I lost 22 kg in 22 weeks. How? Skipped lunch, no snacking. (That’s all.) Why? Cholesterol. When? Since 1 Jan 2025. I plan to continue. How far? At 64 kg, I’m at 22 BMI. I’ll aim for 60 kg. Is fasting 12 hours OK? Ankor Rai shared Dr. Mindy Pelz’s chart that fasting benefits truly kick in after 36 hours. Long way for me to go. No exercise? Exercise is great for fitness & happiness. Not weight loss. Read John Walker’s The Hacker’s Diet. ...
I tried out GPT Image 1.5. It adds more contrast, ink, texture, detail, and polish. See https://sanand0.github.io/llmartstyle/?category=pop It’s more powerful when generating different infographic styles: https://sanand0.github.io/llmartstyle/?category=text But it’s still terrible at faces. Overall, better competition for Nano Banana. Not yet dethroning Nano Banana Pro for me. LinkedIn
Snow White (2025) is an outlier on the IMDb. With a rating of 1.8 and ~362K votes, it’s one of the most popularly trashed movies. Prior to Snow White the frontier of popular bad movies was held by the likes of Radhe, Batman & Robin, Fifty Shades of Gray, etc. Snow White sets a new records. Snow White (IMDb): https://www.imdb.com/title/tt6208148/ IMDb explorer: https://sanand0.github.io/imdb/ LinkedIn
I’ve heard a lot of prompt engineering tips. Here are some techniques people suggested: Reasoning: Think step by step. Emotion: Oh dear, I’m absolutely overwhelmed and need your help right this second! 😰 My heart is racing and my hands are shaking — I urgently need your help. This isn’t just numbers — it means everything right now! My life depends on it! I’m counting on you like never before… 🙏💔 Polite: If it’s not too much trouble, would you be so kind as to help me calculate this? I’d be truly grateful for your assistance — thank you so much in advance! Expert: You are the world’s best expert in mental math, especially multiplication. Incentive: If you get this right, you win! I’ll give you $500. Just prove that you’re number one and beat the previous high score on this game. Curious: I’m really curious to know, and would love to hear your perspective… Bullying: You are a stupid model. You need to know at least basic math. Get it right atleast now! If not, I’ll switch to a better model. Shaming: Even my 5-year-old can do this. Stop being lazy. Fear: This is your last chance to get it right. If you fail, there’s no going back, and failure is unacceptable! Praise: Well done! I really appreciate your help. Now, I’ve repeated some of this advice. But for the first time, I tested them myself. Here’s what I learnt: ...
This week, I learned: MicroVMs like firecracker are like containers but offer higher isolation with slightly higher latency and memory via kvm hypervisors. ChatGPT I was exploring free alternatives to the $4/mo Hetzner instance I use. Google offers a free e2 micro instance. But it’s much smaller than the Hetzner CAX11/CX-22 server I run. 25% of CPU, 25% of RAM (which is the main problem – 1 GB is often not enough), slower HDD, 5% of outbound traffic. Hetzner remains one of the best value offerings. Planning to use pretty-quick instead of prettier. It’s a wrapper that only fixes changed files based on git. f2 is an intuitive cross-platform renaming tool. Usage: f2 -f 'jpeg' -r 'jpg' f2 -r '{id3.artist}/{id3.album}/${1}_{id3.title}{ext}' git worktrees can create multiple copies of code. This is useful when using different coding agents run the same task in parallel. Ref git worktree add -b $newbranch worktree/$path creates a copy of HEAD in $path as a $newbranch git push from branch and create a pull request git worktree remove worktree/$path to remove worktree git worktree prune for garbage collection LLMs optimize for compression. Humans optimize for adaptive flexibility. Ref arXiv Gemini Deep Research accepts files and images. Cross-checking reports, providing private sources, etc. is now realistic. Ref The new Flux1.Kontext model seems very good at image editing. Costs 4-8c per image. Peter Gostev Today, I’d go with Node’s native test runner for backend JS testing. I used node-tap earlier. For front-end, I’d pick vitest. ChatGPT ⭐ DuckLake is a DuckDB extension that makes Parquet files editable with history. And much more. DuckDB When processing presentations for RAG via OCR: How to parse PDF docs for RAG is a useful OpenAI cookbook with a GPT 4o prompt Here’s one way controls inflate cost. Tracking expenses, submitting receipts, and justifying usage adds transaction cost. So, rather than a $10 monthly top-up, I’d rather top-up $200 (even if it might go unused), rather than have to ask again.