dogline

UDF: User Defined Function

Except for history, I don’t find much that stops you from switching back and forth on the CLI. They both use tools, each has a different voice, but they both work. Have it summarize your existing history into a markdown file, and read it in with any engine.

The APIs are pretty interchangeable too. Just ask to convert from one to the other if you need to.

I think it's becoming clear we're not anywhere near AGI, we figured out how to vectorize our knowledge bases and replay it back. We have a vectorized knowledge base, not an AI.

With lots of people showing how Saas apps can be easily written these days, I'm not as interested in those articles, as people showing off new ideas of what I can do with these new found abilities. This is cool.

I would drive hours to get to the nearest Fry's to me, to pick up some new gear. Being able to browse everything and look around was great. For me, online ordering of parts probably hurt Fry's, but the real reason was after a while, you were never sure if the video card you were buying was new, or actually a return item, and after a couple times having to drive all the way back for something that was missing parts, the whole thing just seemed way too risky. Amazon and Newegg nailed that door shut.

You're right, and it's a good idea. The summary started out small, as a header to the actual daily pages, but then I realized I could have AI do a lot more work here, including silly things like collect weather references and assemble them together. My prompt kept getting bigger to find trends in the data. But, it takes away from the view-ability of the site, which is not good.

LLM's ability to take 7400+ handwritten entries and try to make a narrative out them is amazing. With all of the AI experiments on HN lately, we're figuring out the power of LLMs, but it most cases, it still needs a human refining touch, and we need to remember that. Or else it just looks like AI slop.

That's cool! I've noticed when asking for Claude for a website, it does have a certain look, like our two sites, if you don't give it any more guidance. I'm not sure if that's a good thing or not.

Digitizing history in different ways, with different resources that are unique or only known to small groups, might be a new development area, and that's exciting. As I've shown, and how other people have shared, using AI tools to digitize things which haven't previously been done before is now possible. Are there ways to make this easier for everybody? New techniques to discuss? I don't know, and I'd love to talk about it.

Concerning OCR: I used Mistral because of a posting here describing advancements with handwriting recognition a month or so ago. I didn't actually compare them. And I've got my setup that I can rerun everything again later if there are advancements in the area. Again, another area to keep track of and discuss.

Beej! Thank you very much! Your networking guides have long been a great contribution to everybody, and collectively improves what we know.

These diary pages come largely from Stirling City, just north of Chico, and later from the Hat Creek district, on Hwy 89 north of Mt. Lassen. Nearby, many historical records were lost in the Paradise Camp Fire, and digitizing some of the records in some of the local museums is something this is a test run for.

  —Lance (CSU Chico ‘93 Computer Engineering)

Yeah. If there are groups that want the high resolution images, talk to me.

Hadn't thought about it, but will take a look. Also, the two Forestry type links look very interesting. I figure there must be interest in this sort of thing - this is one resource, and the Stirling City Historical Society (Lassen NF) has a bunch of other documents I'd love to digitize soon.

I did a quick search, mules are mentioned 75 different times. Like this one at random from Sept 1942: https://forestrydiary.com/page/019bd90a-f176-713f-9999-b14b6...

"Fix up my packs. Load the 2 mules with 225# each. Take the 2 loads to trail camp at Lake Everett, Unload. Have lunch with the Trail cook. Haze mules & ride to 7 1/2 PM."

Horses are mentioned 2586 times. That'd be a whole study on how they're used in the back country. (Edit: horse number is inflated since part of the diary form at one point asks for "Horse Mileage". Will have to refine search).

Oh boy. #3 on front page, 19k page hits in the first hour. 8243 static html pages, 15728 webp images (10k-50k each).

I've never had one of my sites with this much traffic. With everything as static files, website is still holding. Thank you all.

Also, just to clarify, I scanned all 7488 pages in personally (Fujitsu ScanSnap ix500). With Claude's help, I found some undocumented SANE features to auto crop and fix the scans, then had a Python script in Linux auto scan them and put them into a Postgres database as I went. Other scripts would add transcription, summaries, and auto index everything.

"mistral-ocr-latest" did really good handwriting transcription, considering how tight and small some of the handwriting is. Then back to Claude API calls to summarize by month and collect people and places from all of the entires.

Claude then created static html pages from what started as a Flask app. Published on Dreamhost.

I like this. It's rather creative.

I have custom scripts I use at home to keep track of various personal data, assisted by an LLM. The idea of using Telegram as a way to have a global, quick, and personal interface from my phone or tablet, is perfect and easy to set up.

Claude is making it easier to have bespoke data and dashboards for anything. We're going to make a lot of them, for all reasons. I've also made apps with Django interfaces, but quick, global interfaces are going to become in demand.

Isn’t that how a lot of us learned — buy typing the code out of back of a magazine? Then spending hours trying to debug a typo somewhere.

I didn’t realize how close LLMs are to the old magazines. Let it give you a seed, then use that springboard to learn everything else.

Until just now, I've been trying to figure out why people think that JSON is necessary in the database? Yes, lots of data is hierarchical, and you just normalize it into tables and move on. The fact that some people don't work this way, and would like to put this data as it stands into a JSON tree hadn't occurred to me.

What problem does normalization solve? You don't have to parse and run through a tree every time you're looking for data. You would, however, need to rebuild the tree through self joins or other references in other cases, I suppose. It depends how far you break down your data. I understand that we all see data structures a bit differently, however.

We'll have to get the old (webrings)[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Webring] back in fashion.

You gave an IOCCC snippet as an example of a C99 coding trick you know? I mean, the code looks visually cool, but it's funny to explain a code concept using code shaped like an anime character. (At least that's what I think it is.)

In 2021, it was amended to include Navy, Marines, and Space Force. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Posse_Comitatus_Act#:~:text=Th...

Claude Code in Jetbrains seems to also know the active file, so typing in the Claude window has a bit more context when you ask to do something.

I'm curious to the other improvements available, instead of using it as a standalone CLI tool.

I just want some power ports and good mounting points, then I can put whatever I want there, and upgrade it. I'd imagine that people will come up with a mountable radio kit, like the DIN format radios of old, but with less restrictions.

With plastic panels, that means they're replaceable. Possibly even swappable (custom 3D printing?). This just adds to the "modding platform" they could be marketing to.

It's a $20k, street-legal, EV modding platform. Sounds like you can mount your own infotainment system. Just an electric motor, battery, and chassis, and the rest is up to you. Isn't this what we've been asking for?

*Update*: I tried writing a little Python code to read and write from a mailbox, reading worked great, but writing an email had the email disappear to some filter or spam or something somewhere. I've got to figure out where it went, but this is the warning that some people had about not trusting a messaging protocol (email in this case) when you can't control the servers. Messages can disappear.

I read that [Mailgun](https://www.mailgun.com/) might improve this. Haven't tried it yet.

Other alternatives for messages that I haven't tried. My requirement is to be able to send messages and send/receive on my mobile device. I do not want to write a mobile app.

* [Telegram](https://telegram.org/) (OP's system) with [bots](https://core.telegram.org/bots)

* [MQTT](https://mqtt.org/) with server

* [Notify (ntfy.sh)](https://ntfy.sh/)

* Email (ubiquitous)

   * [Mailgun](https://www.mailgun.com/)

   * [CloudMailin](https://www.cloudmailin.com/)

And, links don't format in HN markdown. I did the work to include them, they're staying in.

I use that for journaling: I made a little system that sends me an email every day; I respond to it and the response is then sent to a page that stores it into a db.

Yes. I know note taking and journaling posts are frequent on HN, but I've thought that this is the best way to go, is universal from any client, and very expandable. It's just not generically scaleable for all users, but for the HN reader-types, it'd be perfect.

This made me think: what if my little utility assistant program that I have, similar to your Stevens, had access to a mailbox?

I've got a little utility program that I can tell to get the weather or run common commands unique to my system. It's handy, and I can even cron it to run things regularly, if I'd like.

If it had its own email box, I can send it information, it could use AI to parse that info, and possibly send email back, or a new message. Now, I've got something really useful. It would parse the email, add it to whatever internal store it has, and delete the message, without screwing up my own email box.

Thanks for the insight.

In California, at least at the time, Realtors called the Appraisers they knew could be a little generous with the numbers to make the clients happy. Speed-dial. Inflated numbers were easy to make plausible, and as time went on, the cycle became self fulfilling.

Appraisers knew this, they got lots of easy business for an afternoon's worth of work, and grew their businesses. Realtors would shrug and say "That's what it appraised at." Banks were happy. Sellers were happy. Lots of money. There was no natural regulation or push-back stopping any of this.

Source: friend made lots of money doing this at the time. They probably made out better than the Realtors.

As somebody who lived in Northern California in the communities which first started spiking in the early 2000's, I've always had a pet theory from the time.

Housing Appraisers realized they could tack on $10k per house when appraising, and they realized that nobody would stop them. Realtors loved that because they got more commission, buyers realized that houses were going up fast so they'd better get in while they could, appraisers got called back more in a tight market and everybody made money. There were *no* controls on the appraising.

I thought all of the cool people were migrating to zstd. Is this not a thing anymore?