标签：#ha

You've got a folder of a few hundred screenshots and you want the text out of each one. Or you want to generate a batch of images for a side project. Or you just want to drop a single "summarize this" call into a script you're writing on a Sunday afternoon. So you open the pricing page for the official API, do the math on per-token billing plus setting up keys and a payment method, and it's hard to justify, because the exact same model will do the exact same thing for free in a browser tab. There are really two ways to get a model like ChatGPT or Gemini to do work for you. The web UI is free, or already covered by a subscription you're paying for anyway, but you drive it by hand. The API is scriptable, but you pay by the token. Most of the time that trade-off is fine. But for a whole category of work like hobby projects, throwaway scripts, research, or anything that doesn't need production-grade reliability, you're stuck picking between "free but manual" and "automated but paid." Which raises the obvious question: why not automate the free web UI? It's just a webpage. You open it, type in the box, click send. It turns out that hides a few fiddly problems, which I ran into enough times that I eventually built a small library for them. In this article we'll work through what it takes to automate these UIs, and at the end I'll show how little code it comes down to. 1. What it takes to drive a chat UI A single round trip with ChatGPT or Gemini breaks down into four jobs: Get your text into the input box Optionally attach a file Wait for the model to finish answering And read the answer back out. Every one of these is harder than it sounds, because the page is a modern single-page app that was never built to be driven by a script. We'll use Selenium with undetected-chromedriver, and for now assume the browser is already open (we'll get to launching it in the next section). To keep the code readable I'll show whichever of the two platforms makes each problem clearest, and

The Financial Times has a good article on how AI is changing the capabilities of video surveillance, with information from both Israel/Iran and Russia. I wrote about this sort of thing a few years ago, how AI enables mass spying in the way that computers and networks enabled mass surveillance. The interesting development in the article is that AI allows people to ask natural language questions about video footage to AIs—and AIs can answer them. In contrast with older tools restricted to a few dozen preset searches, these new tools allow an almost unlimited range of enquiries by enabling language-based searches on video...

Hello Dev Community! 👋 It is officially Day 89 of my 100-day full-stack engineering run! 🎯 Yesterday, I kicked off my competitive solving streak on HackerRank. Today, I advanced from standard linear filters into the powerful world of textual pattern recognition by mastering: SQL Regular Expressions (REGEXP) and String Anchors! 🔍🛡️ When processing real-world data pipelines—like validating structured phone inputs, email domains, or parsing specific text queries—standard LIKE operators can make your code messy and repetitive. Today, I solved these constraints elegantly. 🧠 Shifting from Bulky LIKE Statements to Sleek REGEXP As tracked inside my workspace files across "Screenshot (193).png" and "Screenshot (195).png" , I solved two distinct core challenges from the HackerRank series: 1. Match from the Start: Weather Observation Station 6 The Goal: Query the list of CITY names from STATION that start with vowels ( a , e , i , o , u ), ensuring no duplicates are returned. The Evolution: Instead of chaining multiple LIKE queries or cutting sub-strings with LEFT() , I utilized the caret anchor ( ^ ) inside a regular expression array to verify the string's starting boundary instantly: sql SELECT DISTINCT CITY FROM STATION WHERE CITY REGEXP "^(A|E|I|O|U)";