James, a developer, writes about personal programming projects, technical writing, data structures, and the indie web.
HN links it for his projects such as a feed reader and spreadsheet, and commenters note his open-source tools and Homebrew Website Club.
> curl -sL -H "Accept: text/roff" https://jamesg.blog/2024/02/28/programming-projects/ > post.page && man ./post.page && rm post.page
What if I have a post.page in my current directory?
> curl -sL -H "Accept: text/roff" https://jamesg.blog/2024/02/28/programming-projects/ > /tmp/post.page && man /tmp/post.page
What if another user runs the command at the same time, then?
Or what if a malicious user creates a 666 mode /tmp/post.page file beforehand, detects when you finish writing to it, then attaches a payload right before `man` reads it?
Unfortunately, there is no perfect solution for this problem; I run arbitrary html, css, and javascript every day by browsing the web. It's debatable whether switching to command chains instead of piping results in overall benefits. Of course, the same goes for vice versa as well.
> I think a framework like this should provide abstractions that allow people to focus on the important part like prompt engineering and productionizing the app and worry less about how to figure out stuff like this.
I appreciate the detailed explanation, thank you!
If you'll permit another noob question, can/should frameworks like this include source attribution for responses? Based on articles like https://jamesg.blog/2023/04/02/llm-prompts-source-attribution/ I'd guess the strict answer would be no, and that any strategies you might use to elicit them might hallucinate citations.
For reference, and not implying it's better or worse than your work OP, I've pleasantly used Fraidycat (https://fraidyc.at/) in the past. It's a webextension, so completely local, and also incorporates the idea of having a "calmer" experience: no infinite list of links to check, different update rates, ...
I love your philosophy page, OP ! (https://jamesg.blog/2024/11/30/designing-a-calm-web-reader/)
Hello everyone! I have been co-hosting the Europe Homebrew Website Club for the last year and a half.
During the calls we come together to chat about websites: what you are building, what you want to build, and how you can build it! If you are interested in the web, I (and the rest of community!) would love to see you!
P.S. My site is https://jamesg.blog -- what's your domain name?
Well, it is hard to change a company from the oral/meeting-driven style to an async writing-based culture and a fear even the best resource won't really help with that. But since you've asked also on an indiviual level, I found some nuggets on technical writing in https://jamesg.blog/2024/01/03/software-technical-writing/ - certainly way better than a SEOed listicle
The tool actually is open source, so you could self-host it if you wish. MIT license, in Python. The repository [1] is linked in the blog post the author wrote about the project [2].
[1]: https://github.com/capjamesg/web-reader
[2]: https://jamesg.blog/2024/11/30/designing-a-calm-web-reader/