Microblog
Random thoughts and links.
2024 12
November 4
A friend showed me anyhow today for Rust. Got to clean up a lot of unwraps and expect! (I’m writing a CLI app, i don’t need custom handling for every error)
I started a new hobby: learning to draw. Attempting that with the drawabox course and “Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain” from Betty Edwards. Drawabox seems very good from a technical point of view but maybe a bit boring, so i bought that book too which is supposed to be more fun. We’ll see how far I can get!
I randomly ended up in a Masterclass by Tyler Jacobson today at Lucca Comics. And by randomly i really mean i walked into the wrong place… but it ended up being the most interesting thing i did today! His deep dive on how art works for designing fantasy worlds and characters was great. Also learned technical things like contrast > value > temperature > color. Super interesting
I'm (back) on BlueSky 🦋 at @alessandromarrella.com. Looks a bit more populated now!
October 4
Really experiencing the “alignment” problem with AI right now. Even when the task is data summarization in an objective way (x grew by Y%) different people expect the information to be presented in different (and slightly incompatible) ways
Tried to get Claude to play Neuralink's webgrid game using their demo container on computer use. It started off great but then the cursor looked off target. Still really fun and exciting tech! See the video on YouTube
datamodel-code-generator is a really useful python library for generating python types out of a openapi/graphql schema
OpenAI's Realtime API + function calling will enable some really cool use cases like controlling UIs completely with our voice, or completely voice-first applications.
September 4
Internal tooling deserves a good UX too. The UI can be rough, but tools need to do the job well while minimising frustration and footguns.
I really like what Apple did with Apple Intelligence (even wrote a post about it) but they’ll need to rip the iphone 12 mini from my cold, dead hand (singular, because it only requires one hand to use it)
Just found out you can use emojis as favicons directly. This utility can generate the code.
val.town is really cool. I was able to quickly add a “backend” to push thoughts to this static site