Sunday, 3rd November 2024
🔗 Andressen and Horowitz on AI Robots (#). In this discussion between Andreessen and Horowitz, they pointed out that we are on the verge of embodied AI being a generally useful too. My key takeaway was this:
General purpose robots could do everything from be assistants in your home, build houses, fight wars, etc. This is being made possible by all the software advances in AI in addition to the hardware advances in actuators, batteries, and vision systems.
The U.S. currently leads on the software side of AI, but China has a significant lead on the hardware side. The U.S. has basically made manufacturing illegal in the U.S. through environmental regulation, minimum wage requirements, and unions so U.S. companies have outsourced more advanced hardware to China. Now more than ever, with our strained relationship with China, we need to build these capabilities in the U.S. and at the same time U.S. regulators have their eyes on regulating the software AI capabilities.
🔗 Emoji Favicon (#). When building a new site, populating the favicon is more annoying than it should be. It’s something I often put off. But this site will serve you any emoji as a favicon.
🔗 Fair Source (#). I’ve been keeping an eye on this initiative started by Sentry. One of the most common ways I see product companies utilizing open source is to release their software via open source and then make money by running a paid version of the service for people who don’t want to self-host.
With this approach, it can undermine your business strategy if someone else decides to run a competing version of your hosted service using your open source software. I believe this was Sentry’s primary motivation. I’ve also seen talk of Business Source License (BSL) but am unsure of the difference between this and Fair Source. Some day I may dig into this.
🔗 SQLite now runs on Cloudflare edge (#). There is so much innovation happening with SQLite these days and now it appears that Cloudflare lets you run it at edge nodes. I don’t quite understand the significance of this, but now I don’t have to think of Cloudflare as a way to help handle large spikes in traffic to static pages. Simon Willison elaborates on this development.
🔗 Automating app development with LLM (#). I keep automating more of my day-to-day programming using various tools, and this guy did a clever wrap around LLM. He writes a unit test in python, passes it to LLM, and it writes the code necessary to get the test to pass. This technique could prove useful for what I want to do with rails development.
🔗 Using LLM to process video (#). I have done a lot of experimenting with passing screenshots into an LLM to give it additional context, but I really want to try passing video directly into the LLM. I believe Gemini is the only one that supports it. This is a summary of Simon Willison’s recent experiment with Gemini for video.
🔗 Jina AI tool for simplifying webpages (#). This is a really handy tool for simplify a webpage before passing it into an LLM. It turns HTML into semi-structured markdown.