Links
Meltype
This is an experimental IME that lets you type a mix of English and Japanese without switching between the two. It should be smart enough to identify the language of substrings.
kyouhagoogledekensaku → 今日はgoogleで検索
Unfortunately I haven’t been able to test it because it’s developed primarily for Windows and the Mac version seems pretty buggy, but it’s a great idea.
A Day in the Life of Siri AI
Overall, it’s an enormous leap in efficiency and precision. It’s a personal assistant, a second brain, a ChatGPT of your own life.
You just have to will yourself to use it. After 19 years of performing the unlock-phone/open-app/search routine, you’ll need some time to acclimate.
But once you’re used to it, you see the future. Suddenly, the screen isn’t really that important. Suddenly, you understand why Apple’s latest projects are said to be screenless.
Sounds like I need to start using the new Siri some more to figure out what all it can do for me.
Riichi Mahjong Strategy Books
This ebook by Daina Chiba is an excellent, thorough resource for learning Riichi mahjong. It’s hard to find such good material in English. You need a pretty strong understanding of the fundamentals to follow along with many of the sections, so this will probably become something that I revisit many times as I improve my game.Harper: Privacy-First Offline Grammar Checker
I just started using Harper via an Obsidian plugin and so far it is working great. It is open source and runs locally with no external dependencies, doing everything it needs to and nothing else.Punch Yourself in the Face with Reality
I know you want to use AI as an escape. It is so tempting. You get to sit in your bubble and imagine everything and see it come to life and your agent buddy will keep cheering you on while you get nothing done with your life. And I think that’s the biggest danger of AI. You convince yourself that you are doing something useful when you are not.
The Tower Keeps Rising
There is the appealing idea that AI-assisted programming means better tools which lets us build more ambitious software. That is certainly true at the level of the individual and without doubt a developer with an agent will be dramatically more capable of changing a codebase. But large software projects have never been limited only by how quickly an individual can produce code. They are limited by how well people can coordinate their understanding of the system they are changing.
Local AI Needs to be the Norm
Local AI shines when the model’s job is transforming user-owned data, not acting as a search engine for the universe.
Creating a Color Palette from an Image
Spectrimage takes a photograph, visualizes the color information pixel-by-pixel, and builds a palette.
Great writeup of techniques to extract a good set of colors from any image.
OKpalette – Best in Class Color Extraction
A lovely web app to extract color palettes from images. Simple, but really impressive set of features.Modern CSS Code Snippets
Modern CSS code snippets, side by side with the old hacks they replace. Every technique you still Google has a clean, native replacement now.
There are really useful new CSS features that I’m embarrassed to say I knew nothing about.