Category: Perl

AI is getting good

Perplexity AI is proving to be a much better search engine than Google. It is astonishing.

For several years now, Google has been shooting themselves in the foot by trying to reform society through tainting search results. Accordingly, their search results have gone to shit. There are numerous examples of A/B tests against Google search: getting uplifting / supportive results when the female gender is the search, but getting condemning / demoralizing results when the male gender is the search. Ditto A/B test searches for Democrats versus Republicans, and Hillary Clinton versus Donald Trump.

Okay, I’m done: I have replaced my search engine in all my browsers with Perplexity AI.

So while Google was going to shit, Large Language Models became capable. Jeff Bezos of Amazon spun up his own, trained it, and is now putting it out there as Perplexity AI. They have a commercial license for $20 per month, which is too rich for my blood. If they had a $5 per month plan, I’d pay for it now.

But currently, I’m freeloading. I do pay for Twitter, so I might start using Grok (Grok3 just came out) instead. I prefer to spread my activity over different services. Yet, I feel that freeloading is something I don’t like in other people; therefore, if I want to live a high integrity life, I shouldn’t be a freeloader. Anyway….

Today I get to do the minutes for a monthly meeting that I am Recording Secretary for.

On my Windows machine that plays nice with the Sony ICD-UX570 Digital Voice Recorder, I uploaded the recorded MP3 file to Nextcloud. It syncs to the server, and the file ends up in my folder where all these recorded MP3s go. That folder syncs to my main machine I’m working on now.

I had that moment of inspiration that finding these files / messing with the folders is more trouble than it should be. I’m in these folders a lot. Windows has a “Favorites” feature, surely KDE has such too?

Asking of Perplexity AI “does KDE Dolphin have a Favorites feature” instantly took me to a page which presented a ZD Net article “How to use KDE Plasma Places for a much more efficient desktop“. This is precisely what I was looking for, yet I had no idea that it was called Places.

This is great. Google search might have gotten me to this page eventually, but I doubt that I’d have gotten to it without going through many different page views (thereby increasing Google’s ad revenue).

And yes, I’ve asked Perplexity AI to generate a Perl program for reading a Nextcloud calendar, and it took no time at all to do it. Now, the program did not work….

But troubleshooting the problem with Perplexity AI was pretty easy. It suggested I try curl and that worked perfectly.

As it turns out, Nextcloud doesn’t play nice with Net::CalDAVTalk.

Whether this is a problem with Nextcloud (which doesn’t try to do anything on its own – it uses SaberDAV underneath) or this is a problem with Net::CalDAVTalk isn’t a terribly fruitful pursuit. What is almost trivial to do is to ask Perplexity AI to generate the Perl program without Net::CalDAVTalk. The whole thing can be done with HTTP::Request, LWP::UserAgent, and XML::LibXML.

It is astonishing how well this is working, and how quickly this change is taking place.

Update on my last rant (Perl PAR::Packer sucks) – it got better, thanks to Håkon Hægland on Stackoverflow

I was quite frustrated, because I really needed to be able to deploy a utility to about 30 people, and I could not see any way out.

I’m not sure, but I think the reason it didn’t work is that the author of PAR::Packer thinks including shared libraries are out of scope. For all I know, they are really out of scope. But I needed the shared SSL library to be able to perform the task.

I put a request out on Stackoverflow, and Håkon took it as a challenge. He was successful, and I am hugely thankful for that.

My failure was not seeing that App::PP::Autolink was a thing. Håkon asked the maintainer of PAR::Packer (Roderich Schupp) the question I didn’t think I could ask. Roderich knew the answer, and supplied it. Håkon used that to educate the world (and me) that yes there is an answer: App::PP::Autolink.

Thank you, Håkon. You made my world a better place. I hope your work makes many people’s world a better place.

Wow Perl PAR::Packer sucks

I presented a problem to my boss, where I need to let about 30 desktop technicians run some code I’ve written. My boss said when he is in that position, he writes it in PowerShell, and uses PS2EXE. This is good idea. I found that in the Perl world, the same idea is in PAR::Packer.

A super simple script, running on my Linux box, takes less than one second to run. Open up an SQLite database, fetch all 20 records, sort them, print them. Simple. Less than one second.

The Windows .exe version takes 19 seconds.

Every. single. run.

There is no way that the on-call technicians who have to run the scripts I’m writing are going to be happy with that. And it would make me feel bad, inflicting that sort of this-is-time-of-my-life-that-I-am-not-getting-back on some poor soul who got a call at two in the morning, to deal with whomever for whatever.

Normally, on Windows, I used WinBatch. Did so for 20 years. But alas, WinBatch was always a for-pay product, and eventually hobbyists wrote AutoHotKey (or was it Auto-It?) (for free) to do everything WinBatch does. Also, the real goal was to take my Perl scripts that use REST to get and put JSON or XML at a web service. WinBatch has lots of old extenders, but rarely any new ones. I don’t know of a REST extender for WinBatch. I don’t know of anything in WinBatch that does what DBI does in the Perl world. The WinBatch answer is to install MS Access (or whatever) and use COM to drive the actual database client. Avoiding installing software is part of the goal here. I need something That Just Works.

And preferably works in a second or two; not twenty.

I’ve got REST modules written in Perl. I’ve gotten far enough in my Perl skills to put standardized code in modules, and then use those modules. But that meant putting modifying the search environment for finding modules. Guess what doesn’t work with PAR::Packer?

Okay, crap, I can move all my modules into the root directory where my scripts are. This is stupid, but I’ll do it.

And then I find that the execution speed of even a simple script is terrible.

Searching for a solution, of course the answer is “You’re doing Perl wrong, if you don’t want to install an entire development environment on every workstation”.

Well, thanks for nothing. Apparently I need to give up Perl and start learning PowerShell. PowerShell does rather look like Perl, so maybe it won’t be too terrible of a transition.