I’m starting a linkdrop series, primarily out of self-interest:
This is just a delightful article - I think it really shines as a demonstration of how robustly the web serves as an end-user programming platform. Using a web browser as a file browser seems silly at first, but I think it encourages an approach that fits with how most people need to deal with files - akin to family photo albums, where memories are curated and selected with thought, rather than filing cabinets in dentists offices, where hundreds or thousands of patient records are organized.
Really just worth browsing for the cool gifs that demonstrate the library.
I’m not affiliated with these people of course, but I think there’s something really intriguing about the approach they’ve taken. It strikes me as akin to the “deep modules” concept in John Ousterhout’s A Philosophy of Software Design (here’s an overview of the concept.) SSH is an extremely deep module, with a simple mental model and interface - the result of applying it to a few problem spaces, like pico.sh is doing, is pretty interesting in how drastically simple the resulting solutions are.
Lately, I’ve been on a pottery kick - I started by taking a class at my local community college this past fall, and one of the topics we cover is glaze recipes. There’s a lot of complex chemistry going on in glazes - apparently, it’s not beyond GPT-2. Derek Au, the fellow who develops Glazy.org (a community database of glaze recipes) has not been ignoring the potential of LLMs for these more exacting, chemical applications, and has tested a number of the recipes he generated.