2026-04-09 07:13:33
Today I'm sharing a pretty simple micro-app: a Claude skill that you can use in the desktop app or in Claude Code. It lets you pass in a podcast transcript and helps clean it up for you.
The local models we have today for creating transcriptions are really great, but they aren't perfect, and they do get some things wrong, so it's helpful to clean them up. I've tried to help with this issue before. I implemented a Gemini-powered feature in Quick Subtitles that does this, and it works pretty well, but there are some things I want to improve about that feature, and it's limited to transcripts created in that app. Sometimes I have transcript files that were generated elsewhere, so I needed a more universal way to clean them up. That's where this skill comes in.
Now, I know a good percentage of my readers don't like LLMs and scoff at them as simply being fancy autocorrect, but hey, that's literally what this skill does! It's a fancy autocorrect! Obviously, you can do this without a skill, but skills are effectively shorthand to add to your prompt and to add other considerations that the skill creator may have implemented.
For example, when you use this skill, instead of having a long prompt that explains that this is a podcast transcript and lists the names of the hosts and the sorts of things that it could get wrong, you can just say "clean up this transcript," and it'll go ahead and do it. You can either directly tag the skill, or in most cases, Claude will just understand that you probably want to use the skill and will load it for you.
Proper nouns are something that LLMs can often get wrong, especially if they're not typical titles or names. I wanted the skill to be generic, so I didn't hard code anything into it. Instead, I added a memory feature that should make it so that when you first run the skill, it asks you for things like the name of your podcast and the names of the hosts, so it can look up those transcriptions and make sure those are correct. It stores that in Claude's memory, so you don't have to do it every time, although, of course, because Claude is an LLM, you can add these later at any point if you want.
As a quick aside, one of the things that critics of language models often critique is that the output can be a bit fuzzy. Yes, we want the output to be as accurate as possible, but what isn't always appreciated is the fuzzy input, which LLMs excel with. My co-host Nealeon's name is mistranscribed basically every single time by every model, and it's done in different ways. So it's really hard to know exactly what to look for to know what needs to be fixed. A simple find and replace doesn't work super well for this use case, but LLMs can understand that there's a person named Nealeon, and the transcript likely got it wrong, so it will look up possible misspellings and correct multiple of them easily. It's very effective at this, and I really appreciate that about LLMs. When you don't exactly know what you're looking for, but you know what the results should be, it does a really good job at getting you there.
This skill is available for free on GitHub if you'd like to download it, and there are instructions to install it in Claude if you're not familiar with installing skills.
2026-04-08 03:15:10
David Pierce: Vertical browser tabs are better and you should use them
The good news here is, you don’t have to take my word for it. Switching browsers is hard, and maybe you don’t want to do it just for vertical tabs. But update Chrome, right-click the tab bar, and just see what happens when you select Show Tabs Vertically. I bet you’ll never go back.
And there we go, the last of the major browsers has added side tabs, validating my opinion that Arc is right up there with ChatGPT for the most influential new apps released in the past 5 years.
Editor's note: Safari technically has side tabs, although they are a weird add-on, not a replacement for the normal tabs. I'm counting it, but it's not really what we're talking about when we talk about Arc-style side tabs.
2026-04-07 07:55:00
Last month, I wrote about how Apple is working on adding support for encrypted RCS messages between Apple Messages on iOS and Google Messages on Android. At the time, I said I hoped Apple would make this work with Samsung's messaging app as well so that basically all Americans could get the benefits here.
Well, today Samsung announced they are ending their custom messaging app and are directing users to switch to Google Messages instead.
Well, problem solved.
2026-04-04 04:40:40
Just 6 months ago, Lenovo launched their Legion Go 2 handheld PC game console. It came in 2 versions, each with a different chip (AMD Ryzen Z2 or Z2 Extreme) powering the device. They came in at the profoundly premium price points of $1,099 and $1,349.
Now, those are profoundly high price points compared to the competition. The Steam Deck OLED was (and technically still is, but it's been out of stock for over a month) $549-$649 which outside of the OLED screen being nicer, does lag behind in a bunch of specs, so the price difference is somewhat understandable. Still, a bit north of $1,000 for a portable gaming console is pretty wild.
But now the Legion Go 2 has gotten a price increase. And not a small one…
Instead of $1,099 and $1,349, now they cost $1,499 and $1,999. Yes, those are $400 and $650 increases, or put another way, one top-of-the-line Steam Deck more than before.
As I said back at the start of the year, 2026 is going to be a very painful year in tech.
On the plus side, if you did want a portable gaming PC with the power of the $1,999 Legion Go 2, you could look at the seemingly-reasonably-priced-in-comparison $999 ROG Xbox Ally X, which has the same Z2 Extreme chip as the $1,999 model, 24GB RAM (down from the Go's 32GB), and a slightly lower res screen, but honestly I think it's a way better buy, even if the software sucks hard. Install Bazzite on that sucker and enjoy life.
2026-04-03 23:04:46
Nintendo: About Nintendo Switch 2 Game Pricing
Beginning in May 2026, and starting with preorders for Yoshi™ and the Mysterious Book, new Nintendo published digital titles exclusive to Nintendo Switch™ 2 will have an MSRP that is different from physical versions.
Considering Nintendo caught up with Sony and Microsoft and made their first party games $70 this generation (except for Mario Kart World, which cost $80 which is honestly outrageous), it's nice to have at least one video game headline that isn't about how a company is increasing prices further.
2026-04-02 08:00:00
jess77x in a Reddit post about Pluribus:
The discourse around this show is so weird. It's either a masterpiece or a total slog. And everyone is just talking past each other and calling people illiterate/TikTok brained for disliking it or pretentious shills for liking it. And it's a shame because engaging with this show, the ideas presented in it, and how the show goes about exploring those ideas (for better and for worse) could be so interesting, yet so much of this discussion is centered around this unproductive binary.
This is just how it goes with media discourse. It's good or it's bad, there is no in between. There is no space for "art is subjective, there will always be many opinions". Get in line or get wrecked in the comments.