Anyone got open source alternatives to vanna.ai for text to SQL? The SQL part is pretty good but the plotly charts it recommends are wonky.

I’ve also been playing with dbt - and considered sqlmesh instead. Chose to go deeper with dbt as I feel like sqlmesh’s real value shines when you want to avoid transforming the data both in dev and prod. … and I’m just prototyping stuff locally to play with different open source BI frontends.

Last week I did some experimentation with unstructured.io to extract content out of some pdfs. Also played with github.com/getomni-ai/z... as a more lightweight option. Overall, vision models do a much better job than classic OCR (ex: tesseract) on tables in docs.

Here’s a decent overview of the data pipeline orchestration tools on the market. dataengineeringcentral.substack.com/p/review-of-...

I spent some time this week playing with some tools to setup a data pipeline for simple BI and data science. Played with airbyte, dbt, duckdb and metabase. Planning on trying lightdash next week. Trying to avoid hosted data warehouses and use open source for the full chain.

Interesting compensation model.

I published some notes on OpenAI's new text-to-speech and speech-to-text models. They're promising, but like other LLM-driven multi-modal models they appear to suffer from the prompt-injection-adjacent problem of mixing instructions and data in the same token stream simonwillison.net/2025/Mar/20/...

Love that #econsky is here. A few years ago, I started listening to podcasts about the economy during my runs and I feel like it massively helped me learn more about how the world works.

It’s surprising how much N, and how much separation you need to detect something like a 10% difference in A/B testing results. And a 10% lift in something (e.g. conversions) is pretty large. The math:

Has anyone here attempted to use the most recent multimodal models to build a replacement for Azure Document Intelligence or Amazon Textract? (Something that works on arbitrary forms.)

This tariff chaos is an opportunity for Canadian entrepreneurs, but also bad actors. Looked online for new places to buy furnace air filters. Found a Canadian manufacturer. Great price. Sells retail and wholesale. Problem? I have no idea if they’re legit.

I like seeing this kind of data being shared. I wonder if that first filter includes applicants from other countries with zero related qualifications for the in-office role.

Apparently @profanity.accountant counts swear words instead of beans.

This isn’t a rhetorical question, genuinely curious: Does Amazon make any money when someone buys a dozen CR2032 batteries for five bucks with free next day shipping in a big box? My best guess is no, but the drop shipper paid monthly fees for the privilege of having items in the warehouse?

Exa Websets — Search, but good It's an agentic search, like DeepResearch, but instead of producing a 70-page treatise it just gives you a list of pages you never would have found on your own blog: exa.ai/blog/websets... try it: websets.exa.ai

It's weird talking to CTOs on both ends of this spectrum. One end has their inbox flooded with junk applicants. The other barely has any applicants for legit roles. Factors: full-remote vs hybrid, tech stack, AI vs no AI, sexy startup vs regular ol' company.

338 is at an Idiocracy-level of ads. <slowly backs away>

This was an interesting read for a few reasons. 1) to Vicky’s point, it appears we’re re-inventing the wheel with an inefficient generalist tool 2) but I’m seeing it as empowering for generalist engineers - as long as they can map complex problems to fundamentals drive.google.com/file/d/1DsIs...

This is a crazy paper. Fine-tuning a big GPT-4o on a small amount of insecure code or even "bad numbers" (like 666) makes them misaligned in almost everything else. They are more likely to start offering misinformation, spouting anti-human values, and talk about admiring dictators. Why is unclear.

Within the last six weeks, if stored in optimal conditions, this asset class has appreciated about 60% in the USA. Follow Charles for more investment insights.

Claude Code a terminal-based code agent that understands your code base and completes tasks, PRs, etc. this looks extremely advanced. i may stop using Cursor 🤔 docs.anthropic.com/en/docs/agen...

Surprised/happy to discover a French Canadian character in White Lotus s3. I’m guessing she’ll end up an outright horrible person like all the others in the show. 😂 #quebec

I’ve helped a few friends improve the quality of their legacy systems. Each time, I started by focusing on their data. From the db, I reversed engineered business rules… and compared that to what they told me the rules were. …and uncovered several bugs that had gone unnoticed.

Always a good laugh when a leadgen company InMails me about ‘challenges’ I must be facing… at the company I sold years ago. For a business built on outreach, you’d think they’d have better QA.

Today I learned some people pay a subscription fee for their bed. And that their bed has a backdoor letting the company ssh into your home network. Swell! www.reddit.com/r/technology...

Can’t believe I’m about to watch some hockey tonight. (By “some”, I mean it’ll be the only 4 minutes I’ve spent watching hockey since WordPerfect was a thing.) #4nations

Someone needs to make a job search site targeting tech folks which aggregates other job sites but rewords job ads so the tech stack appears at the top! An LLM would make light work of that.

This is a very interesting point. Everyone who produced high quality source materials is struggling to monetize it and is mad that AI is stealing their work. Won’t take long before it’s all paywalled and our best sources will be reddit’s AndyLuvsCats42 who did 8 min of research on facebook.

I've ignored the low toner warning on my printer for over one year. Guess I'm kind of a rebel after all.

Wish I had noticed the new Lacuna Coil album dropped earlier today while I was coding… and not tonight while I was doing the dishes. But first listen sounds good!

Calling all jerks from my network: Mike needs your input.

Just spent too much time figuring out why my DNS changes weren't propagating.... Turns out a had a typo in the domain I added to cloudflare.

I’ve lacked time to play with all the new toys but am installing Le Chat now and giving it a whirl. On one hand, I feel like it’s coming in late but, on the other, we saw how quickly DeepSeek built momentum. We’re starting an era where chatbot differentiation is getting harder to market.

Pumped that I’ll be getting between $0.50 and $2.50 in Uber Eats coupons following a class action settlement in Quebec! Gonna blow this windfall on some delicious beavertails!

Been enjoying time learning new languages (python and Spanish) these past few months. Feels like a productive use of my time and a good way to stay away from doomscrolling! Hope the snow melts soon to start running again!

Interesting read.

Found a couple of old nintendo ds consoles packed away. It’s kind of wild to be able to play worms multiplayer 15 or so years later without needing the internet or a subscription!

Confetti is a nice touch for 28m users!

Today, someone on here banned me for making a pineapple on pizza joke. For the record, I love fruit on pizza. (Pineapple, tomatoes, olives and peppers are all fruit.)

Seeing people’s bluesky block counts on clearsky.app reminds me of a black mirror episode. “Oh this dude looks harmless, but he’s gotten blocked 95 times so he must be sending shady dms.”

Entrepreneurship is a journey into loneliness. Sometimes you only realize it when you’re in the thick of it. #buildinpublic

0 points too. And I’ve also used a TV guide.

'Your banking details may have been exposed!' ... says some random antivirus software a family member installed 7 years ago if you haven't purchased their VPN software. Build in public crew: are you also your family's tech support? #buildinpublic

Found an interesting way to see if ChatGPT was bullshitting me today. I was playing with mysql CTEs that were slow. I didn’t want them to get materialized. It told me just add WITH INLINE. That didn’t work. It made me check if I was using version 8.0.21 or above.

You are stuck in your tech bubble. You keep launching projects no one asks for. You keep solving problems only devs care about. You should spend some time talking to people who dont know what an api is. There's a whole world out there.

"You can't use that stock photo, the dude's too ugly! He'll scare away your prospects!" ... when you ask a friend to peek at your landing page ... when that stock photo is actually of you #buildinpublic

Stumbled on this browser-based image editor by Microsoft designer.microsoft.com/home It supports a bunch of fancy features. Thought I would share. I just wanted to strip out a bg and the other tools I used didn't let me select all the objects I wanted to keep.

Ohh Nine Inch Nails world tour being leaked, with at least one Canadian date! lambgoat.com/news/45575/n...

@mladenmacanovic.bsky.social was scrolling through folks I added through random lists when I started and spotted you. I am curious. With a project like yours, what kind of “help” would you like to get - that’s not directly development related? Is it docs? Is it testing? Is it biz dev? Other?

Today’s one of those days…. A trivial task like programmatically checking if a URL is still working brought me down a rabbit hole. My test was timing out. Turns out some kind of scraper protection on that website made me waste a bunch of time.