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2024

Omakub

Link: Omakub: "Turn a fresh Ubuntu installation into a fully-configured, beautiful, and modern web development system by running a single command."

I've been doing a lot of setting up lately. Between K3S, Docker, Robots and so on. I've become good friends with the shell, yaml files, bash scripts, and much more. This article shows a nice one-liner approach:

Doing Stuff with AI: Opinionated Midyear Edition

Link: Doing Stuff with AI: Opinionated Midyear Edition: "AI systems have gotten more capable and easier to use"

I think many technology savvy people are way underestimating the usefulness of large language models, LLMs, like ChatGPT, the best known LLM. But there are others. And they are improving and changing on a weekly basis. But my respect and admiration for their capabilities also makes me (helplessly) worry about how they WILL be used to cause serious harm in the future. The attached article is a great run down of current capabilities of these systems.

Ideas are Dimes a Dozen: Large Language Models for Idea Generation in Innovation

Link: Ideas are Dimes a Dozen: Large Language Models for Idea Generation in Innovation: "Large language models (LLMs) such as OpenAI's GPT series have shown remarkable capabilities in generating fluent and coherent text in various domains. We compar"

I often say that ideas are cheap. And by that I mean that everyone has a million decent ideas. The art/trick/skill is to know how to turn that one idea into something that people want, use, benefit from, and maybe are willing to pay for. That's why I don't often worry about "who had that idea originally" (and that includes me) but am more impressed with "who was able to execute successfully around that idea". And so, I don't doubt (from personal experience) that LLMs now and more so every day, will accelerate finding, sorting through, testing and challenging, ideas that lead to startups that work. Here's a paper on that very question.

Ifttt

Link: Ifttt: "Get started with IFTTT, the easiest way to automate your favorite apps and devices for free. Make your home more relaxing. Make your work more productive. We..."

What a wonderful tool!

The Consequences of One’s First Programming Language annotated/explained version.

Link: The Consequences of One’s First Programming Language annotated/explained version.: "Fermat's Library is a platform for illuminating academic papers."

Here's an interesting article, which does not really deliver on the title IMO. I am not even sure how to count the first language. For me, was it Basic (the language that got me hooked) or Pascal (the language used in college) or Assembly language (the first language I used professionally.)

bytes: The Lesser-Known Python Built-In Sequence • And Understanding UTF-8 Encoding

Link: bytes: The Lesser-Known Python Built-In Sequence • And Understanding UTF-8 Encoding: "The bytes data type looks a bit like a string, but it isn't a string. Let's explore it and also look at the main Unicode encoding, UTF-8"

Ever wanted to understand UTF8 better? Every programming language does it a little different but utf8 is utf8. This article explains it well, in general, and specifically for python.