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