (much like most normal baby monitors do). The monitor (web ui) has an option of directly listening to the raw non-gated audio, which I use every now and then to confirm what's going on. I also record the streams sometimes for algorithmic improvement.

My aim is not to replace human connection with machines, it's to allow the parents a bit more sanity so as to be better carers for our children. So far we've gained in sleep, piece of mind, and reduced stress. The last one is important - listening to your baby yell for 10 minutes, even if you know they're just annoyed because they don't want to sleep, can be really draining (especially for mom). The notifications allow us to keep tabs on things without the direct audio line to the limbic system.

AI + hardware has really helped my wife and I get more sleep.

I had an esp32-box-3 lying around from a lapsed "voice agent" project from a year or two ago. Had a baby. Baby moved to another room, sleep trained. Baby either: 1. wakes up a few times a night, babbles for a bit, goes back to sleep OR 2. baby wakes up and fusses for N (=10) minutes, at which point parents need to go in and settle (that's the sleep training routine we use).

In either case, we do NOT want to wake up every time the baby does. Baby can go back to sleep easily, we adults have a harder time. A few rounds with Claude and the esp32 is now our new baby monitor. It tracks cry/fuss duration and publishes an audio stream (via a web UI or direct with, say, VLC). The audio only comes through AFTER N minutes of fussing have elapsed. It also posts notifications (to ntfy) after 30s and N minutes. My log says baby often wakes up 1-2 times a night and resettles almost immediately. We only wake up if the audio comes through, after N (10) minutes.

Also during the day it's really handy to be notified when baby has woken up from her nap. Let's us be out of the house, or in a distant room, and still keep track of what's going on.

It's fun to keep improving and adding features to this. Never would have had the time/energy to get this done without a coding agent. I ordered a set of 10 more of the esp32-box-3s to give them out to my friends (well, some are for other projects... so much potential).

(EDIT: Yes, I know this isn't AI designing hardware, but even writing code for embedded off the shelf stuff feels like a huge new potential.)

Pi is my daily driver. I noticed the same phenomenon, and had Claude analyze all my past transcripts for classes of 'edit' error. Built an extension which patches the edit tool to self-heal on the majority of those kinds of calls. It's not 100%, but it cuts down on the rejections quite a bit and saves a few round trips.

EDIT: It's still quite fascinating seeing the kinds of things the models keep trying to do. It almost seems like when a human has slightly off with their nervous system. The conscious brain wants to do one thing, but for some reason the signals aren't getting to the hands correctly.

I've always wondered what "illegal" means in this context? Is it designed to just be a pejorative, or something incendiary? When is an invasion "legal"? I can't really think of any case where any kind of recognized body of law (especially one that both constituents would recognize) would impose legality on an invasion, so it seems that people say "illegal" in much the same way that "legal" has become a stand-in in our society for "moral".

Should I read it as "immoral invasion"? Leaving aside whether it is or isn't, at least that framing makes sense, because you can meaningfully debate the morality of an invasion, but I can't understand how you could debate legality (except perhaps within the country's own internal framework of laws, like if a president declared a war without going through the proper legal channels).

That unsubscribe rule is genius. (Obvious in hindsight, as the best things are.) Thanks for that.

Thank you, yes. I was very confused.