pravj

Strongly agree with this. Long before 2022 (ChatGPT), I remember saying to someone at work, "We need to build a reading culture for a writing culture to thrive."

I used to envy and take inspiration from other workplaces where good [but not necessarily good-only] writing was respected; where a pre-read is really read before the meetings, thoughtful comments were made on it, etc.

AI workflows have obviously simplified documentation generation along with the code, but we had to work on our product/engineering practices to generate meaningful documentation, and not just vestigial/temporary documents in the process. On this particular point, we've made positive progress lately.

I reached 0.05% and retired for the day.

https://postimg.cc/MXBQqrXf

I remember reading a book a long time back, titled something like "non-linguistic analysis of call center conversations".

One main takeaway from the book was that "you can just look at the ratio of turn-taking duration, and which speaker/participant is spending how much time" to decide "what happened in the conversation".

The same goes for AI-generated conversations; verbose responses are the default behavior, and models are incentivised to keep that output-token ratio. Too easy to catch/notice, pretty annoying.

PS - I work in the Conversational AI space, and it is quite an effort to keep the ratio right for people to stay long enough on the phone with AI agents.

Wisdom of the crowd at play.

The popularity ranking matches the quality of content produced, and people are spending more time than anticipated on Grok and Roll to confirm if they (listeners) are hallucinating or if the radio is really stuck on roll.

Grit Garden: https://grit.garden (https://github.com/pravj/wordle-garden)

Recently shipped this personal art project that turns daily Wordle attempts into gritty / struggle-filled stories, kinda similar to the emotional arc of the Wordle game play.

You can upload your own Wordle game screenshot to generate one for yourself.

In addition to completing what was once in the idea list, I got to learn about

- Prompt fine-tuning: Models are sharp enough to complete Wordle games quicker than human average scores, so I had to dump that down and get the average down.

- Karpathy’s Autoresearch: Experimented with auto-research for prompt fine-tuning, in addition to manual prompts.

- Vision models: While leading labs have multimodal models with quality visual reasoning, the benchmarks are still quite different for a simple Wordle analysis (reading what letters were yellow/gray/green); I also noticed labs/companies with separate vision models but their APIs lag significantly compared to what’s possible in developer experience.

- Video generation: For the last few days, I have been experimenting with automated video generation for the project's social handles. I'm still struggling with the right hooks that reduce the skip rates, but it's fun.

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Additionally, working on an Apple Watch app similar to my Mac app on the same lines, [Plug That In](https://plugthat.in), i.e., notify before the device goes too low on battery, but with a twist.

Extending on the same line, we will see programs like Google Summer of Code (GSoC) getting a massive revamp, or they will stop operating.

From my failed attempt, I remember that

- Students had to find a project matching their interests/skills and start contributing early.

- We used to talk about staying away from some projects with a low supply of students applying (or lurking in the GitHub/BitBucket issues) because of the complexity required for the projects.

Both of these acted as a creative filter for projects and landed them good students/contributors, but it completely goes away with AI being able to do that at scale.

https://hackpravj.com

Using this to maintain my writings, projects, readings, and curated photo collections.

Wrote a blog on my personal website about rediscovering the joy of coding after five years.

Glad you found it relevant, and thanks for sharing the feedback.

Not going to deny that it was a bummer to read your second line, lost all the Endorphins earned from reading the first one. Nevertheless, I want to fix this if it's a legit issue.

Do you mind sharing more details on the battery consumption from the app?

I'm using IOKit power source notifications and hearing this feedback for the first time. (personally using this on my work [old M2] and personal [new M4] MacBooks for the last ~2 months).

Plug-That-In [https://plugthat.in] (Mac App; Paid)

An annoying little laptop charging reminder utility that does the job.

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There are times when I'm deeply immersed in focused work, a meeting, or engaging video content and end up missing the usual low-battery notifications on my MacBook.

When the laptop suddenly shuts down, it's followed by the familiar and frustrating walk to find a charger or power outlet. It can be annoying and occasionally embarrassing, especially when rejoining a session a few minutes later with, "Sorry, my battery died."

Over the past few weekends, I built Plug-That-In, an app that introduces "floating/moving notifications". These alerts follow the cursor, providing a stronger, harder-to-miss nudge regardless of what’s happening on screen.

The app also includes a few critical features:

- Reminder Mode: When the battery reaches critical levels, the app emits a configurable alert similar to a car's seatbelt warning, continuing until the battery is addressed.

- Do Not Disturb Settings: Customize alerts and sounds based on context, such as when system audio is playing, a video is active, or the camera is in use.

It grew out of a personal need, and I'm glad to see it used by over 50 people in the past month.

Plug-That-In [https://plugthat.in] (Mac App; Paid)

An annoying little laptop charging reminder utility that does the job.

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There are times when I am deeply involved in a focus-work session, a meeting, OR watching some sort of engaging video content, and don't pay timely attention to the standard low battery notifications from my MacBook.

After the laptop shuts down suddenly, what follows is the most annoying walk to find the charger or the charging outlet. It's frustrating at times, sometimes embarrassing because you have to say, "Sorry, my battery died down" as you join back the session after 2-3 minutes.

Over the last 3-4 weekends, I have been building Plug-That-In, which has floating notifications. Essentially, a notification that follows my cursor movement, so I get a stronger nudge irrespective of what I am doing.

There are a few other critical features, such as Reminder Mode and Do-Not-Disturb Settings.

- Reminder Mode: On critical/lower battery levels, it will keep beeping like a car's seat belt alert for some time (configurable) when the battery is really low.

- Do-Not-Disturb settings: Configure what sort of alert/sound it will generate when I have system audio playing or video playing, or the camera is active.

It has addressed a personal need and has already proven useful a few times over the last weeks.

Tinkering with a tiny macOS app that gives me proactive reminders about the low battery and imminent shutdown.

Standard system notification comes at about 10%, and most of the time, in my case at least, whenever I miss that, the result is "laptop shutdown amidst an ongoing video meeting" or something like that. (Basically, too late before I act)

Just so that I don't miss the reminders, the app will show an overlay window with some text, following my cursor, and a custom sound.

I built a version this weekend, and am current doing a dogfooding exercise.

This resonates a lot with some observations I drafted last week about "AI Slop" at the workplace.

Overall, people are making a net-negative contribution by not having a sense of when to review/filter the responses generated by AI tools, because either (i) someone else is required to make that additional effort, or (ii) the problem is not solved properly.

This sounds similar to a few patterns I noted

- The average length of documents and emails has increased.

- Not alarmingly so, but people have started writing Slack/Teams responses with LLMs. (and it’s not just to fix the grammar.)

- Many discussions and brainstorms now start with a meeting summary or transcript, which often goes through multiple rounds of information loss as it’s summarized and re-expanded by different stakeholders. [arXiv:2509.04438, arXiv:2401.16475]

Jotted down a few thoughts based on a pattern I’ve started noticing; AI is often getting used inefficiently.

Users in a white-collar setup are limiting their relationship with LLMs at a peer-level, and a multitude of AI-tool UX is designed to reinforce that same hierarchy, which is marking the entry of "AI Slop" into the workplace.

I'm working on restoring my website/blog.

I stopped writing right after college when I moved to full-time work, but I want to change that now.

Just as I started, I realized the website was hosted on Forestry CMS, which has been discontinued, so I will have to figure out how to maintain the URL structure, etc. (this is important since there are a few popular/top-10 pages for certain queries/searches [1]).

[1] https://hackpravj.com/blog/solving-semantris-opencv-word2vec... (for "Google Semantris")

It includes:

- 50 jumping jacks [3 sets]

- 25 knee-highs [3 sets]

- 30 mountain climbers [2 sets]

- 25 pushups

- 1 minute plank

I stopped doing it after I was able to meet my weight loss milestone, need to restart.

Agree that a quality-sensitive metric can't be modelled fully in the structure. This is something I'm even observing in the work-environment also.

Do you have any learnings to make such initiatives work?

Glad you liked the structure/goals.

All of them are for January-February-March 2021. Does that cover the time-bound aspect you're talking about?

Thanks for informing.

- I assumed everyone here on HN would be familiar with him. But lesson learned that it was just another assumption. I've added the details about him.

- I've fixed the broken links.

Nokia can be an example for missing the smartphone movement.

I find this interesting, It shouldn't take much time before we have a new category of startups:

- that lets you (as a startup) optimize spending on day-to-day tools (similar to optimizing your cloud spendings)

Same from India, the status page [1] is holding it up though, saying "All systems operational. Updated a few seconds ago".

[1] https://status.twitterstat.us/

Neat! check out Google's Quick Draw [1] where you need to draw a given object in 20 seconds and a neural network will recognize what you're drawing.

[1] https://quickdraw.withgoogle.com/

After switching from technical to a product role, I have seen a complete change of perception towards excel/google-sheets. I still observe the passive hate towards excel by developer companions, but for me, it's a goto tool, the same as it was the case with Python, the goto language.

I like to call it a fundamental or building block technology that enables you to develop things on top of it, my favorite being a finite-state-machine we modeled in a sheet. Won't be surprised if we end up talking about Google sheets being one of my favorite products.

Looks neat.

Can you explain more on the following point, in the non-personal information section of the policy?

"navigation paths used while visiting the website or platform"

Vernacular.ai | ML Research Engineer, Associate Product Manager | Bangalore, India (https://vernacular.ai/career.html)

Vernacular.ai helps enterprises streamline their contact center operations by deploying multilingual voice bots and delivering up to 70% cost cuttings. Our product, VIVA (Vernacular Intelligent Voice Assistant) uses cutting edge speech recognition and natural language processing technologies allowing it to understand user's queries and resolving them through engaging conversations.

- ML Research Engineer (https://vernacular.ai/career.html#jd-mlre)

- Associate Product Manager (https://vernacular.ai/career.html#jd-apm)

You can apply via email as well, [recruitment at vernacular dot ai].

Reach out to me, [pravj at vernacular dot ai] for any further clarifications.

Author here, this issue was the inspiration, though I could not find a working solution in it. As referred in the thread, GitHub has stopped supporting that AJAX hack.

I am planning to make it more accessible, please follow the follow-github-organisation[1] for updates. Pun intended.

Let me know if you have any other feedback.

[1] https://github.com/follow-github-organisation

- You create an issue with the link of the organisation

- Using GitHub webhook, an event is triggered to see if the org is already being followed

- If not, a record is created (organisation name, public repo count, issue id etc)

- Every 6 hour, (for all organisations) a cron job checks if the org has any extra public repositories

- In case of any new repository, a comment is created with the links to the new repositories

GitHub doesn't allow a user to follow an organization. As a result, users don't get to see the activity done by that particular organization.

I have tried creating a small solution (refer to the link) for the same, and it uses GitHub as a distribution channel.

- You need to create an issue (in the linked repository) with the link to that organization.

- If a new repository is created, the thread will be updated (every 12 hours) with the link to the new repository.

- Check the list of issues if the organization is already subscribed or not.

Website: https://hackpravj.com Blog: https://hackpravj.com/blog

I write about explorable explanations from a software engineering perspective, going after a particular problem and explaining it using either data or a solution.

For example, my recent article was about solving Google AI's game Semantris using Computer Vision. https://hackpravj.com/blog/solving-semantris-opencv-word2vec...

This year I've decided to write about my learnings in products. I've my first topic in making, will try to publish it as soon as I get time.