I often find myself staring at a wall of text online. It could be a lengthy technical article, a detailed news report, or a deep-dive blog post. My first thought is often: “Is this worth the time to read in full?” On top of that, for my podcast, Les Cast Codeurs, I’m constantly gathering links and need to create quick shownotes, which is essentially… a summary.

My first attempt to solve this was a custom Gemini Gems I created: a personalized chatbot that could summarize links. It worked, but I often ran into a wall: it couldn’t access paywalled content, pages that required a login, or dynamically generated sites that I was already viewing in my browser. The solution was clear: I needed to bring the summarization to the content, not the other way around. The idea for a Chrome extension was born.

Generative AI use cases are usually about running large language models somewhere in the cloud. However, with the advent of smaller models and open models, you can run them locally on your machine, with projects like llama.cpp or Ollama.

And what about in the browser? With MediaPipe and TensorFlow.js, you can train and run small neural networks for tons of fun and useful tasks (like recognising hand movements through the webcam of your computer), and it’s also possible to run Gemma 2B and even 7B models.

A while ago, my friend Sylvain Wallez shared a little bookmarlet
on Twitter/X that transforms a dark mode site into light mode.
I know the trend is towards dark mode, but for a lot of people with certain vision issues,
for example with astigmatism like me, certain dark modes can very painful.

This site about vision
(and you’ll find other similar references) mentions that:

People who have myopia or astigmatism also may experience halation (from the word “halo”).
Halation occurs when light spreads past a certain boundary, creating a foggy or blurry appearance.

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Probably like most of you, my dear readers, I have too many browser windows open, with tons of tabs for each window. But there are always apps I come back to very often, like my email (professional & personal), my calendar, my chat app, or even social media sites like Mastodon or Twitter. You can switch from window to window with CTRL/CMD-Tab, but you also have to move between tabs potentially. But for the most common webapps or websites I’m using, I wanted to have a dedicated desktop application.

On the Google Cloud front today, the big news is the release of the new Node.JS 8 runtime for Google App Engine Standard. It’s been a while since a completely new runtime was added to the list of supported platforms (Python, Java, PHP, Go). You could already run anything in custom containers on App Engine Flex, including your own containerized Node app, but now you can have all the nice developer experience on the Standard environment, with fast deployment times, and 0 to 1 to n instance automatic scaling (you can see the difference between those two environments here).