Raw Notes

I came across this tweet where it's explained how to create stunning ads for your product by using the Veo 3 AI model. You can see how high-quality the video ad attached in the tweet is, it's just beautiful.

Below, you can see how the prompt is structured for creating the video:

{
  "description": "Beneath a pristine blue sky, a flawlessly synchronised swarm of bees first weaves in the exact outline of a Billy Bee honey bottle, holding the shape in mid-air, then the spirals tighten and the bees coalesce into a liquid honey form that crystallises into the final bottle.",
  "style": "cinematic, minimal, polished",
  "camera": "begins with a smooth vertical crane shot from sky to swarm, glides through the spiraling bees outlining the bottle shape, then continues in a continuous tracking move as they merge into liquid honey and gracefully settles into a centered close-up on the revealed bottle",
  "lighting": "soft, natural daylight with a delicate rim light outlining the bottle’s edges and highlighting the honey’s warm glow",
  "environment": "expansive sky with a gentle gradient, minimalist and uncluttered",
  "elements": [
    "sleek, choreographed bee swarm in tight spirals",
    "Billy Bee honey bottle (hourglass shape with golden-amber honey)",
    "bright yellow flip-top ‘NO MESS CAP’",
    "yellow and red ‘billybee’ label with winking cartoon bee mascot"
  ],
  "motion": "the swarm first traces the precise contours of the bottle in mid-air, holding the outline momentarily; spirals then tighten uniformly until the bees seamlessly merge into a liquid honey form, which then solidifies into the bottle",
  "ending": "polished hero shot of the bottle hovering mid-air, label and winking mascot in crisp focus, with subtle reflection beneath",
  "text": "none",
  "keywords": [
    "outline reveal",
    "sleek swirl",
    "minimalist sky",
    "harmonised motion",
    "product precision",
    "hero bottle"
  ]
}

Also, people are tweaking the prompt and creating more different kinds of videos which is fascinating to look at. Here's another one.

I think, it would take a professional animator at least 10 hours to create the same level of detailed video manually.

DHH brought a Linux wave among tech-twitter audience, and now a lot of folks are trying his Omakub and Omarchy developer setups. In fact, I am also thinking about getting a Beelink PC for running Omarchy.

However, recently, a person installed Arch Linux with Omarchy on macOS and has also written a detailed guide on doing the same. It's not very straightforward but definitely an easy-to-follow guide.

It uses the Parallels virtualization software for macOS. And I am soon going to try it.

I was creating a Next.js website where a few images were broken at the time and I wanted to show an "image not available" image whenever there are broken 404 images. And somehow I discovered that adding the below lines in the netlify.toml does that gracefully:

# Handle missing images gracefully
 [[redirects]]
  from = "/subfolder/*"
  to = "/image-not-available.png"
  status = 404

And in that subfolder whenever there are broken or 404 images, it automatically redirects them to the fallback image, and in this case, to this image-not-available.png image.

This is amazing.

Came across this tweet that features a tool called Claudometer. It analyzes the sentiment of Claude AI across several Reddit communities and shows the results in an interactive way. At the time of writing this post, the all-time average sentiment is "Slightly Negative" at 48%.

I think, it's a really cool idea to build tools like this. I would definitely keep this in mind and build like this in the future. Also, I already have a few such tools in the projects section.

Sahil Lavingya, founder of Gumroad, has launched a new tool called Gumboard. It's a collaborative to-do list tool which is completely free to use and looks great as well. Gumboard is completely free to use, for now, and works in real-time as well.

I loved the video demo in the announcement tweet (above).

Came across this cool WordPress plugin called View Transitions while watching this YouTube video. Basically, the plugin makes the loading of new pages appear a lot better, as if the entire page didn't re-load at all. Looks very cool.

The plugin works by leveraging the CSS at-rule: @view-transition, but only in the supported browsers. Currently, it works in Google Chrome, Safari, Edge, Opera, etc. web browsers (see more supported browsers here), but doesn't work in Firefox.

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:

1. qlmarkdown: An app and an extension that can be installed to see preview for .md files.
2. glance: Glance is another such tool that can let you see the preview.

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:

1. Logged in to Namesilo, unlocked the domain, turned off WHOIS privacy, and requested transfer code
2. Logged in to Cloudflare, went to the domain transfer page, refreshed the page after 10 minutes, and the domain was already being shown (as it was already on that Cloudflare account).
3. Moved forward, provided the transfer code, and completed the payment ($10.44).
4. Refreshed the transfer manager page on Namesilo after 4 minutes, and approved the transfer for the domain.

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.