willlma (u/willlma) - Readit News

willlma commented on Mistral 3 family of models released mistral.ai/news/mistral-3... · Posted by u/pember

barrell · a month ago

I don't see the contention. I do not use llms in the design, development, copywriting, marketing, blogging, or any other aspect of the crafting of the application.

I labor over every word, every button, every line of code, every blog post. I would say it is as hand-crafted as something digital can be.

willlma · 23 days ago

It's interesting. I've been tinkering with an article summarizing/highlighting browser extension, and realized that I don't want the end-user to have read AI-generated content because it's not as high-quality as I'd hoped. But on the flip side, I'm loving having the AI write most of the code for me.

willlma commented on The pivot antipope.org/charlie/blog... · Posted by u/AndrewDucker

jasonsb · 2 months ago

> To summon the vast proposed changes, PV cells' improvements need to be coincided with many other changes: grid development, battery tech, industrial re-tooling, climate policies/institutions, mining/extraction, agricultural methods, production methods... and that's without even discussing culture, which will have to evolve substantially.

What a ridiculous take. PV's are plug and play, you don't have to change anything. The only dependency is storage, so battery tech needs to keep up. However, advancements in battery tech are already progressing at a rate that exceeds the pace of innovation in PV cells.

willlma · 2 months ago

You only have to change every car, truck, tractor, water heater, clothes dryer, lawn mower, leaf blower, stove top, etc to be electric instead of using natural gas (ie electrfy everything), which likely requires all the changes that the parent mentioned. Also, not everyone has enough land to install enough PV to power their entire homes + transportation, so a lot of this is going to have to come from the grid, which requires changes in transmission which are being actively blocked by the current administration (see Grain Belt Express).

willlma commented on Indefinite Backpack Travel jeremymaluf.com/onebag/... · Posted by u/renjieliu

bparsons · 3 months ago

I am always confounded when I get off a flight at a vacation destination and see people dragging these 80L roller bags around. What are you putting in there?

Pack the absolute minimum. If you really need something, you can almost always buy it wherever you are going. Even trekking in the deep Himalayas, there was always a spot to buy an extra t-shirt or socks every day or so.

willlma · 3 months ago

And throw it all away before you fly home? That's like saying "Why wash dishes when you can just throw them away and buy new ones"?

As an aside, you should absolutely wash your clothes after buying them before wearing them. They're covered in chemicals that aren't great for your skin. I usually pack a week's worth of clothes and do laundry once a week while traveling. Doing laundry more often is a drag.

willlma commented on Atuin Desktop: Runbooks That Run – Now Open Source blog.atuin.sh/atuin-deskt... · Posted by u/digdugdirk

ellieh · 3 months ago

Huge fan of gradual automation

It’s definitely baked into the approach here. You could just write a bullet point list of what needs doing. Then maybe sprinkle some blocks on top so the user can do things faster. Then in the end, work towards the whole thing being automated

No all or nothing, no YAML needed ;)

willlma · 3 months ago

Hey, thanks for building this. I'm trying to use it for this usecase. I'm trying to pause the script during the manual steps. How would you go about this? Example: 1. Change working directory block 2. Interactive terminal 3. Manual Step 4. Interactive terminal 5. Manual step

If I press run at the top, then it doesn't stop for me to do 3 before executing 4. Should I run each step individually for this usecase? Will changing the directory in step 1 apply to steps 2 and 4 if I don't hit run at the top?

willlma commented on Toyota is recycling old EV batteries to help power Mazda's production line thedrive.com/news/toyota-... · Posted by u/computerliker

willlma · 4 months ago

This is not recycling. Recycling implies that you can produce the same product again many times; it's a sustainable practice. This is repurposing or upcycling. It's cool they're getting a second life, but they won't get a 3rd, 4th, Nth life unless the batteries are actually recycled into their component materials at end-of-life. It's kind of like the plastic brick companies: cool that plastic is being turned into a construction material, but it doesn't mean we can stop mining for the primary source material any time soon.

willlma commented on I tried every todo app and ended up with a .txt file al3rez.com/todo-txt-journ... · Posted by u/al3rez

Igrom · 5 months ago

Reading through the comments under this thread, there are many users who swear by a plain text file, but who then build quite a lot of snowflake software to regain functionality offered by more structured TODO applications. That includes:

- having your computer alert you to things that come up

- being able to tag notes

- being able to add events to a calendar

- being able to set priority of tasks

- expecting prioritized/currently relevant tasks to be at the top of the agenda

- being able to add recurring tasks

- full-text search (grepping)

- formatting features (markdown)

Some of the laborious (or, in my opinion, plain unholy) solutions include:

- feeding TODOs to an LLM to filter for the currently relevant ones and send Telegram notifications

- hand-copying currently relevant tasks to the top of the TODO list

- running a script on a VPS to sync notifications

- set up cron job with git commit

- writing post-it notes by hand

I would encourage everyone to try out emacs with org-mode. It takes some time to get used to the editor and its keybindings (though provisions exist for vim users), but _every_ item on the list above is handled out of the box, or is offered through a free and maintained plugin.

The author of the OP claims to have tried _every_ todo app, and has afterwards moved (regressed?) to writing notes in a plain text file, but there is a path extending from this point that the author has not walked yet. I strongly suggest that, especially for people with a computing or technical background, it is an undisputed upgrade. https://doc.norang.ca/org-mode.html being the bible, of course.

willlma · 4 months ago

How do you check your todo list on mobile?

willlma commented on Uv: Running a script with dependencies docs.astral.sh/uv/guides/... · Posted by u/Bluestein

simonw · 5 months ago

The "declaring script dependencies" thing is incredibly useful: https://docs.astral.sh/uv/guides/scripts/#declaring-script-d...

  # /// script
  # dependencies = [
  #   "requests<3",
  #   "rich",
  # ]
  # ///
  import requests, rich
  # ... script goes here

Save that as script.py and you can use "uv run script.py" to run it with the specified dependencies, magically installed into a temporary virtual environment without you having to think about them at all.

It's an implementation of Python PEP 723: https://peps.python.org/pep-0723/

Claude 4 actually knows about this trick, which means you can ask it to write you a Python script "with inline script dependencies" and it will do the right thing, e.g. https://claude.ai/share/1217b467-d273-40d0-9699-f6a38113f045 - the prompt there was:

  Write a Python script with inline script
  dependencies that uses httpx and click to
  download a large file and show a progress bar

Prior to Claude 4 I had a custom Claude project that included special instructions on how to do this, but that's not necessary any more: https://simonwillison.net/2024/Dec/19/one-shot-python-tools/

willlma · 5 months ago

I'm not a Python dev, but had to write a script the other day and got all cought up with the virtual env stuff. Why can't `uv` just infer the dependencies from the `import ...` line? Why declare the dependencies twice?

willlma commented on Altermagnets: The first new type of magnet in nearly a century newscientist.com/article/... · Posted by u/Brajeshwar

OhNoNotAgain_99 · 5 months ago

That line is worth a dollar of subscription,

willlma · 5 months ago

I had the same thought with a recent NewScientist article. Signed up, read it, and tried to cancel to avoid the recurring fee. There's no click to cancel; I had to submit a form + request and repeatedly check my email to see if my request had been honored. I'm still waiting for the perfect pay-per-article platform to show up.

willlma commented on Ask HN: What are you working on? (May 2025) · Posted by u/david927

aantix · 7 months ago

A timer is a great idea.

I’ll add it to our community ideas Google doc.

willlma · 7 months ago

As someone who has built a timer-based procrastination browser extension, I'd like to add that it would be a nice touch if you could stop playback between videos (or maybe between chapters on long videos) rather than cut people off right as the timer goes off. It's a bit jarring to be in the middle of something you're enjoying and for the screen to go blank.

willlma commented on Ask HN: What are you working on? (May 2025) · Posted by u/david927

carpo · 7 months ago

Ive almost finished the first version of a desktop video library app I've been writing for myself. I had the idea last year, but the cost of sending images to an LLM made it too expensive (to run over about 1500 videos), but now it's fairly reasonable.

In the app you pick a folder with videos in it and it stores the path, metadata, extracts frames as images, uses a local whisper model to transcribe the audio into subtitles, then sends a selection of the snapshots and the subtitles to an LLM to be summarised. The LLM sends back an XML document with a bunch of details about the video, including a title, detailed summary and information on objects, text, people, animals, locations, distinct moments etc. Some of these are also timestamped and most have relationships (i.e this object belongs to this location, this text was on this object etc). I store all that in a local SQLLite database and then do another LLM call with this summary asking for categories and tags, then store them in the DB against each video. The App UI is essentially tags you can click to narrow down returned videos.

I plan on adding a natural language search (Maybe RAG -- need to look into the latest best way), have half added Projects so I can group videos after finding the ones I want, and have a bunch of other ideas for this too. I've been programming this with some early help from Aider and Claude Sonnet. It's getting a bit complex now, so I do the majority of code changes, though the AI has done a fair bit. It's been heaps of fun, and I'm using it now in "production" (haha - on my PC)

willlma · 7 months ago

This isn't entirely on-topic but I've been trying to understand why AI video editing isn't more common, and thought you might know. I've had an idea for a while to make tennis match highlight videos that show every single point of the match. Tennis has a lot of downtime between points (and even more between games and sets). I just want to tell an LLM: here's a two-hour long video of a tennis match. Strip out all the gaps between points. I'm guessing this would a very expensive frame by frame analysis of the video right now and that's why it's not done. Is that right or are there other reasons?