kidnoodle

Is a river alive by Robert McFarlane

A beautifully written travelogue/nature book/eco activist screed that tours the world visiting rivers and the people engaged in living with and protecting them. Fascinating, hopeful, heartbreaking and lyrical. Really enjoying it (evidently)!

At work, standing up openmetadata to capture data lineage from airflow.

At home, increasing the number of libraries I can check live availability for for Leafle. (Library software is a wild place man)

No probs! I’d be super interested to hear how it does if you give it a try.

It is gonna be a bit variable - it has definitely got less knowledge of non-English literature. Couple of French friends tried it out and it did a reasonable job though!

Morning hacker news folks. I made this thing I call leafle - it is a bot you can talk to about books, that can give you suggestions for books you can borrow right now at your local library (at least for 6,900ish libraries it can: https://leafle.nanosheep.net/coverage).

It leans very heavily on the fact that LLMs have very broad latent knowledge of.. well, most books written in English, really. So it tries to do a good job of finding you books which aren't just another one by the same author, or happen to be in vogue right now.

You can try it out a little without signing up, import your reading history from other services (Goodreads, storygraph, particularly nicely with hardcover), or just take a pic of your bookshelf. If you do sign up, it'll get better at suggesting you things as you talk to it more about things you've read (hopefully it does a reasonable job of holding an intelligent conversation on that score), and you can also then connect it to claude and friends via an MCP or play around with the API.

My local library collocates with a cinema these days - I, and many others, were originally super sceptical about this, mostly because the arrangement made a public service and space sort beholden to a commercial entity.

Happily in practice it has turned out to be great, and the combined space operates really effectively as a community ‘third space’. Obviously because of the private sector aspect of this there’s a significant risk in terms of how sustainable it is, but moderated somewhat by the council owning the actual building both live in.

Love a serif (but then I miss writing my docs in latex so..)

I’ve carried on working on my llm powered book recommendation engine, Leafle (try it out if you like! https://leafle.nanosheep.net).

Mostly this week I’ve been wrestling with a better solution to filtering openrouter providers because a common failure mode is getting stuck on one which is either very slow, or doesn’t actually meet the spec it promises in terms of tool calling.

I suppose potentially the upside with books is it takes a while to exhaust the shallow wins compared to music and movies because the investment of time is that much greater.

Oh for sure. I think there’s a lot of potential in llms for this (lot more sophisticated approaches possible than what I have here). Ultimately it should be like one of those fantasy setting librarians or book sellers who looks you up and down and then just hands you the right book for the moment.

Edited to add - or just a really good real life one, it would be awesome if everyone had access to a librarian or bookseller with like an hour to sit and talk with you about books and then help you find some.

A few things - it checks the books it suggests actually exist is maybe the most important (I was really bummed to discover some Claude suggested for me did not). My main reason for building it was to hep me find stuff from the library, so there’s that as well. It also tries to do a little better than more of author X, by using the llm’s ‘understanding’ of the books and what actually mattered to you about them to build up a little profile of your taste and find maybe slightly unusual things that would work for you.

Oh, and it definitely does not pat itself on the back for suggesting books for you.

(You can see the profile it makes and correct it - it did a pretty good job on me)

Oh how annoying! Sorry, that should be fixed now - that was a flow I didn’t account for originally (I figured people would chat first an upload once it gave them suggestions).

Thanks! I’ll have a look

You should be in now! Just trying to manage my limited credit that I’m funding the openrouter account with.

Aha! I was posting about a thing I made for just this purpose the other day - it is called Leafle. You talk to it about books you’ve read and enjoyed or not, and it uses that plus the fact that llms have very extensive knowledge of pretty much all books, to suggest ones you’ll enjoy (or in fact, that will meet your need - reading isn’t just about ‘enjoying’ after all).

It can suggest them to buy, or as audiobooks, or it can find ones currently available to borrow from your local library!

It is at https://leafle.nanosheep.net if you’d like to give it a go :)

I’ve been playing around with exploiting LLMs having ‘read’ every book ever written to make a chatbot to help people choose library books. You talk to it a bit about things you’ve read, and it uses the llm’s latent knowledge of books to suggest ones you might like.

It’s pretty fun! It might even work on your local library (I got carried away and spent a while making it work on a few thousand round the world - you can see the coverage here: https://leafle.nanosheep.net/coverage).

https://leafle.nanosheep.net

I’ve been playing around with using llms to recommend me books I can get from my local library based on the model’s latent knowledge of books it has ‘read’ and a conversation with it about books I’ve liked.

I had a theory that the way to solve this was a location intelligence data union which sold safely anonymised aggregates and shared the profits, while also litigating on behalf of members under available legislation to stop other people using their data.

Alas, I was stymied by not having any cash to work on it, and the unit economics were not very VC friendly (at least I assume that’s one of the reasons why I didn’t get any traction from VCs).

A new spin on my slow baking location intelligence data union (https://wherelabs.info). This week I’m thinking about whether it makes sense to provide a location history ‘vault’, designed to let users expose their location history to LLM’s as context.

A new spin on my slow baking location intelligence data union (https://wherelabs.info).

This week I’m thinking about whether it makes sense to provide a location history ‘vault’, designed to let users expose their location history to LLM’s as context.

Still slowly working away on my location intelligence data union..

I’ve spent a while understanding what sort of market would make it viable. I think it does actually work if you can square: 10K participants per major metro area, revenue of about 2.9M per metro area (so say, 5K monthly recurring with about 50 customers).

At that point you could pay data union participants about $5 a week to share their location data with you.

From talking to some previous data union folks, the major challenges are paying out (my target is much higher than any union managed), and people dropping out over time.

My bet is that these are both solvable things by selling data products rather than just bundles of data, and the data source being very passive.

I’m also interested in the idea that such a union should act more like a union than previous efforts in this space, by actively defending members’ data from brokers.

I’ve been working more on the unit economics of my data union/trust idea (https://wherelabs.info/).

What I’m trying to understand is whether it is viable to pay people ~$5 per week for sharing their location data and demographics based on a 90% share of revenue from sales of data products built on that data. (But without ever selling or exposing individual level data).

I think at least initially the ‘product’ is datasets which don’t show individuals. You could of course build out a future direction which is differentially private.

More or less my initial approach to this is you take a grid, and you show movements/density on that grid. If necessary you coarsen the grid to avoid reidentification of individuals, and ultimately to get a good picture of the population given the biased sample which is the union membership, you need a statistical model on top which also helps from a privacy perspective.

State actors demanding individual location history is definitely an issue. I have a few possible approaches in mind to defend against that.

I’m still slowly working on a location intelligence data union (https://wherelabs.info) - the idea is people install an app and agree in a very upfront way to have their location tracked over time.

The union monetises this by selling privacy preserving aggregates (think ‘where is everyone in London right now’, or ‘where did people commute from?’), and acts on behalf of union members to stop data brokers selling their location data.

I built an app for iOS and android recently with a combination of Claude, and cursor. I started off by drawing Claude a picture of what I wanted the app to look like, and telling it to give me the skeleton of an iOS app. (It did a surprisingly good job)

Then I switched to cursor and iterated with it on making it work. Once I had the iOS app running, I got cursor to create an android app that looked and functioned the same.

Super interesting experience - took a couple of days of iterating here and there, helped to have them in git repos for when cursor went too far off piste.

Both apps work, they look pretty much like my original picture.. and the code is absolute trash. I don’t know swift, or particularly kotlin, but the code is horrendous. If you wanted to take them any further, you’d rewrite it from scratch.

This was. Rating combinations of Claude 3.7, 4.0 thinking, Gemini 2.5, and chatgpt 4. (Switching between agents when one was getting stuck.)

Observationally, they all had a much harder time with android and rarely produced anything that didn’t need fixing to build.

Great for rapid prototyping in a stack I don’t know, but 100% tech debt.

I’m playing around with the idea of a location intelligence data union. I work in an adjacent space, and it drives me crazy that there’s all this data about humans moving around that could make a huge positive difference in the world but it doesn’t, because ‘good’ actors won’t touch the shadily data broked data.

I figure the solution is to pay people for their location data, and be up front and transparent about collecting it.

Flowminder | Southampton, UK | Full time/part time | Remote (UK) | Full stack software engineer (frontend bias) | python/react | 52000

Still looking for someone to join my small but wily team of engineers and help me build a new, open source (https://github.com/Flowminder/flowkit-ui and https://github.com/Flowminder/flowkit-ui-backend), data platform for the humanitarian and development sector. (There's lots of other interesting and impactful things to get your teeth into as well, but the role is primarily for this project to start with).

Flowminder is a pioneering, internationally operating non-profit organisation that supports disaster relief and development efforts through several products including the analysis of data gained from mobile phones and household surveys in ethical, privacy and security preserving manners.

We use things like: React, Linux, Mapbox, Deck.gl, Python, FastAPI, Docker, make, PostgreSQL/MySQL, Terraform, CircleCI, Github, GCP, OpenAPI, Auth0

I can also promise you no stupid interview process - you, me, and a couple of the engineers have a chat about you, us, and things you have worked on and the kind of work you’d do with us. If you’ve got a GitHub/bitbucket/gitlab/whatever that’s great, and we’ll look at it, but not everyone’s work is public, and not everyone develops as a hobby, and those things are entirely reasonable as well!

https://www.flowminder.org/about-us/work-with-us/full-stack-...

Flowminder | Southampton, UK | Full time/part time | Remote (UK) | Full stack software engineer (frontend bias) | python/react

I'm looking for someone to join my small but wily team of engineers and help me build a new, open source (https://github.com/Flowminder/flowkit-ui and https://github.com/Flowminder/flowkit-ui-backend), data platform for the humanitarian and development sector. (There's lots of other interesting and impactful things to get your teeth into as well, but the role is primarily for this project to start with).

We use things like:

React, Linux, Mapbox, Deck.gl, Python, FastAPI, Docker, make, PostgreSQL/MySQL, Terraform, CircleCI, Github, GCP, OpenAPI, Auth0

https://www.flowminder.org/about-us/work-with-us/full-stack-...

Flowminder | flowminder.org | Infrastructure Engineer | Remote in the UK | Full or part-time | https://www.flowminder.org/about-us/work-with-us/infrastruct...

Flowminder is a pioneering, internationally operating non-profit organisation that supports disaster relief and development efforts through several products including the analysis of data gained from mobile phones and household surveys in privacy and security preserving manners.

We are now looking for an Infrastructure Engineer with excellent communication skills to facilitate and (depending on experience) drive and lead the expansion of our small but worldwide infrastructure and product installations in cooperation with key technology partners.

We use terraform, docker, linux, python, Postgres, airflow, GCP and anything else that gets the job done. Our infrastructure sits in mobile phone operators' data centres in interesting places around the world, and we use it to help people.

We value autonomy, a drive to make stuff better, and being curious.

A thoroughly panic inducing example is the basis for Anna Meredith’s Sawbones - https://music.youtube.com/watch?v=TsgNYUfdv9A&feature=share