hrbrmstr's Daily Drop

  • Drop #474 (2024-05-23): Holiday D20 Edition

    A extra random Drop is out today featuring edge functions for AI bot blocking, “abort bars”, NextDNS in context, and updates to Zed & llamafile.

    hrbrmstr

  • Drop #472 (2024-05-22): Happy ThursdAI

    Today’s AI-focused edition of the Drop we cover the need to defend against AI misuse. First, we introduce the concept of ai.txt for controlling data mining. We then look at strategies for blocking malicious AI bots and take a look at what we might be able to do w/r/t poisoning AI models. These strategies aim…

    hrbrmstr

  • Bonus Drop #49 (2024-05-19): 🦙s All The Way Down

    The weekend Bonus Drop covers various AI-centric tools like llamafile, whisperfile, and Firecrawl. llamafile simplifies the deployment of LLM/GPT models for local use, while whisperfile focuses on converting audio files. Firecrawl is a tool for crawling web content and converting it into Markdown format, and is 100% usable in a non-AI context.

    hrbrmstr

  • Drop #467 (2024-05-15): Wonkish Wednesday

    Today’s proper Drop covers how Trail of Bits collaborates with Alpha-Omega and OpenSSF to enhance Homebrew’s security with cryptographically verifiable attestation; it also looks at Nimble and Lance V2 as Parquet replacements, and points to a sober piece on “The Heat Death of the Internet”.

    hrbrmstr

  • Drop #466 (2024-05-14): (Tardy) Typography Tuesday

    Today’s Drop discusses font popularity, AI in typography, and a featured free font! We touch on the use of CDNs for font delivery, the role of AI in creating typefaces, and the potential impact of AI on creativity in design processes.

    hrbrmstr

  • Drop #465 (2024-05-13): Monday Mid-Morning Grab Bag

    Today’s Drop covers JSContact, RFC 9562, and the impact of AI on our ears and the livelihoods of folks who used to make coin from their voices.

    hrbrmstr

  • Drop #462 (2024-05-09): Happy ThursdAI

    Today’s Drop reveals details of AI spending and its impact on various sectors; an open-source alternative to Perplexity offers local language models and different search modes; and a resource for Apple Silicon Mac users wanting to do (mostly) frustration-free “AI” on Apple Silicon

    hrbrmstr

  • Drop #454 (2024-04-18): Happy ThursdAI!

    Today’s AI-focused edition of the Drop discusses the usefulness of a Rust-based disk-usage tool, dua, for managing space occupied by AI models. It also explores a concerning development where LLM agents can autonomously exploit one-day vulnerabilities and a new experimental extension, DuckDB VSS, that accelerates vector similarity search using DuckDB’s new fixed-size ARRAY type.

    hrbrmstr

  • Drop #432 (2024-03-25): Monday Morning Grab Bag

    In today’s Daily Drop, we have the regular Monday grab bag of resources. We highlight Fedica, a platform for posting to Mastodon and Bluesky, the Navy’s Solar Eclipse Computer, and Vanilla Breeze, a tool for converting Tailwind-classed HTML tags to semantic CSS.

    hrbrmstr

  • Drop #431 (2024-03-22): hrbrtips & hrbrtricks

    Today’s Drop shows how to convert data from Postgres to Parquet safely & painlessly, shows how to hack x-callback-urls @ the CLI for inter-app communication on macOS, and enhancing Bash scripts with LLM/GPTs. It emphasizes technical details and tools for each topic, providing insights and tips for data professionals and developers.

    hrbrmstr