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Colby Russell

@colby@kosmos.social
mastodon 4.3.4
  • Open on kosmos.social

The time for smart documentation is now.

114 Followers
0 Following
27 Posts
Joined January 09, 2021
Location:
USA (Austin, TX)
Open post
Colby Russell @colby@kosmos.social
· 1mo ago

Even when people don't set out to have LLMs write entire blog posts for them, I run across instances where a person has copied and pasted choice passages/snippets from LLMs (with all of their obvious tells) into something that the person has clearly otherwise written themselves, and I just think, "Why?"

Even if you *do* want ChatGPT or whatever to straight up give you a blog post to post, it takes like, what, 20 minutes (less!) to redo it with a read-over and original-write-through pass.

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Open post
Colby Russell @colby@kosmos.social
· 1mo ago

The plural of "mouse" is "mouses".

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Open post
Colby Russell @colby@kosmos.social
· 7mo ago

It feels to me like a big oversight for anything that implements its own flavor of followable profiles not to also support generic RSS and Atom feeds.

(Note I'm not referring here to server software *generating* RSS/Atom feeds of its users' profiles—though that's important, too. I'm referring to the ability of any user to paste in an ordinary RSS/Atom feed and be able to "follow" it, too, alongside everything else in their timeline. For example, Mastodon should allow this but doesn't…)

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Open post
Colby Russell @colby@kosmos.social
· 5mo ago
Replying to
@rosano Solid gives you an inbox. The documentation at solidproject.org (I think) used to have a nice walkthrough that demonstrates how you can POST to someone else's inbox (using XMPP-inspired examples involving Romeo and Juliet IIRC). You can also listen for updates to Solid resources using WebSockets—or at least that used to be the case. In theory, building a group bugtracker is possible with Solid, but the UIs for the demos have always been awful (basically unusable). cc @m5x5
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Open post
Colby Russell @colby@kosmos.social
· 5mo ago
Replying to
Just say "browser engine". It's fine. It's not nearly as silly as the former.
en.wikipedia.org
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Open post
Colby Russell @colby@kosmos.social
· 5mo ago

Reminder in response to yet another billing incident involving insanely high surprise charges (<https://discuss.ai.google.dev/t/unexpected-54k-billing-spike-in-13-hours-firebase-browser-key-without-api-restrictions-used-for-gemini-requests/140262>):

The Purpose of a Billing System Is What It Does

See also: mrkurt commenting on why Fly.io also went with the standard playbook of having no limits on spending and refused to let you set a self-service hard cap so you wouldn't end up with a 54000 MNY bill: "putting work into features specifically to minimize how much people spend seems like a good way to fail a company."

discuss.ai.google.dev
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Open post
Colby Russell @colby@kosmos.social
· 6mo ago
Replying to
@jet@mastodonapp.uk @Littlebobbytables@mstdn.social LinkedIn sells premium plans. Ostensibly, they want to be able to detect and disable the accounts of people using what are essentially poweruser tools for enabling seedy behavior (e.g. by recruiters). In reality, it's because they want to sell recruiters those tools, which is obv. difficult if their premium features (e.g. advanced filtering) can be provided instead by a browser extension. @b_cavello@mastodon.publicinterest.town 👆 (the "benign motivation" is, predictably, maximizing revenue).
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Open post
Colby Russell @colby@kosmos.social
· 5mo ago
Replying to
@simon@fedi.simonwillison.net the rel=stylesheet link presents a wrinkle, but whatever necessary CSS exists can be dumped at the bottom of the file, as with and .
colbyrussell.com

Web-based literate programming demo

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Open post
Colby Russell @colby@kosmos.social
· 5mo ago
Replying to
@aartaka@merveilles.town see also (kind of unrelated):
fi-le.net
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Open post
Colby Russell @colby@kosmos.social
· 6mo ago

Shouldn't the focus on LLMs and the incorporation of them into workflows have by now started to look towards "lowering" (as in compilers/autocoding) the workflows that involve/depend on them into ones that instead use pseudo-natural language processing systems (like Inform7) to provide conversational interfaces, instead of wasting all that expensive compute on what often turn out to be rolls of the dice trying to get the LLM to do the right thing?

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Open post
Colby Russell @colby@kosmos.social
· 6mo ago
Replying to
@aartaka it's gotta be one of my top README-related annoyances second only to people touching and committing empty (or near-empty) READMEs—a waste of time when you have a copy of the source tree on disk and go through the effort of opening the README. Much more interesting/useful would be if people did something like what Glench did with . And/or if people just took a cue from plain.txt.htm: (i.e. making your HTML readable as plain text).
glench.github.io
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Open post
Colby Russell @colby@kosmos.social
· 6mo ago
Replying to
(@aartaka PS: I think if it became the norm for either one or both of these sorts of things to be employed by project authors, forges would eventually add limited support for it.)
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Open post
Colby Russell @colby@kosmos.social
· 6mo ago
Replying to
@aartaka in a better world, your user agent (assuming you're signed up and logged in to some service like a Firefox Sync account) would keep a copy of your "papers"—form data you've submitted—with some configurable policy about how long before it's allowed to auto-evaporate.
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Open post
Colby Russell @colby@kosmos.social
· 46mo ago
Replying to
@cdub this seems like one of those unnecessary (and tedious) conflicts that take the form: 's what I'm going to interpret you to have said (since there's nothing about your word choice to stop me from outwardly feigning it as a genuine/plausible reading), even though is the thing that you were actually saying (and which, to be clear, I already know—but I'm going to force you to account for the adversarial interpretation anyway). cf @robin
pchiusano.github.io

Paul Chiusano: The internet has made defensive writers of us all

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Open post
Colby Russell @colby@kosmos.social
· 5mo ago
Replying to
Alternative take:
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Open post
Colby Russell @colby@kosmos.social
· 5mo ago
Replying to
@simon@fedi.simonwillison.net this was totally coincidental and in no way motivated by (which I only just learned about through HN just now). Thoughts? The comments on HN about Thariq's post focus on Markdown's ability to bail out to embedded HTML, but still: it's Markdown and requires a Markdown-to-HTML transformation step. This way is better, surely.
simonwillison.net
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Open post
Colby Russell @colby@kosmos.social
· 5mo ago
Replying to
(@simon@fedi.simonwillison.net if you're preparing these to be read offline, then loading from disk instead of over the network obviates the reason for CSS to appear at the beginning of the file the way that conventional webpages do. Even over the network, connections are so fast and average payloads already so loaded with bloat that there's no perceptible downsides when benchmarked against a typical webpage from this decade…)
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Open post
Colby Russell @colby@kosmos.social
· 6mo ago
Replying to
@ocdtrekkie @ben that's just spin through selective honesty on their part, and the HN-adjacent crowd is swallowing it. mdp dumped a dataset extracted from their (massive) blob of sniffing logic two months ago. There are a lot of scrapers and scummy leads-generators there. And there're plenty of conventional (in the putting-you-in-control sense) ones, too. Things like open source extensions designed to enforce caps on time spent on "distracting websites like YouTube, Instagram, and Facebook".
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Open post
Colby Russell @colby@kosmos.social
· 5mo ago

A total conversion mod for Discourse to make it look and work like Discord (to further confuse the difference between the two).

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Open post
Colby Russell @colby@kosmos.social
· 5mo ago

A protocol (read: norm) whereby the value of the content attribute for a element is a URL, and for any given page following this protocol, you can load the appropriate page designer/CMS interface/whatever for the page that you're on because it's a simple matter of appending a element whose src attribute is the URL in step 1.</p>

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Open post
Colby Russell @colby@kosmos.social
· 1mo ago

Resource integrity for HTTP.

Rather than having HTTP redirect to HTTPS with a content-free dummy page in the request body, the body of the 301 response is the same content being served over HTTPS, but the HTTP request has an additional Integrity header that allows:

1. verifying that the payload is not forged (signed by the same party that has the TLS certificate)

2. a subsequent, ETag-based conditional request to the HTTPS endpoint

(Only for perambulatory browsing—not auth'd.)

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Open post
Colby Russell @colby@kosmos.social
· 5mo ago
Replying to
@aartaka@merveilles.town alternatively: page borders of the sort you see in old books, except when you look closely, you notice the borders on these pages encode the same information both in human-readable form and a pattern that also redundantly encodes a two-dimensional barcode.
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Open post
Colby Russell @colby@kosmos.social
· 5mo ago
Replying to
@aartaka@merveilles.town none I know of, unfortunately.
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