What exactly surprises you? You should try Gemini 2.5 Pro in Google AI Studio. Set the temperature to around 0.3, and in the system prompt, tell it to only edit exactly what you ask for and nothing else.
This model works really well. For example, simple things like [1], [2], and [3] can apparently be generated with just a couple of prompts.
According to the author, these were made with Gemini 2.5 Pro without any manual coding by a human.
Cursor isn't as powerful as Gemini in AI Studio because AI Studio gives you full control over the model's settings and how it processes code.
Plus, the massive 1 million token context window is incredibly helpful for working with large codebases. You can use tools like code2prompt and repomix to feed all the necessary context into AI Studio from the clipboard for those projects.
We've had the best success by first converting the HTML to a simpler format (i.e. markdown) before passing it to the LLM.
There are a few ways to do this that we've tried, namely Extractus[0] and dom-to-semantic-markdown[1].
Internally we use Apify[2] and Firecrawl[3] for Magic Loops[4] that run in the cloud, both of which have options for simplifying pages built-in, but for our Chrome Extension we use dom-to-semantic-markdown.
Similar to the article, we're currently exploring a user-assisted flow to generate XPaths for a given site, which we can then use to extract specific elements before hitting the LLM.
By simplifying the "problem" we've had decent success, even with GPT-4o mini.
Any iOS device backup, including older ones, can be scanned for IOCs (Indicators of Compromise) for patched CVEs. If you own a macOS device, your iOS device can be hardened via the free Apple Configurator app for local MDM policy, e.g. disable AirDrop, whitelist WiFi without auto-join, disallow USB devices when locked. If the device is compromised, it can be restored after backup, erase, DFU and iOS reinstall.
As mitigation for old and new devices alike, frequently rebooting an iOS device will remove a large class of non-persistent malware. If battery life or performance are suddenly reduced, and can be restored to normal by an iOS reboot, a potential cause is non-persistent malware. Use the "Force Restart" key sequence, https://support.apple.com/guide/iphone/force-restart-iphone-...
Is there an iOS VPN solution which can (opt-in) monitor network or DNS traffic for threats or connections to known C&C servers?
PSA: yt-dlp has a feature that it fails to create output files(including temporary "part X of Y" chunk files) if filename is too long for the filesystem driver. It will NOT retry with shorter filenames. This can be problematic for ephemeral links.
As a workaround, add `-o "%(title).150B [%(id)s].%(ext)s"` to the command. Alias it, or do whatever you have to.
Here's the one-liner I use for downloading playlists in parallel: \n
yt-dlp --flat-playlist --print id $(cat dl-target-playlist) | parallel yt-dlp -x --wait-for-video 3 --download-archive ~/archive https://www.youtube.com/watch?v={}
/n I'm not sure if it's faster than the default yt-dlp in parallel but with this script you just have to modify the file named dl-target-playlist.
I used to work in the securities division of Goldman. Traders are generally amazing at excel and one way to completely lose their respect is to suck at excel. I've more than once seen a trader look on in horror as a programmer fumbles around in some excel model the trader has asked for help with. At one point I had to turn some genuinely insane excel models (think 10mins to load the sheet, 10-15mins to recalc) into code (my version of that model ticked >1000x per second and had more functionality than the original), so I learned to get good at excel and learned the kinds of things people who are amazing with it are able to do and how powerful it is.
So with that here's one super easy tip and one foundation pathway for long-term learning.
The super-easy tip is to learn some basic shortcuts[1] so you can move quickly and get shit done without constantly reaching for the mouse. In particular, learn the "Ctrl - arrow" shortcut (move to the end of the contiguous data in the direction of the arrow), the "Ctrl + Home" shortcut (Move to the start/top left corner of the spreadsheet) and realise that when you're holding down shift this means you can select regions of data for cut and paste or other operations really quickly. Also learn:
1) If you're using a mac you'll need to turn off some of the exposé features or rebind them if you want decent excel keyboard shortcuts. Small price to pay imo but your opinion may differ of course.
2) If you're using anything other than an archeological version of excel you're going to have to come to terms with that stupid ribbon thing. Luckily from a keyboard shortcut pov the ribbon means you have one simple set of shortcuts to learn to access any icon on the ribbon from your keyboard so learn it. On PC just press "Alt" and your ribbon will light up with all the keyboard shortcuts for everything from the ribbon on Mac I can't remember how you do this thing and a quick scan doesn't reveal. My chops are a little rusty because I only ever really used excel seriously on windows.
OK now you won't be painfully hobbling about the app one row or column at a time and reaching for the mouse the whole time, the long-term learning. Understanding the power of excel comes down to realising you are editing a model of a graph computation, then learning and understanding a few key features which are really powerful, and will hint at other directions to explore to learn more. I'll give you some examples, but these really are the tip of an incredibly huge iceberg.
1) Autofiltering
Put yourself in a sheet where you have column headings at the top and one contiguous block of data in rows and columns beneath. Go ctrl-home to move to the top left of your data, then go shift-ctrl-end (or shift-ctrl-right and shift-ctrl-down) to go to the end of your data. All your rows and columns should now be selected. Now click on the "AutoFilter"[2] icon or if you've been paying attention to 1, use "Alt" to choose the icon of a hopper thing on your ribbon. It says "filter" next to it and the link below has a picture. This allows you to sort and filter your data in very flexible ways with a UI that's very intuitive for non-technical users. I often point UX folks at this feature when they (inevitably) come up with a pale shadow of this capability.
2) Pivot tables
With your data still selected, go to "Insert" on your ribbon and go "Pivot table", select "new worksheet". OK here you have a thing that basically does a select ... group by on your data with various aggregations, sorting, filtering and a bunch of related functionality all in a pretty simple wrapper. Play around and get familiar with this. You can do amazing things really quickly with pivot tables. Yes I know you can do all this and more in pandas but your mba colleague can do this with excel in seconds and they can't write a line of code. You may be getting a sense of why people consider excel powerful.
3) Vlookup, hlookup, sumif, countif and friends
OK that was the entry-level drug, now go find out about vlookup, and sumif. These are simple functions that look data up in a table. Typically vlookup takes a sorted table on some reference sheet, looks up some key in the leftmost column and gives you back the value of some cell in that row. Realise this adds higher-order dependencies to the graph of your computation. People use this to do amazing shit with vlookup.
Sumif is a simpler lookup. It takes a table and a predicate and sums up values matching that predicate. It is often used to look up single values where the table isn't sorted but you know you only have one of each key.
4) Index, Indirect and Address
We've gone too far to stop now. If you're writing a sheet that uses these you already know you are a bad person and don't care. these are the `eval()` of excel, allowing you to construct arbitrary references to cells or arbitrary functions as strings, dereference and evaluate them. You can then compose these into other functions. More details of this depravity can be found here[3]. It always makes my day if I am making a sheet that requires any of these functions.
I replaced Grub w/ rEFInd a few years ago and I've never looked back. The ability to just scan filesystems and boot images is so simple/easy compared to the Grub menu edit and "reinstall" process you have to go through every time you want to make a change. I've never used systemd-boot but highly recommend rEFInd over Grub.
I also have a Python script for installing Ubuntu on native ZFS w/ encryption and using rEFInd. You can use this script from a live boot environment. If nothing else, can easily review for how to do it manually.
(In Professor Farnsworth's voice:) Good news everyone!
I asked Heather permission, and she says it's OK for me to give away the huge collection of custom Sims objects I have that includes an archive snapshot of many classic SimFreaks objects, as well as all the unreleased SimProv Wedding Playset objects that Heather and Donna and Steve and I created years ago but never finished and released, and a whole bunch of other stuff like the Transmogrifier object that randomly changes your body, the Dumbold voting machine that sometimes makes you accidentally vote for Pat Buchanan, Satan who shows up when you're depressed and offers to buy your soul, the Crowd Sitter that makes everyone gather together and sit down on chairs, and the Cupid that lets you instantly fall in love with anyone in the neighborhood, and the Buddha that makes everyone happy and not piss themselves and fall asleep in their own puddles of urine during parties.
I don't have time to actually support and debug any of this stuff, but at least I recently updated the Cupid to be compatible with the Pets expansion pack, so it now lets you fall in love with any pet in the neighborhood. (You just can't actually marry them -- not that there's anything wrong with marrying cats and dogs, but we didn't have the animations for that!)
If you want to express your appreciation, then please subscribe to Zombie Sims for a $9.99 lifetime membership, and then you can play around with inviting lots of Zombies to your weddings and see how that works! (Or don't invite them, and they will crash your wedding anyway!) But no guarantees or warranties that it doesn't devolve into a bloody mess!
Here's my special collection of Sims 1 downloads, including the unreleased and not quite finished "SimProv" wedding Playset and handy "Cupid" that lets you instantly fall in love with anyone in the neighborhood (including pets)!
Speed Dating With Cupid: A demo of Speed Dating with Cupid, part of the SimProv Wedding Play Set for The Sims 1. Programming by Don Hopkins. Graphics by SimBabes and SimFreaks.
To find the Cupid and other Simprov items, go into buy mode, press the last icon of three dots for "Miscellaneous", then press the first icon with a pool table for "Recreation". The main item of the Simprov wedding playset is the "Hope Chest", which has a "Help" item that explains what to do next, and it summons a wedding consultant (who you can dismiss and call back if you don't like her hanging around in your bedroom forever). Then you can click on the hope chest to make other objects like the Cupid, and click on the wedding consultant to make catalogs of other items (most of them are just placeholder programmer art right now, but some of then configure things like what kind of wedding you will have and who will officiate it), but the idea was that you could order lots of items through the catalogs that you couldn't get through the normal shopping interface. But for now most of the wedding items are still in the build mode shopping catalog. The Simprov Wedding Playset video above walks through how to use most of the objects!
Also be sure to check out Donna's beautiful wedding beds, the luxurious buffet with ice dolphin sculpture, gold inlaid glass dining table, fancy dollhouses, elegant dolls, and many other premium objects identified as Simprov, SimBabes, and SimFreaks in their catalog descriptions.
Heather and Steve were both early Sims 1 fans who each published their own popular web sites with downloadable objects, met through the Sims 1 modding community, then eventually moved in together and got married, and now they've combined their extreme art and programming talents to make an intricately intertwingled collection of Sims 1 Zombie objects, with a whole lot of original artwork and programming!
Pizza Hut pan pizza is the easiest pizza to make yourself at home. You don't need a stand mixer, it's a no knead recipe (long overnight rise builds all the gluten). You don't need a fancy super hot oven, it just cooks at 400 degrees F in a cast iron skillet. Give this recipe a shot, it's unbelievably good and very accessible: https://www.seriouseats.com/foolproof-pan-pizza-recipe or https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=-srfPL5CWZs
This model works really well. For example, simple things like [1], [2], and [3] can apparently be generated with just a couple of prompts.
[1] https://koreanrandom.com/en/games/through-the-space/
[2] https://koreanrandom.com/en/games/tanchiki/
[3] https://koreanrandom.com/en/games/sharik/
According to the author, these were made with Gemini 2.5 Pro without any manual coding by a human.
Cursor isn't as powerful as Gemini in AI Studio because AI Studio gives you full control over the model's settings and how it processes code.
Plus, the massive 1 million token context window is incredibly helpful for working with large codebases. You can use tools like code2prompt and repomix to feed all the necessary context into AI Studio from the clipboard for those projects.