Assorted links(January 2025)

Speed matters: Why working quickly is more important than it seems « the jsomers.net blogJames Somers, July 26, 2015REVIEW: Reentry, by Eric BergerReentry: SpaceX, Elon Musk, and the Reusable Rockets that Launched a Second Space Age, Eric Berger (BenBella Books, 2024).Mr. and Mrs. Psmith’s BookshelfJohn PsmithSchool is Not…

TIL: Avoid modifying headers with Dart HTTP package

I'm using the http package to make a POST request to OpenAI, and the API seems to only strictly accept application/sdp as the Content-Type: flutter: Response body: {"error":{"message":"Unsupported content type. This API method only accepts 'application/sdp' requests,…

Book review: The MANIAC by Benjamín Labatut

Historical fiction about von Neumann and AI. This felt different than other historical novels I've read because as far as I could tell, there was no fictional plotlines introduced to the history. The fictional bit is just the first-person narratives from people around von Neumann that never actually…

Gemini file upload in Elixir

If you want to send videos or images to the Google Gemini API, eg for video summarization, you need to upload the video to a separate endpoint and wait for it to get processed. This is described in the Gemini docs, and it's fairly straightforward to translate into…

Implementing distributed pooling in Elixir

In Elixir, once you have clustering set up, it's ridiculously easy to run some code on another node in your cluster: Node.spawn(:"another_beam_instance@10.0.1.2", fn -> # This runs on a different node send(self(), node()) end) receive do response…

TIL: `pg` vs `pg2` Erlang modules

I started reading up on Erlang's pg module(pg = "process groups", it's not related to Postgres!) recently and kept seeing references to pg2. This is quite confusing because pg is the newer module that replaces pg2. From pg.erl's initial commit message:…

FLAME Dashboard

I just released a small Elixir package: flame_dashboard(Hex.pm package). It adds a page to Phoenix LiveDashboard that lets you monitor your FLAME pools. Here's a video showing the dashboard in action: 0:00 /0:13 1×…