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LLMfailramblings

Notes

  • Published

    Ask LLM to return 20% solves 80%, when it gives too many options

    When it gives too many options that feel low effort, ask it for the high impact options.

    LLM

    Sometimes I ask LLMs what to do in some situation, and it may suggest a ton of options.

    This feels low effort on its’ part.

    A solution that seems to work well for me, especially since in that moment I’m annoyed and in no mood to read, is to tell it to focus on the 20% that solves the 80%.

  • Published

    Cursor + Claude 3.7 Is Too Eager. For Some Edits Use Claude 3.5.

    It won't stfu.

    ramblings

    Both 3.7 and 3.7-thinking, sometimes, even though I told them in the prompt, in a rules.md file (and added in to context), and added in the Rules settings, it still add too much code, cluttering my files.

    I’ve found that in such cases, instead of insisting, just restore the files to before Claude 3.7 to where Claude wrote the excessive code, and switch to Claude 3.5. It will likely make the minimal edits needed.

  • Published

    Trying Image Upscalers & Enhancers

    Most image upscalers/enhancers I’ve found aren’t great for with fine details. Image upscalers/enhancers won’t do all the work if you don’t know what you’re doing.

    I was trying to upscale and enhance a photo for a billboard. The client didn’t have a better one, and to get a new one there would be a bureaucracy involved.

    The last time I had tried upscalers was ~2 years ago, and figured they’re really advanced and surely it’ll solve my problem.

    But they didn’t. Now it seems there’s a ton of upscalers, because they’re easy to implement, and you need to find the right one for the job. In my case, there were some blurred elements on the margins, and I didn’t know I wanted them sharpened/enhanced in some way.

    The most sensible one is from TopazLabs. For my case they seemed like the most focused and intuitive upscaler, with some control, that doesn’t degrade the quality of your image.

    I haven’t tried all of them. Some notes:

    • Canva seems to have some sort of app marketplace, and you can try out those apps and see which fits. This felt more time consuming than helpful.
    • I would’ve loved to try Freepik.com’s offering, but they don’t have a free trial for upscaling.
    • iloveimg.com made a reasonable effort.
    • Picwish.com did a reasonable job because it made the parts that were bothering me sharper, which lead me to better understand what I needed to edit.
    • I thought Replicate would be the best, since you get lots of state of the art models and pay based on how much you used each of them, based on their specific pricing. The models I had high hopes for returned an error after waiting 1-2 minutes, so I decided to give up.
  • Published

    Failed: Custom CSS in Glance Dashboard on Coolify

    Documenting a failed attempt to implement custom CSS in Glance dashboard when deployed through Coolify. I'm probably just stupid.

    fail

    First View of Glance

    I wanted to use a custom CSS theme for my Glance dashboard. The default font is JetBrains Mono, which is great for code, but not so great for reading. I wanted to use a custom CSS theme that is more readable.

    Glance is a modern, self-hosted dashboard application that aggregates content from various sources like RSS feeds, Reddit, Hacker News, YouTube, and GitHub into a single customizable interface. It features a widget-based system that lets you monitor everything from weather and stocks to server metrics and site status, all through a clean and minimal UI.

    The Setup

    I recently tried setting up Glance - a sleek dashboard app - using Coolify as my deployment platform. The basic setup was straightforward: create a new service in Coolify, point it to the Glance Docker image, and configure the basics.

    The Custom CSS Challenge

    Glance supports custom CSS through a configuration option in glance.yml:

    theme:
  custom-css-file: custom.css

    And Coolify provides volume mounting to persist files. In theory, this should be simple - mount a volume, add your CSS file, point Glance to it. In practice? Not so much.

    What I Tried

    1. First attempt: Put the CSS file directly in the service directory

      theme:
  custom-css-file: custom.css

    2. Then tried the full path approach:

      theme:
  custom-css-file: /user/assets/custom.css

    3. Moved server config around:

      server:
  host: 0.0.0.0
  port: 8080
  assets-path: /user/assets

    4. Even tried creating a /static directory and putting the CSS there.

    Every attempt resulted in the same thing: a 404 error when trying to access the CSS file.

    The Volume Setup

    In Coolify, the volume was configured as:

    • Source: aks0wk0w84ocgc0os0gs4sgw_glance-assets
    • Destination: /user/assets

    The file was definitely there - I could see it when checking the container:

    $ docker exec -it glance-aks0wk0w84ocgc0os0gs4sgw ls -la /user/assets
total 12
drwxr-xr-x    2 root     root          4096 Jan  1 20:24 .
drwxr-xr-x    3 root     root          4096 Jan  1 20:26 ..
-rw-r--r--    1 root     root            29 Jan  1 20:24 custom.css

    Current Status

    After trying various paths, permissions, and configurations, I still couldn’t get Glance to serve the CSS file. Each attempt resulted in a 404 error when trying to access the CSS file through the web interface.

    For now, I’ve put this project on hold. If anyone has experience with getting custom CSS working in Glance when deployed through Coolify, I’d love to hear about it!