Dan Tuohy

Dan Tuohy

@tripsnek.com

tripsnek.com - Europe Travel Planner and Itinerary Optimizer Software person. Primarily Node/Angular/TypeScript. AI R&D since 2005. Things I like: Static types, genetic algorithms, Rick Steves, liberal democracy 📍Atlanta, Georgia

2.1K followers1K following3.4K posts

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tripsnek, in a nutshell: Tell it where you want to go, how you like to travel, what you're into. As much or as little detail as you want. It builds an efficient, multi-modal route, filling gaps with a Rick Steves-like "view" of Europe. Edit & iterate until it's perfect, get all sorts of handy tips

Joined the atlanta coalition ensemble for nokings yesterday. The set list is basically new orleans brass, outkast, and old anti-fascist songs. Such a fun thing to exist. Don't get many excuses to honk a trumpet these days

Just added a new thing: Language Brush up tripsnek.com/brushup Specifically designed for those with some background, but are rusty, and are about to travel. It consists entirely of the content you are most likely to actually need. Ultimately just a fancy flash card deck, but with some bonuses...

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The system also allows you to specify your date of travel, so it can project *into the future* the degree to which you are likely to retain everything based on your performance. So you get two summary numbers: recall right now, and recall expected at your date of travel.

With no account, your progress is stored locally, so just make sure to use the same device. With an account (free, no obligation), it will automatically transfer between devices so you can practice wherever. Any and all feedback most welcome. tripsnek.com/brushup

tripsnek.comLanguage Brush Up: Travel Phrase Flash Cards | TripSnekQuick daily flash cards that keep the travel phrases you’ll need fresh: ordering, check-in, directions, tickets, getting help. In French, Spanish, Italian and German.

Just added a new thing: Language Brush up tripsnek.com/brushup Specifically designed for those with some background, but are rusty, and are about to travel. It consists entirely of the content you are most likely to actually need. Ultimately just a fancy flash card deck, but with some bonuses...

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* Each card is optionally linked to cheat sheets for underlying language concepts if you want to drill down * When appropriate, each card can have pragmatic usage tips describe why and when you use the phrase

You can choose from three levels of coverage: essentials (~150 cards), core (~450) or everything (~1300). Total beginners should choose "essentials", though I would not expect this system to be much more useful than numerous others. This is really designed for those with some background

Just added a new thing: Language Brush up tripsnek.com/brushup Specifically designed for those with some background, but are rusty, and are about to travel. It consists entirely of the content you are most likely to actually need. Ultimately just a fancy flash card deck, but with some bonuses...

View full thread

This provides a structured, principled version of that process. It works like this: * Cards are presented, and progress tracked, using the standard FSRS technique used by Anki. * So the system always has an estimate of your recall for each card and overall, which guides how they are shown

* Each card prioritizes the most common translation in the native language * However, each card also lists alternates, including direct translations that would be perfectly well understood. * If you get *any* of the alternates, credit yourself with "got it". You will be understood!

Just added a new thing: Language Brush up tripsnek.com/brushup Specifically designed for those with some background, but are rusty, and are about to travel. It consists entirely of the content you are most likely to actually need. Ultimately just a fancy flash card deck, but with some bonuses...

This is informed by ~15 summers traveling europe, with a beginner to intermediate understanding of 4 languages (french, spanish, italian, german) derived from conventional language learning. Each year, I practice whichever I am going to need using the usual suspects (duolingo, pimsleur, etc)....

This **does not replace** that type of systematic language learning. However, each year I get the most value-per-minute from low-tech review of travel-oriented tables of common phrases for various contexts. It essentially "stacks the deck", pulling the most useful concepts to front of mind.

Dan Tuohy reposted

Replying to @niedermeyer.online

The horrifying sin at the heart of Tesla's driving automation is the fact that creating a safety critical system that performs an entrancing simulacrum of self-driving is vastly more lucrative (when properly leveraged on Wall Street) than developing a system that actually improves safety.

say what you will he left it all on the field

More damaging revelations about Ken Paxton: A previously unreported New Year’s Eve 2024 celebration where Paxton partied in Dubai with two fugitives from U.S. justice and a woman who wasn’t his wife on.wsj.com/4yKLe4d

VR mods are even more dramatic. It may take years, but eventually VR will be comfortable enough to be a major part of the overall market, and top notch AI-assisted VR ports will already have existed for years as mods to AAA titles bought for $4.99 on steam sale. Titanfall 2 VR feels almost native.

Giovanni Colantonio@marioprime.bsky.social

The “AI game remake” trend kind of feels like a Napster moment for the industry, in that it threatens to permanently devalue a remake/remaster in players eyes as a thing you get for free. And considering that AAA is really coasting on remakes right now, seems bad!

"every joke will be personalized to have exactly the punchline you will most expect"

Bugs 🔜 MC Atlanta@bugsmaytrix.bsky.social

maybe i'm old fashion but the coolest thing about video games is being taken to new worlds that i hadn't thought up and experiencing something exciting that the artists behind the game want to show me

it's odd that we don't have a shared understanding that he gives speeches in the patter and intonation of a 1960s lounge comedian who would have been old even in the 1960s and also none of the jokes would have been funny even in the 1960s

Aaron Rupar@atrupar.com

Trump: "I take an aspirin a day. I don't know if it works but psychologically I need it. It thins the hell out of your blood I guess ... They want me to go down to the 80. I take the 386. I don't know what the hell it is. It's a monster. They said, 'Sir, you don't need that!'"

Dan Tuohy reposted

there remains no more devastating way to write about him than to simply transcribe the words he says, in the order he says them, with accurate punctuation

Aaron Rupar@atrupar.com

I recommend people read this to get a sense of the president's grave cognitive impairment. Trump is either unwilling or unable (or maybe both) to answer the questions he's actually asked, so he just rants and raves while the interviewers do their best to provide structure to his random brain firings

As a fun experiment, I added a natural language interface to tripsnek built around decision models. Same principle as the existing tripsnek: mention start/end city, total nights, then as much other detail as you want. You can try it out here: tripsnek.com/describe Threading with some data.

tripsnek.comDescribe Your Europe Trip in Plain English | TripsnekWrite about a trip to Europe the way you'd explain it to a friend, and Tripsnek builds an editable itinerary around it: start and end cities, stops, dates, pace, how you travel and what you like.
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You could easily do this with conventional LLMs, but its expensive, and tripsnek has no revenue. Decision models supposedly offer the smarts at far less cost, and yep, they sure do - about an order of magnitude in my tests...though at the cost of an order of magnitude more complex supporting code.

But even the code complexity I'm ambivalent about. It puts you back in the land of regexes and text munging. But it's also debuggable, optimizable code. Anyway, (ai-assisted) write up here: tripsnek.com/lab/jev-trip... h/t @hikikomorphism.bsky.social , where I first heard about these models

tripsnek.comJev Reads Trip RequestsAn experiment: we pointed Jev, a decision model that can't write text, at real travel posts and compared it with Claude on the same slot-filling job.

As a fun experiment, I added a natural language interface to tripsnek built around decision models. Same principle as the existing tripsnek: mention start/end city, total nights, then as much other detail as you want. You can try it out here: tripsnek.com/describe Threading with some data.

tripsnek.comDescribe Your Europe Trip in Plain English | TripsnekWrite about a trip to Europe the way you'd explain it to a friend, and Tripsnek builds an editable itinerary around it: start and end cities, stops, dates, pace, how you travel and what you like.

The idea here is to leverage the LLM for what it's good at: figure out the *intent* in natural language, turn it into a set of structured constraints and preferences, then hand off to a purpose-built optimizer with actual data behind it. You can click the checkbox to see all of jev's decisions.

Dan Tuohy reposted

🚨Exclusive🚨: I have exculpatory evidence in what is easily the dumbest congressional oversight episode of the year...maybe the decade. I was at the Iowa v. MD game & just looked at my pics & sure enough, someone who looks like Jack Smith is sitting in Sec 109, Row 1. Complete & total vindication!

"We're gonna be signing a document today renaming the bike shed, because it's not a shed. We're gonna be naming it the Bike House. Official renaming it."

Aaron Rupar@atrupar.com

Trump: "We're gonna be signing a document today renaming artificial intelligence, because it's not artificial. We're gonna be naming it Super Intelligence. Officially renaming it."

CNN@cnn.com

Nvidia has launched a new tool to help keep AI agents from going rogue and operating outside the control of humans. https://cnn.it/3VjRDEP

The most important political project of this era is ensuring that this man's role in history become a cautionary tale to would be imitators.

Jamie Dupree@jamiedupree.bsky.social

Your tax dollars paying for ads of President Trump on today's Washington NFL game

"Knowing how to operate in a denied EW environment wins championships" - Bear Bryant

Awful Announcing@awfulannouncing.bsky.social

Right as Laura Rutledge explains Donald Trump's presence leading to communication issues for Texas and Tennessee, the ABC audio becomes a mess. Chris Fowler and Kirk Herbstreit try to deliver the play-by-play in a painful listen for ABC viewers. 🏈🎙️😵‍💫

"How was the movie?" "Great!" "What was your favorite part?" "Dad bought us gummy worms!"

Aaron Rupar@atrupar.com

tell me the summit accomplished jack shit without telling me the summit accomplished jack shit

Dan Tuohy reposted

BREAKING: The Trump administration’s third-country removal policy is blocked. The First Circuit says the third-country removal final judgment from Judge Murphy is back in effect. “Consistent with this court's September 18, 2026, Judgment, the March 16, 2026, stay pending appeal is dissolved.”

Gillian Brockell@gillianbrockell.com

NEW: Emergency motion asks First Circuit if its decision overturning DHS's third-country removal policy is effective immediately or not. They cite my reporting, and reveal tomorrow's ICE flight to make TCR stops in Central African Republic, Rwanda and Burundi. www.courtlistener.com/docket/72347...

Dan Tuohy reposted

There's plenty of corruption, crimes against humanity, and downright evil shit to focus on, but every so often it strikes me how thoroughly we USians have been exposed and disgraced on the world stage. A country who can elect such a man—twice!—is not a worthy country. We need radical reformation.

Aaron Rupar@atrupar.com

Trump to the UN: "Do I annihilate the Islamic Republic, and do it quickly? Do I drive them into hell?"

Dan Tuohy reposted

i think you can fairly say that the second trump administration is the most racist federal administration since woodrow wilson and honestly i'm not sure that it isn't more racist than wilson's

Rodger Sherman@rodger.bsky.social

Tough competition of course, but the Trump admin deciding that white South Africans are the only group of people on earth currently worthy of refugee status has to be the most overtly racist thing any administration has done in decades

I remember in theory of computation 20 years ago encountering turing's proposition that a human brain could be entirely simulated by a tape head manipulating individual symbols on a tape in sequence, and thinking "wow, that's really neat and seems true" it still does, and its ok

this one clip on its own could make him capitulate

Aaron Rupar@atrupar.com

LMFAO -- Trump is holding an event at the White House right now but there's no audio because the press pool isn't there. The Newsmax host notes that this is an example of Trump's attacks on the press "backfiring just a little bit"

Dude reflexively defends data centers like they are coal plants staffed by credibly accused sex abusers

Faytuks Network@faytuksnetwork.bsky.social

President Trump says he is forming an “AI Force,” modeled after the Space Force, and will soon appoint an AI “czar.” Trump said his administration will not “hinder or stifle” AI growth, saying the technology could eventually account for as much as 25% of U.S. GDP.

Dan Tuohy reposted

I don't understand the hate for RFK Jr.. For YEARS, people have been saying they want a Secretary of Health and Human Services that swims in raw sewage and eats whatever animal carcass they randomly stumble upon. We finally have one and people are STILL unhappy??