“Feature parity with Arc” was a useful research prompt. It was a terrible implementation ticket. A model can list product features all day: compact chrome, command palette, floating agent panel, split view. That list does not tell an agent, or a test, what done means. Visual resemblance is not a state transition. I needed the boring form: each inspiration becomes an invariant the browser can…
I have been designing how agents talk to Narada. Before I locked too much of that interface in, I did something a bit sideways: I pointed Computer Use at other browsers on purpose. I was not trying to automate Arc or Chrome forever. I wanted the model to click around the way I would. Open a command. Switch tabs. Open a panel. Notice what happens to focus and the pointer. Then write down the bits…
If an agent can act inside a browser, who should remember what it is allowed to do? The model could remember. The application that connected it could remember. A chat panel could keep a list somewhere. All three answers work until the model changes, another client connects, or the user takes control of the tab. The browser is the only part of this system that sees the whole situation. It knows…
Once models learned to read screenshots and move a pointer, browser agents started to feel almost obvious. A person can use a website by looking at it and clicking things. Let the model do the same. It is a remarkably general interface. It is also a strange interface to use inside a browser. The browser already knows which tab is active. It knows the URL, whether a navigation is still running,…
For most of its existence, the browser has made a simple assumption: there is a person sitting in front of it. The person knows why a tab is open. They can tell whether a button looks suspicious, decide when to share information, and notice when the page did not do what it was supposed to. The browser provides the page, the controls, and some security boundaries. The person supplies the intent.…
I had been living the “Windows free” life for almost 10 years even since I switched over to first Linux Mint , then Ubuntu and lately Pop!_OS . Over these years, I went to university, learnt programming and earned 2 degrees in Computer Science, all the while programming on Ubuntu/the CLI. This changed in 2019 when I joined Microsoft as a Software Engineer and I had to familiarize myself with…
7 CSS declarations and a/an (optional) font import is all it takes to change a drab basic website to a minimalistic easy to read piece of beauty. @import url('https://fonts.googleapis.com/css?family=Fira+Sans:300'); body { font-family: 'Fira Sans', sans-serif; line-height: 1.6; color: #222; max-width: 40rem; padding: 2rem; margin: auto; background: #fafafa; } Let’s go over this. font-family sets a…
I use docker a lot, so much so that I even run PostgreSQL and MySQL on docker rather than having them installed locally. This makes much more sense when you have a local and production setup like mine where both run around docker. And so, every once in a while, I encounter a situation where I have to backup my Postgres databases. I use the standard official postgres docker image from Docker Hub .…
Over the past year, I have been working on Gratiato , a social networking site for students, teachers and researchers to share papers, find relevant research and collaborators. Gratiato is built on top of Ruby on Rails with sprinkles of Vue for a very dynamic and interactive UI. Thus, the website is a multi-page Rails app interspersed with Vue components. These components are written in .vue…
This post has been crossposted from the Zense Blog . Microsoft recently announced that it is buying GitHub for $7.5 billion dollars , and predictably, there’s a developer backlash . Microsoft’s history with acquisitions has not been good, notably Skype, Wunderlist and Nokia. However, in recent years that has not been the case. Satya Nadella has been an incredible game changer for Microsoft.…
Requirements: Ubuntu, Java 1. Install Java: sudo apt install openjdk-8-jdk 2. Download the latest run deck debian packages from this link http://rundeck.org/download/deb 3. Install the package using the following command sudo dpkg -i {rundeck package name} 4. You can now start the Rundeck server using: sudo service rundeckd start 5. Now you can access the server at the url: http://localhost:4440…
I have been playing around with Docker for a while. I use Docker for all of my Rails development and deployment tasks. So, every once in a while I encounter a situation where I have to enter the root user mode in the Docker container. If you think that the solution to the above problem is simply: $ docker run -it <container_name> sudo bash , then you will find that sudo is not included by default…
Over the past few months, I have been working on a project titled Goodwill Currency for the Web Science Lab @ IIIT-B . It is a Ruby on Rails based portal with a VueJS frontend. One of the interesting challenges that I came across was search. Since most of the content on this portal will be hidden behind a login wall, we need a custom search solution. Enter Solr and Sunspot. Solr is a OpenSource…
Abstract A nation-state is a geopolitical entity with the cultural entity of a nation, from which it aims to derive its political legitimacy to rule. A few key features of the nation-state are: A Sovereign Government Exclusive/Semi-exclusive Citizenship Territorial Integrity or Territorial Impermeability Nationalism as the core Philosophy The Web and Internet are two of the most significant…
I have been working on a project as a part of Web Science Lab @ IIIT-B which is essentially an online marketplace of content. I am building this marketplace using Ruby on Rails 5 for backend and VueJS for a rich frontend. The marketplace has Resources and Users. There are other models in the platform as well but for the sake of this post, Resources and Users are the models of interest. Users can…
VueJS is a snazzy new frontend Javascript Framework that helps build reactive User Interfaces. I have been following VueJS since its beta and have recently been using it extensively for my projects. I use VueJS with Ruby on Rails. So far this was done by writing the Vue components as individual erb partials and then include them in the UI as shown below. VueJS would compile the components and…
26th January. The Republic day of India. And the day which evokes the patriotism of a lot of people across the country. Different kinds of patriotism. There are those who shout out “Happy Republic Day” on all social networks and post pictures of themselves with a plastic national flag, one that will be on the ground at the day comes to an end. Then there are those who call out the former as “fake…
7 p.m. I was outside my home, on the patio, with a friend discussing the results on the Indian General Elections 2014. An Ice-Creamwala, with his cart - he sells his wares on the corner of the street - called me up and asked: “भईया इलेक्शन का क्या नतीजा आया?” What do the Election results say? I told him. BJP has itself secured a majority and with its allies, is 330+ strong. No more coalition…
I love Wordpress. We all love WordPress. With that being said I would like to declare that I love the idea of WordPress. I love its community. Its far reaching presence and the ease with which one can start working with it. However, I hate, better said, I despise, WordPress’s Administration interface. I absolutely hate it! The clutter, the tacky menus and the pain to work with it in mobile. Phew!…
Yesterday (13 September 2013), I got the oppertunity to be asked by Navdeep Singh Rana, the owner and admin of IndiaExam.in, to design a logo for IndiaExam. I have made a few logos here but almost all them were either for my personal projects or just for fun. This one was a serious one. For the first time, my work was to be used by a large entity and is to be viewed and appreciated by a lacs of…
I love blogging. Having said that I would like to emphasise that I love blogging not blog handling. But as those two come in packages, I have to deal with it. I tried a lot of blogging solutions, Wordpress, Tumblr, Blogger, Octopress and Jekyll-Bootstrap. And frankly I hate them all now. WordPress is just too clunky to satisfy my needs of a simplistic blog. Tumblr far too minimalistic and its…
I’ve been working for years to create a logo for my company ArkoMan(nonexistent yet!). But I’ve finally come up with something. Here’s the result after an hour of Illustrating and years of conceptualizing. So hows it? Tell me in the comments.
Me: I’ve finally decided to let go of Octopress. You: Why? Me: Because its too complex for my needs. You: Oh Come on! That can’t be the reason. If Octopress is so complex, why are others using it? And anyways, you have not written that much that you can decide whether Octopress is easy or complex. Me: Alright, that is not the reason. The reason is I’m in love with Prose.io. Yup, thats right.…
Hi! My name is Gaurav Koley and I’m the writer of, well, all that you currently see on your screen (Provided this page is the only thing that is on your screen). So here I am about to tell you a brief and a not so brief story of my doings. As you already know that my name is Gaurav Koley, I might a well move on to other things. I was born in a small town Chinsurah, near Kolkata, India on 18…