web-browsers 15

This week, I learned: mdq is pretty useful to extract Markdown sections. For example cat *.md | mdq '# Title' extracts all sections where the header contains ‘Title’ (case-insensitive). CloudFlare Browser Run is, roughly, a browser as a service. Pricing: 10 hours free per month, then 9c per hour. I had Codex run a small research to explore it, and it seems simple to set it up and use it. GPT 5.5 seems to be especially better than GPT 5.4 and running for long, with tool calls, without losing focus. That’s something OpenAI models are good at anyway, so this takes it a step further. ChatGPT I added gpt-image-2 to my LLM Art Style gallery. It is notably better with text accuracy. For example, on Rock - Paper - Scissors - Lizard - Spock it consistently lists all 10 rules, which Nano Banana 2 does not. World leaders do keep us entertained. Saparmurat Niyazov (Turkmenistan) renamed the months of the year and days of the week after himself and his mother. He built a towering, gold-plated statue of himself in the capital that rotated so it would always face the sun. He also banned lip-syncing at concerts, outlawed gold teeth, and banished dogs from the capital because he found their smell unappealing. Idi Amin (Uganda) declared himself the “Uncrowned King of Scotland” and sent baffling, unsolicited telegrams to world leaders - advising Richard Nixon to recover from Watergate, or offering food aid to a struggling Britain. François “Papa Doc” Duvalier (Haiti) reportedly ordered all black dogs in Haiti to be put to death and claimed his personal Vodou curse was responsible for the assassination of John F. Kennedy. Francisco Macías Nguema (Equatorial Guinea) banned the word “intellectual”, banned the use of lubricants in the power plant (claiming his magic would keep it running, which promptly broke the generators), and stored the nation’s remaining foreign currency under his bed. Kim Jong-il (North Korea) claimed he invented the hamburger (calling it “double bread with meat”) and shot 11 holes-in-one his first time playing golf. Donald Trump (United States) used late-night tweets to announce major policy shifts and fire his own cabinet members. He altered an official government hurricane map with a Sharpie to match a previous erroneous statement, and publicly mused during a press briefing about the injection of household disinfectants as a medical treatment. Git repositories inside git repositories (without using sub-modules) don’t seem to work well. I need this because I have mono-repos for research and I want to use git in a sub-folder to iterate, then commit just the final version to the parent folder. Looks like I need to remove the child .git/ (e.g. rename to .git.bak/, which I’ve added to my ~/.config/git/ignore) for this to work. Gemini To run a script in the background (without logs) and detach / disown it, use nohup your-script >/dev/null 2>&1 & disown Running /insights on Claude Code helped me add these two instructions to my code skill: Test web pages with screenshots (for layout, overlaps, contrast) AND CDP (for interactions, navigation) before finalizing Prefer icon libraries over unicode/emoji icons. Sending an entire PDF/PPTX to Gemini costs ~40% of sending PDF/PPTX + images. The quality is fine for small files, but for large files adding images reduces error rate from ~5% to 0.5%. Pandoc Markdown to Word DOCX supports sidebar comments. You can use this Markdown: Here is [comment in sidebar]{.comment-start id="c1" author="Anand" date="2026-01-01T12:00:00Z"}commented text[]{.comment-end id="c1"} inline. Gemini. In fact, Pandoc supports lots of other things, like: Custom styles via block ::: {custom-style="Custom Style Name"} Track changes via [inserted text]{.insertion author="Name" date="2026-04-20T12:00:00Z"} and [deleted text]{.deletion author="Name"} Page breaks via \newpage (a LaTeX command that Pandoc supports in Markdown) CSS styles via {width="5.5in" height="3in"} Offpunk is a CLI offline-first browser. Interesting idea, but installation is a problem. After sudo apt uninstall offpunk running offpunk failed with ImportError: lxml.html.clean module is now a separate project lxml_html_clean. After a git clone it reported HTML document detected. Please install python-bs4 and python-readability. These are easy to fix, but I wasn’t inclined. Creating an authenticated MCP Server for ChatGPT is complex. It requires OpenID Connect (for which library support is weak and requires a provider like Auth0), dynamic client registration (which is hard to implement though Auth0 supports it), and after half a day of experiments, I still couldn’t connect. An easier option is to run temporary tunnels with cloudflared or ngrok or localtunnel. Questions I was asked Week ending 26 Apr 2026 ...

This week, I learned: WebApps are a depreciated store of value. Earlier, a web-app would have impressed me because the capability to create it is rare, and the effort to create it is high. Today, when I see a “localhost:3000” or a “replit.app” domain, I mentally discount the effort behind it and ask: How rare is the capability to create this with a coding agent and how much effort is it. THAT determines the value of what I see. Part of the value is “Look ma, no hands!” and it’s delightful they’ve learnt. Part of the value is “There’s gold in them thar hills!” and use-case discovery is important. WaveCity is a WASM build of Audacity, i.e. Audacity running in the browser! Audiomass is a similar but simpler audio editor - again, WASM-based. Gemini Questions I was asked Week ending 19 Apr 2026 ...

This week, I learned: Timsort is one of the fastest sorting algorithms. Switching from bat to moor as a pager, since bat doesn’t support wrapping via keyboard shortcuts. Gemini “Use (some-command) --help to …” is an efficient prompt prefix that tells agents to read the docs and use a CLI tool to solve a problem. For example, “Use uvx rodney --help and ffmpeg for a demo video of GitHub PRs”. As agents improve, we’ll have more mediorce output (e.g. dashboards) since people won’t know to ask for better, or validate the result. They’ll hire experts who know to ask better and verify better. Claude Opus 4.6 solved a problem Knuth was working on! Knuth Cognitive debt is what Simon Willison calls it when we build (or, in my case, say/write) stuff we don’t understand. The debt framing is apt. One solution is to generate a version intended for AI to read, and another for us. # How can an innovator learn accountability? “I’m wired to start fires. Should I learn to also run the fire department, hire someone who does, or just stay a fire-starter and let others deal with the mess?” ANS: First, accountability is high value, so do it! Second, prefer a partner over building muscle. Build muscle only if output is checkable, has value, and customers will pay. Claude | ChatGPT | Gemini Commit publicly. Put your name on the output. Commit to process (or narrowly defined output) rather than outcome. Optimize with data, code, checklists, workflows, culture, etc. OpenAI released gpt-realtime-1.5 and gpt-audio-1.5. Buth are ~20% cheaper than the 4o versions, but 6.7x more expensive than gpt-realtime-mini. 1 second is about 10 tokens, so an hour of audio input at $32/MTok is about $1.15. The “Effort” setting for AVIF files on Squoosh doesn’t reduce file size - it increases quality slightly (for a tiny increase in file size). So, set the quality to whatever file size you need and increase the effort for a slightly better quality. Polya believed in teaching problem-solving rather than solutions, i.e. teach How to Solve It, not just what you get at the end. To me, this includes: Understand the problem (from different perspectives) Plan (with different mental models) Execute (the easy bit) Look back (post-mortem, retrospectives, etc.) Browserless lets you run browsers via an API. Useful when you don’t want the overhead of setting up a browser infrastructure, or for multiple browsers in parallel. Scraping, testing, web app automation, PDF/screenshot/video generation, etc. are all possible. Gemini OpenAI has a Websocket mode GitHub Agentic Workflows lets you “compile” a Markdown file into an agentic GitHub action. Useful as a sceptical reviewer, issue-to-prototype builder, data to story generator, automated code migrator, etc. Gemini Claude Questions I was asked Week ending 15 Mar 2026 ...

Here’s an example of how I am using LLMs to solve a day-to-day workflow problem. Every day, I interact with a barrage of websites: emails, news, social media, and work tools across multiple devices. Microsoft Edge’s workspaces syncs groups of websites across devices. I’ve never tried it, started today, and wondered: how should I organize my workspaces? Rather than think (thinking is outdated), I used LLMs. ...

I went to the Google Chrome site. Clicking on the “Accept and Install” button… … automatically launched the downloader in Firefox… … and (after a fairly short while) started installing the application directly. This may be the most painless install I’ve done in a while. I clicked on “Customise the settings” This is what it looks like. And that’s it! It installs, and launches in just a few seconds. First impressions: the startup and rendering are really fast. ...

I’m awaiting AllPeers. It’s a Firefox bittorrent extension that makes it easy to share files among peers.

Opera 7 Beta is out. It sports a new look, which one tires of quite soon. But it’s as fast as ever, and has better standards compliance. via Anand

I downloaded Mozilla 1.2 beta. It loads fast. It runs fast. It hasn’t crashed. It’s tab feature is great. It’s Type Ahead Find feature is fabulous. It’s add-ons are great. I think I’m going to switch browsers again! (My only crib, though, is that I can’t customize keyboard shortcuts. Or I don’t know how yet.)

Netscape 7.01 is out. Preview release, mind. No, I haven’t tested it yet. Awaiting reviews. (24 May: No reason to switch)

AOL, and hence its 30 million subscribers, could move away from IE towards Mozilla. That’s big.

Opera 6 Beta is out.

The public preview of IE 6 is out. The revolutionary feature is smart tags. I think the image toolbar is a pretty neat idea too.

The preview release of Internet Explorer 6 is out.

A sneak preview of MS IE6. What is worrying is that Microsoft may not release IE6 as a standalone application. They’re planning to bundle it with their next OS: Whister.

zeroTV: good TV-like entertainment for free. World Bank’s B-SPAN has World Bank seminars online. Yeah, the computer is becoming the TV.