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🔗 Platformer News: The scientific case for being nice to your chatbot:
Being polite to a large language model can feel strange or even silly — roughly equivalent to thanking a toaster. And yet a recent paper from Anthropic lends scientific weight to the theory that chatbots work better when you’re nice to them.
Looks like in this brave new world, we’ll all be saying thank-you to our doors. 😀
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Interesting behaviour I’ve started to notice in myself when browsing repositories of coding agent skills: I now question whether a given Markdown file is intended for human readers or for agents. Use to be easy:
.mdare for you to read, source files are for machines. You can’t rely on this anymore. -
Closed a credit card account a few months back. Thought I had it all balanced but it turns out it was closed with a credit, a few dollars I can’t get because the account’s no longer accessible. But I still get a monthly paper statement reminding me of this fact. Not sure how I can stop them now.
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Two episodes away from finishing A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms. At the big battle scene, that I just can’t commit myself to watch. 😐 Not ready to call it a “did not finish” though. I may get back to it eventually.
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🔗 Birchtree: Where did the MP3s come from?
Not to make everything a comparison to what we’re living through now, but I do think that it’s notable that one of the most nostalgic, good-vibes products of many of our youths was fundamentally built on stealing from artists.
Seems to me that the nostalgia comes from having media that you “own.” Maybe not in a purely legal sense, but certainly from a technical one. To be able to manipulate media as plain files on a file system, that you can move and play anywhere, is something that’s been lost with the move to streaming.
The good news is that it’s still possible to get music as MP3 files, legally even. Bandcamp and Qobuz are two I tend to visit, and both are quite good. And yes, it may not have everything you’re looking for, but it has more than you think. Enough for me to go there to look for something before resorting to the streaming services.
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It’s quite amusing seeing Markdown used in yet another domain that previously had to make do with ancient XML-based standards. Markdown is truly eating the world.
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🔗 Simon Willison: Gemini 3.1 Flash TTS
Google released Gemini 3.1 Flash TTS today, a new text-to-speech model that can be directed using prompts.
Oof! This looks like a pretty good TTS system. The example Simon gave was quite convincing. I had a play myself using Simon’s online tools, giving the model this prompt:
Say dynamically: “[surprised]Wow, impressive! [neutral] Although I do wonder if this is worth the two cents I paid. Would be nice if I chose the right word to say. [mocking] Impression? [laugh] So cute!”
(Some context, I wrote “impression” instead of “impressive” in my first test).
Here’s the result (it’s a download link download to avoid the post showing up on the podcast feed): gemini-speech.wav
Pretty decent.
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It’s been 21 months since I moved away from GitHub to a self-hosted Forgejo instance. So far, no regrets. I am considering a smaller setup, just to keep the bill down a little (not that it’s expenseive, around €20.00 /month). And while I do have occasional wistful looks at the integration GitHub enjoys with the larger ecosystem, I have no drive to move back.
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This week’s earworm: an arrangement of Svalbard Theme, from Orion’s Belt by Anders Enger Jensen. 🎵
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The grammar checker in my IDE is complaining about a missing article? My comment can’t be “if slice is empty,” it has to be “if the slice is empty?” Has the IDE ever worked with someone who writes code? 😛
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Free idea for an online game. You’re given 60 seconds to read a post. While you’re reading, ads causes the page to reflow, video ads fly in covering the prose, and you need to do your best to dismiss them or deal with them. Then, at the end, the page blanks and you need to answer a comprehension question about what you were asked to read.
There could even be level progressions here. Level 1 would have a single ad causing the page to reflow. Then later, you start getting video ads flowing across the screen, or maybe even popup notifications for notifications or to sign-up to an email address. The boss could be a paywall, where you need to either pay (thereby getting a lower score) or find a way around the paywall by browsing the plugin directory and finding one that won’t hack you or make the problem worse.
I guess there’s more here than I originally expected.
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Ultimate issue with such posts is that their purpose of existence changes over time. You make a post about seeing someone mentioning a tool, about you using that tool, and your opinions of it. And because’s in the moment, you don’t write about the tool itself. Why would you? You know what the tool does. The post is just an expression of you using it.
But eventually, time passes and all you remember is that you used a tool that does something, or worked a particular way. You forgot the name, and you think you know who mentioned it, but you refer to this person in many different ways. The post now needs to act as a reference, a way to recall something.
The only solution I see is making sure you say a few words about the tool itself. Just a few, like “key-frame animation.” or “motion graphics.” or heck, just write “browser” if that’s where you use it. Anything that would help with indexing and eventually recall.
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Speaking about being disorganised, it took me forever to find the post I made a while back about a tool used for making animation. Didn’t find it in search, and ChatGPT was not help either. Eventually found it by searching for “.gif” in Micro.blog, as I knew the post had a Gif animation.
Turns out the post contained none of the terms I was using to search. Made sure to have fixed that.
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Another useful use of Claude Code, especially for us Obsidian users that can’t keep their notes in order. Launch it in your Obsidian vault and ask it “what was I thinking when I made this paricular decision?” 😀
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I wonder if Zuck would be okay with staff using an LLM to interact with Meta. 😏
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TIL that moon towers, a thing I saw in an episode of Rick and Morty that I thought was completely fictional, are actually a real thing, or at least were. I guess Rick and Morty live in Austin, Texas. 😏
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Kind of validating to see coding agents having just as much trouble with code generators for gRPC schemas as I do (it’s means these gRPC tools kinda suck).
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Bit sad that it’s come to the point that news of someone conceding their defeat in an election is worthy of the exclamation, “wow, really?”
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This is why I think the whole crunch culture is fucking stupid. People need rest. Without it, you spend more time doing things badly, because the tunnel vision that comes from working 10’s of hours straight means you’re not open to the possibility that the problem might be elsewhere.
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Whoever said that a good night sleep is all that’s needed to solve a problem is absolutely right. Was facing a problem last evening, decided to call it a day, took a look at it this morning, and fixed it. Wasn’t even that good a sleep.
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The month of free public transport has introduced an interesting problem. A completely open barrier does not provide a way to force people in a particular direction. So PTV staff have to make do with alternatives for controlling flow, like directing people manually, or paper signs like these.
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When you deploy your service to the wrong environment, Dev instead of Test, you know it’s time to call it a day. Just be glad I didn’t accidently deploy to Prod. 😬
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Now that coding agents can produce code in reasonably working order, the real source of problems will come from the human’s miss-understanding of how the code should work. If the human has some bad assumptions, and conveys that information to the agent, then things could quickly get quite messy.
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I can’t see how OpenAI pivoting to a “super-app” would entice developers from moving away from the likes of Claude Code. Having a purpose-built TUI works perfectly here: I know where I launched it, I can have multiple sessions, etc. Plus, I’m already using the Terminal for building, Git, tailing logs, etc. Having one more tool in the same collection of windows is a small price on the old spacial awareness budget.