Mark Finkle

Has anyone merged reactive notebooks like Marimo with conversational agents yet? I mean, can I ask some questions about data and the agent fetches the data and displays the results. I can then interactive with either the data or the results.

That might be neat

amusing too 🫠

"we're Chrome in a trenchcoat" — this

"however it does give them an escape route if something can replace Chrome." — I would not hold my breath. It's kinda assuming to realize that making a web browser is possibly harder than an LLM? 😂

I didn't check to see if @siracusa.social was named in the article

Random weird thing: Apple Pay is only a direct payment option in Starbucks app without an account. When you create your account the option disappears... and the experience gets worse.

I deleted the account

I can't imagine AOL employees are happy about this outcome

Hard to imagine how the government being shut down could be much worse than the government we’ve had over the past 9 months.

Dam been writing a book about this and she just TikToked it in 90 seconds.

👀 "the US experience is peculiar. Young Euro area workers have record low unemployment. In the UK, the young persons’ unemployment rate has fallen steadily. Employment by young Japanese workers is near all-time highs. It seems implausible that AI uniquely hurts the prospects of younger US workers."

Amazing how those democratic lawmakers who were hunted down in their homes in the middle of the night in Minnesota weren’t a watershed moment of political violence, huh?

enshittification | noun | when a digital platform is made worse for users, in order to increase profits

Yes! Although I didn't write it, I spent enough time in the code to appreciate it and notice when other products don't have it

I'm concerned that my first thought was:
Does @siracusa.social know about this?

Miss you too, but now we've found each other again!

Celebrating 20 years of MDN | MDN Blog MDN turns 20! Let's look at how we started, how MDN became the most trusted resource for web developers, the impact it's had on the open web, and yes, there's cake, too.

For 20 years Mozilla has developed one of the most useful tools for web devs.

developer.mozilla.org/en-US/blog/m...

Congrats to the MDN team on an awesome milestone. I'm happy that we've played a small part in its history and I'm excited to see it continue to be at the core of every web dev's job.

Pre-sleep thought: My hotel room has a mini-fridge, empty, but running.

Opportunity for removing mini-fridges to save energy? Or at least make a smarter mini-fridge?

Seen in Slack: it is working due to a litany of absolute HACKS!

One person's hacks is another person's temporary fix

I wonder that if, from James Martin's point of view in 1982, that actually happened? But from our 2025 point of view, the programmers moved to work on other things?

Figma files for IPO on NYSE, plans to 'take big swings' with acquisitions Figma filed its IPO prospectus on Tuesday, as the design software vendor looks to raise money and awareness to take on Adobe.

Congratulations to Figma for filing for an IPO. Regulators blocking the Adobe deal must have felt bad in the moment but this is a better outcome.

Stay independent and get rich on your own terms.

E.P.A. Plans to Reconsider a Ban on Cancer-Causing Asbestos

"We're all going to die anyway" - Ancient Republican Proverb

Perplexity CEO says its browser will track everything users do online to sell 'hyper personalized' ads | TechCrunch Perplexity is building its own browser is to collect data on everything users do outside of its own app to sell ads.

What reason could I possibly have to use such a browser?
techcrunch.com/2025/04/24/p...

Google released Agent Development Kit, a framework for building agent workflows with everything we expect from an agent frameworks.

I recreated my ToolAgent quasi-framework using ADK. I could expose my mock tools, add ReAct planning, and switch between different LLMs. It worked out really well. 🎉

I finally got around to exploring local LLMs. It was easier to set up than I expected. I tired a few different models of different sizes. The smaller ones didn't have enough "reasoning" ability to work as agents, but the larger ones did a pretty good job.
starkravingfinkle.org/blog/2025/04...

Exploring LLMs as Agents: Model Context Protocol I will likely run out of topics to cover in the “LLMs as Agents” series, eventually. I wanted to explore creating a chat UI and what I could do with embeddings but I didn’t do tha…

I took some time to experiment with MCP Client and Servers. I converted my ToolProvider system to become an MCP Server and made an MCP Client from my ToolAgent. I use zero dependencies on other frameworks, just to see how the protocol works.
starkravingfinkle.org/blog/2025/03...

This is pretty interesting. After building something similar (WebAgent), I can understand what the code is doing. I also exposed Playwright as "tools", but I didn't realize Playwright has a a11y snapshot feature to get a reduced set of elements. Very handy.
starkravingfinkle.org/blog/2025/03...

With the new ToolAgent framework, I refactored my web automation agent into WebAgent. The Playwright-based automation actions are now tools used by the agent.

I had to stop sending the entire HTML content of the page to the LLM 😱
starkravingfinkle.org/blog/2025/03...

I'm still exploring ("playing") with using LLMs as Agents. I refactored the code into a tiny framework. Have I become that which I wanted to avoid? Maybe 🫠

More tools and a benchmark system allowed me to really improve the agent success outcomes.
starkravingfinkle.org/blog/2025/03...

Totally agree. I hope "it improves testing, reduces complexity, allows us to move faster"are also true, or you're likely better off doing the simplest thing possible.

“Stranding all or part of rural America with worse internet so that we can make the world's richest man even richer is yet another in a long line of betrayals by Washington,” said former BEAD director Evan Feinman

BREAKING: The head of the $42 billion federal BEAD program that aims to bring broadband internet to rural and unserved areas has left the Commerce Dept.

He sent a departing email warning of "deeply negative outcomes" for people if the Trump admin shifts $$ from fiber internet to Musk's Starlink: