Raw notes include useful resources, incomplete thoughts, ideas, and learnings as I go about my day. You can also subscribe to the RSS feed to stay updated.
Total Notes: 168
If you're active in the AI field, you must have heard the term MCP, but now there's a new protocol in the market – Agent Communication Protocol (ACP) which you should definitely take a look.
They define this as:
ACP is an open protocol for communication between AI agents, applications, and humans.
Very cool.
Apple is about to launch the macOS 26 Tahoe, and they have removed the Launchpad from the OS. But I came across a post to learn that there's a way to bring back the launchpad in macOS 26.
The trick is, you have to run these commands in your terminal:
sudo mkdir -p /Library/Preferences/FeatureFlags/Domain
sudo defaults write /Library/Preferences/FeatureFlags/Domain/SpotlightUI.plist SpotlightPlus -dict Enabled -bool false
But I have not tried it... so you have to be careful while running the commands.
Came across this post on X which announces that FireCrawl is launching an open-source version of SEMrush but focused on AI-based search engines.
They also have a demo video attached in the announcement tweet, which suggests that it currently works for ChatGPT, Claude, and Perplexity. The tool will be able to detect if your website and your competitors' appear in these search engines for the provided terms.
I am guessing when a term is put in the tool, it generates most probable related questions that people would normally ask, runs through available AI engines, and then detects if the website appears in the answer. And then shows the data accordingly.
But will love to see how this works out, it's launching next week.
I wrote this post titled "the idea of second brain is useless" only a few months ago and then came across this post from Joan Westenberg talking about deleting her second brain. The second brain was built using Obsidian, and it didn't work for her in the way she expected, in fact, it became burden.
But over time, my second brain became a mausoleum. A dusty collection of old selves, old interests, old compulsions, piled on top of each other like geological strata. Instead of accelerating my thinking, it began to replace it. Instead of aiding memory, it froze my curiosity into static categories.
The article is really well-written, and I loved reading it. I hope, I will be able to articulate my thoughts and write in this way, some day.
My new system is, simply, no system at all. I write what I think. I delete what I don’t need. I don’t capture everything. [...]
I don’t want to manage knowledge. I want to live it.
Basically, this post resonates with me a lot because I also stopped capturing "everything" in Obsidian only a while ago.
Came to know about this cool app called SmartTube which can be installed on any Android-based devices, including Android TVs, and then play YouTube without ads and with other features.
It's completely free to use, and I got to know about this from a reply on X under one of my posts.
I published about this earlier that OpenAI acquires Windsurf but turns out the deal was short-lived, and it completely failed now.
As per The Verge news, the OpenAI's Windsurf deal is off now and Windsurf might be going to Google DeepMind. And this has already been confirmed by this post from Logan Kilpatrick announcing about Varun Mohan (CEO, Windsurf) and the team joining DeepMind.
There isn't any news about Google acquiring Windsurf, yet, but most probably, they will be implementing and optimizing Gemini top models in the agentic coding tool. But the thing is Gemini already has the Gemini CLI agentic coding tool, and it will be very interesting to see how this all pans out.
The eyes will be on Cursor AI as well, as Claude CLI is giving tough competition to it.
Windows 11 has an inbuilt hard-coded keyboard shortcut for opening LinkedIn, which can't be disabled. Pressing the Ctrl+Shift+Alt+Windows+L (left Alt) hotkey opens LinkedIn in the default browser. I got to know about this from this post on X, and the tweet mentions that the LinkedIn hotkey is treated with the same level of sacrosanctity as Crtl+Alt+Delete.
And the reason for this is that Microsoft owns LinkedIn and that's why the hotkey is being treated as this important.
Came across this brilliant post from Jasmine Sun, where she suggests staring at walls instead of feed scrolling, because that makes us creative. The exact tweet reads:
you can become 10x more creative & productive if you replace “feed scrolling” time with “staring at walls” instead. this is not a joke
(also why your best ideas show up during showers & flights)
And I completely agree with this, because I also used to say that the more "bored" you are, the more "creative" and "productive" you can be.
Google Fonts has released a new interesting font called TikTok Sans as announced in this post. They claim that:
TikTok Sans is a font inspired by and made for online creators, visionaries, and storytellers.
Currently, I am using the Helvetica Neue font for my personal blog and loving it so far. But will definitely try this new TikTok Sans on some project.
Read this blog post from DHH titled "It must be worth it even if it doesn't work" that I really loved:
The way to work without regrets is to pursue projects that'll have been worth your time even if they don't pan out. Projects that'll tickle your curiosity, flex your competency, and teach you something new regardless of where they ultimately end up. Projects that leave you better off, as a person, despite not being a commercial or critical success. If you work on projects like this, it's impossible to waste your time.
My personal nightmare is investing years of my life into something that ends up going nowhere, and then feeling like it was all for nothing. That's how life slips through your fingers. That's how you cross over from your 20s to your 30s and curse what you missed along the way because the bet didn't pay out.
When you look for projects that'll be worth it even if they don't work, you know you'll engage the fires of intrinsic motivation. Tap into the magic of flow. Look with satisfaction at a good day's work, well before you're done.
That's a work of meaning.
DHH has created some cool opinionated frameworks for different Linux distros:
Omakub: for Ubuntu
Turn a fresh Ubuntu installation into a fully-configured, beautiful, and modern web development system by running a single command. That’s the one-line pitch for Omakub. No need to write bespoke configs for every essential tool just to get started or to be up on all the latest command-line tools. Omakub is an opinionated take on what Linux can be at its best.
Omarchy: for Arch Linux
Turn a fresh Arch installation into a fully-configured, beautiful, and modern web development system based on Hyprland by running a single command. That's the one-line pitch for Omarchy (like it was for Omakub). No need to write bespoke configs for every essential tool just to get started or to be up on all the latest command-line tools. Omarchy is an opinionated take on what Linux can be at its best.
I have used Linux for a long time in the past, but I am yet to get another Linux machine and I will surely be using these frameworks.
While scrolling on X, I came across this post that shared the Richard Feynman's quote on the beauty of a flower. And it's amazing:
I have a friend who’s an artist and has sometimes taken a view which I don’t agree with very well. He’ll hold up a flower and say “look how beautiful it is,” and I’ll agree. Then he says “I as an artist can see how beautiful this is but you as a scientist take this all apart and it becomes a dull thing,” and I think that he’s kind of nutty. First of all, the beauty that he sees is available to other people and to me too, I believe…
I can appreciate the beauty of a flower. At the same time, I see much more about the flower than he sees. I could imagine the cells in there, the complicated actions inside, which also have a beauty. I mean it’s not just beauty at this dimension, at one centimeter; there’s also beauty at smaller dimensions, the inner structure, also the processes. The fact that the colors in the flower evolved in order to attract insects to pollinate it is interesting; it means that insects can see the color. It adds a question: does this aesthetic sense also exist in the lower forms? Why is it aesthetic? All kinds of interesting questions which the science knowledge only adds to the excitement, the mystery and the awe of a flower. It only adds. I don’t understand how it subtracts.
How interesting!
I create a lot of Markdown (.md) files, but can't directly preview them by pressing the Spacebar button, like for other type of files. So I started looking for ways to enable this, and found some solutions for this:
.md files.And apart from these, I found some good discussions about it on Reddit and StackExchange as well.
Came across this tweet on X where it's mention how the combo of Laravel and React for building web apps can be the best solution out there. The post reads:
The perfect stack doesn't exi...
Laravel backend
- auth out of the box
- payments out of the box
- background jobs out of the box
React frontend
- AI models know it well
- shadcn is so damn easy (and pretty)
- Huge design ecosystem
All running easily on a $10/mo VPS 😍
It does seem interesting so I asked ChatGPT to explain how this works and how this can be hosted, and here is how it explained. I haven't tried this but will definitely try soon.
I had to transfer a domain from Namesilo to Cloudflare, so below are the steps that I took to complete the transfer within just 15 minutes:
And it was accepted on Cloudflare within 1-2 minutes.
I remember that this manually approving the transfer works on most domain registrars as I have done this earlier between some registrars as well.
mcp-containers is a GitHub repo which claims to be a "Containerized versions of hundreds of MCP servers 📡 🧠", and it seemed very interesting to me. Basically, it's a Docker image that you can pull and start using the available cool MCP servers.
This is the website, and the limit is on the number of MCP messages per month. There is a free plan with a limited number of messages, so you can try it out.
As per this X post about LiveCodeBench, almost all LLMs are bad at competitive programming. At the time of writing this, the o3-high (2025-04-16) model was the best at medium difficulty programming (which I don't believe, but haven't really used o3 a lot, so I'd like to believe it).
But I do agree that none of the models are good at hard difficulty programming tasks. I have used them extensively and, while they are a great assistant, they are not good at complex tasks.
Found this interesting video clip of DHH talking about the season of saying "no" and the season of saying "yes". I found this fascinating, and have even transcribed what he says in the video.
I have the season of no and I have the season of yes. I mostly run in the season of no. And when I'm in the season of no, I say no to almost everything just automatically. No, I'm not going to come to the conference. No, I'm not going to come on the podcast. In fact, podcasting is a great example right now. I'd said yes to you during a season of yes. I'd said yes to a bunch of appearances, and that season is well past. I've been saying no to every inbound, every inbound podcast invitation. I get quite a few. And I've just said like, hey, reach back out in September. I'm in a season of no. I'm just not going to entertain that. And I find that that at times is an easier way for people to accept a no is that it's a not right now. And I leave it open that like, hey, do you know what, six months from now might be it.
By the way, I used Google AI Studio and Gemini 2.5 Pro model to transcribe the video, and it did a great job as you can see above.
A new paper titled "Design Patterns for Securing LLM Agents against Prompt Injections" has been recently published where they discuss 6 different design patterns to prevent LLM Agents from prompt injection attacks.
I got to know about this from Simon Willison's post, and he has also written a detailed blog post about the paper.
I also discovered this SAIF Risk Map from Google, which Daniel Di Bartolo shared under Simon's tweet. Basically, it's a mental model for securing complex AI systems and SAIF stands for Secure AI Framework. And they have also recently published a paper titled "Google's Approach for Secure AI Agents", which seems interesting.
I recorded a 1-hour-long video explaining the different ways to do programmatic SEO in WordPress, and have included 4 different approaches in the video:
All these methods are well explained in the video, but have their own advantages and disadvantages. The #1 is the most advanced and customizable but requires a complex setup.
You can also learn more about programmatic SEO at UntalkedSEO.
Found this post by Richard C. Suwandi where he shared a blog post that discusses the new paper by Deepmind titled "General agents need world models". Below is the full post content:
2 years ago, @ilyasut made a bold prediction that large neural networks are learning world models through text.
Recently, a new paper by @GoogleDeepMind provided a compelling insight to this idea. They found that if an AI agent can tackle complex, long-horizon tasks, it must have learned an internal world model—and we can even extract it just by observing the agent's behavior.
I wrote a blog post unpacking this groundbreaking paper and what it means for the future of AGI 👇
https://richardcsuwandi.github.io/blog/2025/agents-world-models/
Will be going through the post this weekend.
Found this amazing photo by Debbie Parker which captures the lightning strike on a tree in West Virginia. But I also noticed that people are mistakenly mentioning the photographer's name to be Donnie Dania, as in this and this post.
I really don't know which one is correct, but the photo is amazing. Nature is lit, literally.
As per this post, I got to know that ChatGPT is now showing the o3-pro model in the dropdown. This is the most advanced reasoning model as claimed by OpenAI.
I tried checking but couldn't find in my ChatGPT Plus account, so... is it only available to Pro users? Not sure.
Also, found another tweet that mentions that this model "thinks" for a very long time. A simple "hi" can make the model think up to 3 or even 13 minutes. But then a lot of people are also mentioning that o3-pro is very good.
Found a post on X where there's a video with all interactions of Apple's new Liquid Glass UI. Super cool to look at.
Came across this GitHub repo about an all-in-one open source AI model called VACE, which can create and edit videos of several kinds. They introduce the model as:
VACE is an all-in-one model designed for video creation and editing. It encompasses various tasks, including reference-to-video generation (R2V), video-to-video editing (V2V), and masked video-to-video editing (MV2V), allowing users to compose these tasks freely. This functionality enables users to explore diverse possibilities and streamlines their workflows effectively, offering a range of capabilities, such as Move-Anything, Swap-Anything, Reference-Anything, Expand-Anything, Animate-Anything, and more.
VACE can also be found on Hugging Face and this is the research paper attached to it. The detailed usage instructions is also provided in the docs.