Journal 2025-05-20
Windsurf Comments
I've been trying out Windsurf (formerly Codeium), Yet Another custom VS Code build with Copilot-style AI. It's good, on a par with the others I've tried. But it's hard to compare these tools because they are all in such active dev.
On the day my free sub runs out (funds low), found a great feature : Custom Workflows. You can tuck away task-specific prompts in .windsurf/workflows/*.md files, invoke from chat with a slash. I needed to apply a specific comment template to about 100 different files (#:transmissions #:processors, I have a #:signature in comments), this feature is perfect. I just piled through them.
I don't know which base they've built their SWE-1 on, but I'm willing to bet it was a "thinking" model. Has that tendency to do more than you ask for, which is an irritating trait for a code assistant, time-consuming looking what bits to reject.
Also there appears to be a minor bug in message timing. I just gave it a problem to look at, on the edge of what usual context windows can deal with - loads of content/layer indirection needed. As expected it's taking it a long time, fine, may not be doable. But this side I've got "Deadline exceeded...retryable" x7...
It's still taken me all morning on that one chore. But it was a very worthwhile exercise. Apart from it being way, way faster than doing it manually, it allowed me to see what I had, clear out a lot of cruft, clean up various lumps of poo.
Badgers
I stumbled on the OpenSSF Best Practices Badge Program which seems a worthy cause. I had a quick go at #:atuin, which is probably my cleanest active repo. Without doing anything manually it got a score of 16%. I should probably come back to that.
One thing that covers, it rings a vague bell from somewhere :
The Common Platform Enumeration (CPE) is a structured naming scheme for information technology systems, software, and packages. It is used in a number of systems and databases when reporting vulnerabilities."
Something else to come back to.
Other Tabs I Should Close
A Step-by-Step Guide to Build a Fast Semantic Search and RAG QA Engine on Web-Scraped Data Using Together AI Embeddings, FAISS Retrieval, and LangChain - this is from MarkTechPost - actually by their CEO. The site often has useful links, if you can find them in their nightmare level of inserted ads. Bookmarked because the same functionality is something I want from #:transmissions + #:semem in the near future. Totally different kit, but it'll be useful to see how it's done there.
REST - Wikipedia - visited because I woke up perversely trying to remember how Saint Roy defined state in Hypertext as the Engine of State (HATEOS). I was pleased to see this line :
An application that adheres to the REST architectural constraints may be informally described as RESTful, although this term is more commonly associated with the design of HTTP-based APIs and what are widely considered best practices regarding the "verbs" (HTTP methods) a resource responds to, while having little to do with REST as originally formulated—and is often even at odds with the concept.
Tasks.md (GitHub) - "A self-hosted, Markdown file based task management board.". I like the look of this. Is Kanban-style, minimally layered over files (tasks) and dirs (panels). It's available in a Docker version. I fancy having a play. It should be totally compatible with what I've got in mind with #:trestle, but usable now without any direct coupling.
DIY Alexa (GitHub) - uses an ESP32, my current favourite microcontroller with Tensorflow Lite, hooked into wit.ai which is a voice/text thing, apparently from Meta. Fun stuff.
analog-foundation-models - yeah. From IBM. LLMs with the multiplications done by analog chips. Bit clunky, too many 8-bit ADC/DACs for my liking. And only IBM can afford to play with such toys. (My own analog computer is still mostly a big box of components in the drawer, I got distracted by Eurorack modular hardware) §