Notes

Pete Koomen on Horseless carriages

28 April 2025

Whenever a new technology is invented, the first tools built with it inevitably fail because they mimic the old way of doing things.

Pete Koomen uses Gmail's Gemini integration to illustrate that a lot of the current AI-powered apps aren't actually that useful. He asks Gemini to draft an email, and it fails at adopting his own tone and style.

He also includes an example of an AI-based tool for dealing with email. It took me a second to realise that it's not a screenshot of a prototype, but a working demo embedded in the page. I suppose, given the theme of the post, it would be ironic if it weren’t interactive.

Glow is markdown viewer for the terminal

17 April 2025

Glow renders markdown in the terminal with ANSI colors and styles. It has a built in pager. Very handy for viewing llm logs:

llm logs --current | glow -p

How to start Phoenix with a node name

26 March 2025

It can be handy to start Phoenix with a node name and cookie. This is often used in distributed systems in production, but I find it handy to use in development with Livebook.

Rather than starting Phoenix with the usual mix phx.server I use:

elixir --name my_app@127.0.0.1 --cookie dev -S mix phx.server

replacing my_app with something more appropriate. I leave cookie as dev because I'm not concerned about security when running locally.

Once the server is running, I connect to it from Livebook:

• Click Runtime Settings, then Configure.
• Enter the [email protected] and the cookie into the panel.

Once connected I can interact with the process from Livebook.