klabetron

Wanna share this?

> [no] historical remarks that only warn about past states

100%. I’m working on a greenfield project that’s not yet released. It loves to put comments in code describing what it no longer does or why it misinterpreted something. And then tries to justify it as preventing the same mistakes in the future. Ugh.

I’ve been asking Claude to create PPTX (and DOCX) as a mechanism for collecting precise feedback from colleagues[^1]. Inline comments and edit suggestions using tools they’re familiar with (we use Google Suite which provides a serviceable interface for theses features on DOCX and PPTX). It’s all possible because it’s just reading XML files.

I do this even if the final product isn’t actually a doc or presentation.

That said: would love to hear of other ways people collect feedback and suggestions (in a Claude ecosystem).

[^1] or myself when I have tokens to burn and can’t be bothered to use a GitHub PR review against a markdown file…

Thoughts on publishing an example output perhaps in another repo? Perhaps just the first two phases? Would be interesting to see what the output looks like practically speaking (before committing to using it for a project).

Minor feedback: struggled to read this with the too-clever but distracting horizontal line scrolling down the page. Also the headers look squashed.

I don’t think we should conclude that a tech columnist who regularly shits on EU tech policy really intends to attack the EU writ large. If he sounds like he’s generalising to the “whole thing,” I’m pretty sure he understands most readers know he’s not talking about the entire EU experiment. Just the backward tech regulation.

I introduced this to my old company years ago and called it Big Block of Cheese Day after the West Wing episode [1]. We mostly focused on very minor bugs that affected a tiny bit of our user base in edgey edge cases but littered our error logs. (This was years ago at a, back then, relatively immature tech company.)

It had the same spirit as a hackathon.

[1] https://westwing.fandom.com/wiki/Big_Block_of_Cheese_Day

Ugh. Reminds me that some time ago Siri stopped responding to “turn off my TV.” Now I have to remember to say “turn off my Apple TV.” (Which with the magic of HDMI CEC turns off my entire system.) Given how groggy I am when I want to turn off the TV, I often forget.

Meta note: don’t see many blog posts as detailed as OP with seemingly mundane details. It assumes almost nothing of the user. So many posts would just say “install this QGIS plugin” with no mention of the pip calls, etc.

Not sure if this comes from search engine optimisation or years of experience consulting to clients that know nothing :)

Anyway, good work Mark. Another of your posts I’ll bookmark.

This.

Went to Japan for the first time in August (…don’t recommend…the heat is intense…) and instead of spending days in Kyoto and Osaka, we spent a few days in Otsu on Lake Biwa.

Highlights:

- The freshwater beach was delightful (Biwako Omi-Maiko Nakahama) - There’s a public onsen that’s not listed on the official onsen association’s site (which only lists resorts you have to book long in advance and pay lots for): Spa Resort Ogoto Agaryanse. It has strip mall vibes from the outside but is a great local onsen on the inside. - If you’re an American and want to experience cultural appropriation: take a cruise on the Michigan paddle boat

And, of course, it’s close enough to Kyoto that you can bop in and out.

Gawker.

Probably didn’t have the level of adoption needed for the nefarious types to justify spending time finding Silverlight exploits.

Love MkDocs* even for non-Python. But, wasn’t aware it could auto-generate from code comments like pdoc? I’d assume one would use pdoc for the API section of a hot mkdocs layout.

*not just because my initials are MK

> Next time I'll see such a response, I probably will quit on the spot; this is unbelievably cruel.

Let me guess: you’d quit but your résumé’s out of date because you, like me, procrastinate updating it?

(Sounds like a manager trying to manage you out; make things miserable enough for you that you’ll quit without having to go through the redundancy process…)

omg remember when we all had to install Java separately at the system level?

For the op, awesome article. Quick question: what’s the definition of your `swap(array, i, pivotIndex)` function? Am I missing something? Or just assumes it’s the standard set temp to a, set a to b, and set b to temp?

My CV is still in LaTeX which gives me the opportunity to procrastinate updating it (rather than actually applying for jobs) because of all of the tweaking I do.

If nothing else, typist is going go give me more opportunities to procrastinate! Nice.

Agreed; if I’m writing help text or instructions, regardless of the use of “my” or “your”, I put pages or features in quotes or bold or italics or whatever format helps it stand out.

‘Click on your “My Cases” tab’

‘Click on “Account”’

etc

Reducing my/your in features is a good start (My Pictures → Pictures, as mentioned in this thread), but always treat specific concepts as proper nouns.

I’m in denial about needing to curb some pretty bad habits so won’t comment on that.

But! I have a fairly “smart” home for controlling my lights, etc. I control it with Siri and the Home app. When friends/family with iPhones stay with me, I just add them as a guest.

Just left town for a few weeks leaving my home & dog to a sitter… with an android. I’ve got an old iPhone that I ended up doing all of the Screen Time/Parental Controls hacks to lock down to must a smart remote. I didn’t love the result. I’m looking forward to using the OP’s post to guide me in making a better dumbphone/smart remote. Thanks!

Author calls this out in the document. It’s intentional.

I think you’re missing the power plant/damn: https://maps.app.goo.gl/dy3wfsnHPQDys1Fo6?g_st=com.google.ma...

I visited Snoqualmie Lower Falls with a friend a few years ago and had this weird feeling I’d seen the place before… and then it hit me: it was clearly modelled in the game.

(It’s a bit of a drive to get there but so worth it.)

Odd choice that the example text on the homepage is almost all obvious typos that a standard spell check would pick up.

lol yep

Holy smokes. That’s a name I haven’t heard in a while. I submitted many calculus homework assignments in LaTeX because Jim introduced it to me back at our high school. (Go Mankato West Scarlets!)

Out of curiosity (as someone disappointingly new to prompt engineering), what’s an example prompt you used with some success?

Thoughts on providing pre-compiled releases? I’m at a TS/node shop and while I can compile go, getting the team to adopt this is a lot harder if step one is to install go, step two is clone a repo they’ll only need for building, etc.

Might want to add major version checks particularly with ffmpeg as IIRC filter syntax can vary between major versions (speaking as someone who is pretty sure he’s got an older version of ffmpeg installed because I don’t want to rewrite my scripts).

> - There are random grammar mistakes and capitalization issues throughout the site, nothing major but worth a pass by a native English speaker. …

Can I get a discount if I copy edit your site and docs for you? :) But, yea, agree that the typos give pause.

> - Could be worth to have a more prominent "Download" box …

And make it more clear what downloading gets you. Is it a trial? Or just a version of the app that doesn’t save?

Reading through the site and docs, I get the impression you’ve spent more time getting license keys to work than anything else. Certainly at least in the way of docs.

Congrats on the first release.

I love a good database of very specific turns of phrase.

Hat-tip to my English professor (from 2 decades ago!), Scott Newstok, for launching this. IIRC, his undergraduate degree was in Mathematics—I’m sure he’d have made as fine a CS prof as English.

> Your files are processed directly in your browser, and no files are uploaded to our servers or stored by us.

How does it run a Python library entirely browser side? Just curious.

(Given the faff of setting up a Python environment, this is a great idea.)