trainyperson

I used WebSerial + WebSockets during hardware to prototype some connected hardware (on boards that didn’t have WiFi).

Plug in to USB, fire up the web app, and then press a button in NY to light up LEDs in SF – it was exciting stuff!

I never tried actually programming the boards over WebSerial; that obviously opens up many more use cases. I’m thinking about the success that p5.js has had in the creative coding community, largely driven (I think) by a low barrier to entry since it just requires a web browser to get started.

This just blocks AI features within Firefox.

The feature I would really want here is a switch that blocks AI summaries, overviews, etc. on any websites you browse.

I like how the author mentioned typing speed tests as a “warm up” to the day. I frequently find myself going to do a typing speed test when I’m at my desk but unable to work, and have often wondered why I do that and if anyone else does that.

Doing the puzzle with “pencil and paper” logic is actually quite approachable and fun! I recommend it. Hint: you don’t need to run constraint satisfaction! There are some insightful shortcuts to be made

Same, although I know Shazam does most of its work on very high frequencies so it’s possible we’re not able to hear the part that got matched.

The “Not Like Us” snippet (09/29 2:43pm) is easily recognizable though. And “Rockabye” can be heard at 3:05pm.

Are there any tools that employ LLMs to fill out the Semantic Web data? I can see that being a high-impact use case: people don’t generally like manually filling out all the fields in a schema (it is indeed “a bother”), but an LLM could fill it out for you – and then you could tweak for correctness / editorializing. Voila, bother reduced!

This would also address the two reasons why the author thinks AI is not suited to this task:

1. human stays in the loop by (ideally) checking the JSON-LD before publishing; so fewer hallucination errors

2. LLM compute is limited to one time per published content and it’s done by the publisher. The bots can continue to be low-GPU crawlers just as they are now, since they can traverse the neat and tidy JSON-LD.

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The author makes a good case for The Semantic Web and I’ll be keeping it in mind for the next time I publish something, and in general this will add some nice color to how I think about the web.

Does Patreon let you see what percentage of your subscribers signed up through the iOS app?

This article reasons that it is not a coincidence because of the “seconds pendulum” definition of the meter, which would necessitate the values being equal because of the pendulum time period equation.

That all makes sense to me, and I agree.

But here’s what’s odd to me:

We ended up not choosing the seconds pendulum approach (for reasons mentioned in the article). Instead they chose to use “1 ten-millionth of the Earth’s quadrant”. Now, how is it that that value is so close to the length of the seconds pendulum? Were they intentionally trying to get it close to seconds pendulum length, and it just happened to be a nice round power of ten? Is that a coincidence?

The 1-minute (or less) headways on London Underground are precisely because of signal modernization over the past couple decades that has moved certain lines beyond purely fixed-block signaling.