bradgessler

Human Code Dump → AI Code Dump

Also, water is wet and the sky is blue.

What happens when the backup breaks?

Reminds me of an “all you can eat” buffet I was at once where the owner told me, “that’s it, that’s all you can eat” and cut it off.

I got og.plus that expands to OpenGraphPlus.com.

At first I was stoked to have a two letter domain, but then I looked into it and learned these companies will get you hooked with a low initial price, then jack up the prices as the domain becomes established.

Quite the grift. My plan is to tread lightly on that domain and be ready to back away from it when the rent seekers move in.

You’d think there would be some sort of rules to the neutrality of these TLD administrators, but nope.

The second time around I wised up and go ogplus.net for an API domain instead of ogplus.media. I’ll take neutrality over vanity any day.

I’m super early stages with this project and exploring what it would look like agents were just unix programs running securely along side other Unix programs. A big benefit of that is I can pipe one agents output into another agents input.

Another idea I’m exploring is having agents write code for simple tasks. First example, if you run “hello world” with agent script, the first time an agent reads the text file, understands its simple, then writes a static memory.js file. When the program runs again, it hits that file and never invokes the agent.

Where things get interesting are the cases where a script works for some cases, but not all. When that happens, the memory.js script can call agent.resume() during a static run so the agent can take over.

I remember thinking Google paid an absurd and ridiculous sum of money when they acquired YouTube. I couldn’t have been more wrong, what an incredible acquisition.

What time?

I’ve been working on https://og.plus, a service that creates unique Open Graph images per page on a website.

It does this by taking a screenshot of the page, but before it does that, you can modify what’s displayed in the screenshot with CSS, tailwind classes, meta tags, or HTML templates.

If you connect your website to it, the only thing you need to deploy to your web app are a few meta tags. The OG+ servers do the heavy lifting of processing the meta tags to setup the page, take a screenshot of it, and serve it up to the consumer.

The other cool thing it does is generate a different Open Graph images per social network so they all get an image for the exact size they works best in their previews. The CSS or HTML templates are aware of this too so you can display different content to specific social networks.

Today, sales and marketing are the two hardest problems in computer science.

I'm beginning to put together that party-lines are strictly about gaining and holding power at all costs. Irony disappears through that lens and the way people act makes much more sense.

Remember all the grievances about the previous executive administration's "Twitter Files" censorship? Rules for thee, but not for me.

To be clear, I think both censorship regimes are not good, but I can't say I'm surprised.

Any recommendations on sandboxing agents? Last time I asked folks recommended docker.

For all we know the Coyote could have been from Oakland or Sausalito.

I shot the Phlex on Rails video course outside last summer with a glossy screen and barely notice reflections or glare, mainly because I setup shop under the shade of large oak trees. The bigger issue with direct sunlight is the glare off the chassis and heat, even when it’s 75F/24C outside.

I wrote about it at https://beautifulruby.com/articles/portable-workstation-iter... if you want to see the setup.

What if AI is running RealOrAI to trick us into never quite knowing the truth?

What’s the advantage of using fiber optics for home networking over 10Gbe Ethernet?

Yeah, software orgs ship their promotion structures.

https://terminalwire.com

It’s “Hotwire for command-line apps”, meaning you can ship a CLI in a Rails app without building an API. The dream is to make it work for all major web frameworks.

Terminalwire streams stdio, browser launch commands, and a few more things needs to ship a CLI for a SaaS quickly.

The best part is when you want to ship a feature for the CLI, you don’t have to worry about pushing out updates to clients and making sure it’s compatible with your API.

A more interesting development are companies that are using it as a replacement for MCP in AI stacks. They’re reporting less token usage and better overall results.

Dustin Curtis wrote about a similar incident at https://dcurt.is/apple-card-can-disable-your-icloud-account

Slightly different issue involving the Apple credit card, but it’s just as insane that there’s no separation between the different parts of Apple.

For that reason I will never have an Apple Card, and I guess I won’t be redeeming Apple gift cards with my Apple ID.

If you run an Apple HomeKit stack and don’t need all the other stuff HA offers, I recommend checking out https://homebridge.io

A big problem with CLI tooling is it starts off seeming like it’s an easy problem to solve from a devs perspective. “I’ll just write a quick Go or Node app that consumes my web app’s API”

Fast forward 12-18 months, after several new features ship and several breaking API changes are made and teams that ship CLIs start to realize it’s actually a big undertaking to keep installed CLI software up-to-date with the API. It turns out there’s a lot of auto-updating infrastructure that has to be managed and even if the team gets that right, it can still be tricky managing which versions get deprecated vs not.

I built Terminalwire (https://terminalwire.com) to solve this problem. It replaces JSON APIs with a smaller API that streams stdio (kind of like ssh), and other commands that control browsers, security, and file access to the client.

It’s so weird to me how each company wants to ship their own CLI and auto-update infrastructure around it. It’s analogous to companies wanting to ship their own browser to consume their own website and deal with all the auto update infrastructure around that. It’s madness.

I wrote a paper about building web applications in 10th grade a long time ago. When class was out the teacher asked me to stay for a minute after everybody left. He asked in disbelief, “did you really write that paper?”

I could see why he didn’t, so I wasn’t offended or defensive and started to tell him the steps required to build web apps and explained it in a manner he could understand using analogies. Towards the end of our conversation he could see I both knew about the topic and was enthusiastic about it. I think he was still a bit shocked that I wrote that paper, but he could tell from the way I talked about it that it was authentic.

It will be interesting to see how these situations evolve as AI gets even better. I suspect assessment will be more manual and in-person.

I built https://terminalwire.com to make it easier for more web applications to ship CLIs like gh. Are there any web services like GH that you use in your workflow that don’t have decent AI integration that would benefit from a CLI interface?

I built https://terminalwire.com around the idea that CLIs are a great way to interact with web applications.

Turns out the approach works well for integrating web apps with LLMs. I have a payroll company using it in their stack to replace MCP and they’re reporting lower token usage and a better end result.

Exactly. iPadOS can’t run a Unix shell and docker, but macOS can.

I don’t even want touch to work on the iPad running macOS. Just let me run my own input hardware against it.

I want macOS on my iPad Pro so I can plug my Moonlander keyboard into it and have a “laptop” that doesn’t destroy my wrists.

MCP has been a weird ride. I built https://terminalwire.com before MCP was a thing to make it way easier for people to add a CLI/TUI to their web apps/SaaS.

Then MCP comes out and AI explodes, sucking all the air out of the room for non-AI tools.

Now it seems like AI can work with CLIs better than MCP, so I’m tempted to slap AI integration all over the project to better convey the idea.

It’s crazy how quickly MCP has run it’s course and watching an entire ecosystem rediscover things from first principals.

I just setup private video for https://beautifulruby.com and can confirm the trickiest part is setting up and hosting HLS.

I extracted a RubyGem at https://github.com/beautifulruby/hls that I use to point at a folder full of videos, then my scripts converts them into HLS and uploads them to a private Tigris S3 bucket. I then have to rewrite playlists from the server with pre-signed S3 URLs.

It’s not that it’s difficult per se, but it does require a meticulous attention to detail to put all the pieces together.

A few things:

https://terminalwire.com streams a TUI/CLI from web apps without having to build an API and

I recently finished 45 videos at https://beautifulruby.com/phlex, so now I’m talking more about them and

Updating https://sitepress.cc to work with Rails 8.1 and thinking about another set of videos for it at https://beautifulruby.com/sitepress.

Quite the plot twist there