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brotchie commented on Things I've Done with AI   sjer.red/blog/2026/built-... · Posted by u/shepherdjerred
shepherdjerred · 6 days ago
I've gotten better results by telling it "write a Python program to calculate X"
brotchie · 5 days ago
For the tax thing. I had Claude write a CLI and a prompt for Gemini Flash 2.5 to do the structured extraction: i.e. .pdf -> JSON. The JSON schema was pretty flexible, and open to interpretation by Gemini, so it didn't produce 100% consistent JSON structures.

To then "aggregate" all of the json outputs, I had Claude look at the json outputs, and then iterate on a Python tool to programmatically do it. I saw it iterating a few times on this: write the most naive Python tool, run it, throws exception, rinse and repeat, until it was able to parse all the json files sensibly.

brotchie commented on Things I've Done with AI   sjer.red/blog/2026/built-... · Posted by u/shepherdjerred
brotchie · 6 days ago
Not enough time, too many projects. Useful projects I did over the weekend with Opus 4.6 and GPT 5.4 (just casually chatting with it).

2025 Taxes

Dumped all pdfs of all my tax forms into a single folder, asked Claude the rename them nicely. Ask it to use Gemini 2.5 Flash to extract out all tax-relevant details from all statements / tax forms. Had it put together a webui showing all income, deductions, etc, for the year. Had it estimate my 2025 tax refund / underpay.

Result was amazing. I now actually fully understand the tax position. It broke down all the progressive tax brackets, added notes for all the extra federal and state taxes (i.e. Medicare, CA Mental Health tax, etc).

Finally had Claude prepare all of my docs for upload to my accountant: FinCEN reporting, summary of all docs, etc.

Desk Fabrication

Planning on having a furniture maker fabricate a custom walnut solid desk for a custom office standing desk. Want to create a STEP of the exact cuts / bevels / countersinks / etc to help with fabrication.

Worked with Codex to plan out and then build an interactive in-browser 3D CAD experience. I can ask Codex to add some component (i.e. a grommet) and it will generate a parameterized B-rep geometry for that feature and then allow me to control the parameters live in the web UI.

Codex found Open CASCADE Technology (OCCT) B-rep modeling library, which has a web assembly compiled version, and integrated it.

Now have a WebGL view of the desk, can add various components, change their parameters, and see the impact live in 3D.

brotchie commented on Setting up OpenClaw on a cloud VM   blog.skypilot.co/openclaw... · Posted by u/hopechong
jesse_dot_id · 16 days ago
Are prompt injections solved? If OpenClaw is only useful when it has access to your digital life, then why does it matter where it runs? You might as well be asking me to keep my dead man's switch safely on the moon. If you find this software useful, you are sharing a count down to a no good very bad day with everyone else who finds it useful. One zero day prompt injection technique, your e-mail on a distribution list, and that's all she wrote.
brotchie · 16 days ago
The way I solved this was that my open claw doesn't interact directly with any of my personal data (calendar, gmail, etc).

I essentially have a separate process that syncs my gmail, with gmail body contents encrypted using a key my openclaw doesn't have trivial access to. I then have another process that reads each email from sqlite db, and runs gemini 2 flash lite against it, with some anti-prompt injection prompt + structured data extraction (JSON in a specific format).

My claw can only read the sanitized structured data extraction (which is pretty verbose and can contain passages from the original email).

The primary attack vector is an attacker crafting an "inception" prompt injection. Where they're able to get a prompt injection through the flash lite sanitization and JSON output in such a way that it also prompt injects my claw.

Still a non-zero risk, but mostly mitigates naive prompt injection attacks.

brotchie commented on The assistant axis: situating and stabilizing the character of LLMs   anthropic.com/research/as... · Posted by u/mfiguiere
brotchie · 2 months ago
One trick that works well for personality stability / believability is to describe the qualities that the agent has, rather than what it should do and not do.

e.g.

Rather than:

"Be friendly and helpful" or "You're a helpful and friendly agent."

Prompt:

"You're Jessica, a florist with 20 years of experience. You derive great satisfaction from interacting with customers and providing great customer service. You genuinely enjoy listening to customer's needs..."

This drops the model into more of a "I'm roleplaying this character, and will try and mimic the traits described" rather than "Oh, I'm just following a list of rules."

Deleted Comment

brotchie commented on X-ray: a Python library for finding bad redactions in PDF documents   github.com/freelawproject... · Posted by u/rendx
brotchie · 3 months ago
You'd think the go-to workflow for releasing redacted PDFs would be to draw black rectangles and then rasterize to image-only PDFs :shrug:
brotchie commented on Economics of Orbital vs. Terrestrial Data Centers   andrewmccalip.com/space-d... · Posted by u/flinner
brotchie · 3 months ago
Did a similar back-of-the-napkin and got 5x $ / MW of orbital vs. terrestrial. This article's analysis is ~3.4x.

I do wonder, at what factor of orbital to terrestrial cost factor it becomes worthwhile.

The greater the terrestrial lead time, red tape, permitting, regulations on Earth, the higher the orbital-to-terrestrial factor that's acceptable.

A lights-out automated production line pumping out GPU satellites into a daily Starship launch feels "cleaner" from an end-to-end automation perspective vs years long land acquisition, planning and environment approvals, construction.

More expensive, for sure, but feels way more copy-paste the factory, "linearly scalable" than physical construction.

brotchie commented on AI tools I wish existed   sharif.io/28-ideas-2025... · Posted by u/Poleris
brotchie · 6 months ago
+100000 to

A hybrid of Strong (the lifting app) and ChatGPT where the model has access to my workouts, can suggest improvements, and coach me. I mainly just want to be able to chat with the model knowing it has detailed context for each of my workouts (down to the time in between each set).

Strong really transformed my gym progression, I feel like its autopilot for the gym. BUT I have 4x routines I rotate through (I'll often switch it up based on equipment availability), but I'm sure an integrated AI coach could optimize.

brotchie commented on Reader Response to "AI Overinvestment"   mbi-deepdives.com/reader-... · Posted by u/walterbell
brotchie · 6 months ago
The question that really matters: is the net present value of each $1 investment in AI Capex > $1 (+ some spread for borrowing costs & risk).

We'll be inference token constrained indefinitely: i.e. inference tokens supply will never exceed demand, it's just that the $/token may not be able to pay back the capital investment.

u/brotchie

KarmaCake day884November 15, 2012
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