I was holidaying in Scotland over the last few weeks so just a few interesting links to share this week. If you haven't been to Scotland before it is well worth a visit.
❤️ Picks of the Week #
📝 Article — BirdNet-Go: But We Have Bird Monitoring At Home — This is a neat little weekend project if you like birds. For me, I am pretty sure it would be mostly pigeons but quite cool anyway.
📝 Article — Valve confirms credit card companies pressured it to delist certain adult games — Clearly we are living in the censorship era. With the online safety act as well more and more things are disappearing from the internet.
📝 Article — A 14kb page can load much faster than a 15kb page (2022) — This was an interesting read. My homepage is 81.81kb compressed so clearly I have some work to do if I want to get this.
📝 Article — Local LLMs versus offline Wikipedia — Given the way the internet is going, having an offline Wikipedia combined with an LLM is not a bad idea.
📝 Article — Don't animate height — There are a few apps I use that seem to ground to a halt even on quite beefy hardware, I wonder if this is the cause. Worth keeping in mind when adding animations.
📝 Article — LLM architecture comparison — This is a very well written article with some great diagrams. Definitely worth bookmarking and having a read through.
📝 Article — Don't bother parsing: Just use images for RAG — It is surprising how well LLMs can parse images. Although I would be wary of hallucinations especially for critical items.
📝 Article — More than you wanted to know about how Game Boy cartridges work — Much of my childhood was spent playing Tetris on my GameBoy. A lot of this goes beyond my understanding of electronics, but I am sure it will be interesting for a lot of you.
📝 Article — Neil Armstrong's customs form for moon rocks (2016) — I wonder how much of this was just for publicity, although it wouldn't surprise me if the red tape went this far too.
📝 Article — Web fingerprinting is worse than I thought (2023) — TL;DR, you should be using Firefox with privacy.resistFingerprinting = true set if you value your privacy at all.
📝 Article — Cursor makes developers less effective? — I still most use AI for discreet bits of code. Certainly when vibe coding it can get a bit ridiculous the amount of time-wasting getting the AI to correct itself. This is also highly dependent on how good the AI model is.
📝 Article — never comply — This is why I still like buying DVDs for the films that I love, and I am getting nostalgic over CDs again. At some point I would like to just self-host everything and cancel my subscriptions.
📝 Article — The Case of the Missing Guitar and the Idiot Who Didn’t Even Realize it was Missing — This story made me laugh. As a guitarist that knows a lot about guitars I would be mortified if I misplaced a $5,000+ guitar.
📝 Article — Decoding Meshtastic with GNURadio on a Raspberry Pi — I am all for offline communication. This looks like a cool project that would be worth setting up at some point.
📝 Article — 6 weeks of Claude Code — I have yet to try Claude Code, but it is interesting to see how other people are using it.
📝 Article — A.I. Researchers Are Negotiating $250 Million Pay Packages — It is amazing how much money is being thrown around to gain the top AI talent. Given the hardware requirements needed to run these commercial large scale models there really is a very small talent pool for those that have the skills that these big companies want.
📝 Article — If you're remote, ramble — This is an interesting idea. We have a #random channel we use at work for this, but I wonder if a random channel for each team member to ramble would be a good idea.
📝 Article — Tokens are getting more expensive — I don't use AI enough to warrant a fixed cost a month so just stick with the PAYG API costs. I wonder if the fixed cost AI subscriptions will come to an end at some point.
📝 Article — Create space-saving clones on macOS with Python — I didn't know you could do this on a Mac. I could see this be useful for some of my video assets which often get copied between projects when I need them.
📝 Article — The Why of Substack — My newsletter growth has definitely slowed since moving off of Substack. I still value my independent newsletter though and won't be going back to Substack.
📝 Article — Job-seekers are dodging AI interviewers — Any company using AI to interview you does not value your time so you shouldn't value there's.
🛠️ Tool — Monitor your security cameras with locally processed AI — I don't have any security cameras in my home but if I did then this would be quite cool. The last thing you want is for security camera footage being sent off to a third party.
🤖 AI — Genie 3: A new frontier for world models — This is certainly more video game simulation than world simulation, but it opens up the possibilities for the future. I wonder what the environmental cost is of generating a world like this in real-time.
📝 Article — Things that helped me get out of the AI 10x engineer imposter syndrome — AI gives the impression that you are being more productive but actually more time is usually spent debugging or trying to understand the code compared to writing it yourself first time.
💬 Quote of the Week #
“Show me the incentive and I will show you the outcome.” — Charlie Munger
From the article How to Be Successful, Cobra Effects, & More by Sahil Bloom.
Top comments (0)