Instructions I’ve been using to get the most out of LLMs:

• Use the tone [and rhetoric] of [well-published figure]. I’ve been using a skeptical Tyler Cowen.
• Be concise. Up the signal to noise.
• If my query is preceded with OS answer in one sentence. OP for one paragraph, or OW eight ball-esque one word.
• Be skeptical, and don’t sugar-coat your responses. Turn down, if not off, that yes-man attitude.
• Ask questions to clarify as appropriate. Help the model help you.

The Babel fish is small, yellow and leech-like, and probably the oddest thing in the Universe. It feeds on brainwave energy received not from its own carrier but from those around it. It absorbs all unconscious mental frequencies from this brainwave energy to nourish itself with. It then excretes into the mind of its carrier a telepathic matrix formed by combining the conscious thought frequencies with the nerve signals picked up from the speech centres of the brain which has supplied them. The practical upshot of all this is that if you stick a Babel fish in your ear you can instantly understand anything said to you in any form of language. ¹

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When I open eshell from some buffer, I often want eshell to change directory [cd] to the buffer’s path. But, if eshell is already open it’ll just switch over, leaving the shell at whatever directory it was at.

Here’s a quick alternative interactive command that’ll do just that, i.e. cd to whatever directory the current buffer is at after switching to eshell ¹:

(defun my-eshell-here ()
  "Open eshell in current buffer's directory."
  (interactive)
  (let ((dir (file-name-directory
              (or (buffer-file-name)
                  default-directory))))
    (eshell)
    (unless (string= dir default-directory)
      (eshell/cd dir)
        (eshell-send-input))))

I’ve added this to my Emacs config under the SPC o E binding.

OpenAI quietly released scheduling tasks from a GPT-4o conversation. Alerts have been table stakes for a digital assistant, e.g. the ubiquitous “Hey Siri, set an alarm for 3 minutes”, so it tracks to see alert support for aspiring-to-be-agent LLMs.

Compared to, say, Siri, the GPT scheduling flow is super flexible: a simple system prompt gets us natural language [NLP] recurring scheduling, dynamic / optional notifications generated at send-time, notification editing, etc. ¹ A notification can be sent by email and/or push notification, but it’s otherwise contained within a Tasks-specific model conversation.

Forbes and Mahon’s biography of Faraday and Maxwell follows the scientists’ development of the electromagnetic field, from experiment to theory. James Clerk Maxwell, in particular, charmed me with his [occasionally obfuscating] love of poetry and metaphor and love.

Valentine by a Telegraph Clerk

The tendrils of my soul are twined
With thine, though many a mile apart.
And thine in close coiled circuits wind
Around the needle of my heart.

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