Tootfinder

Day 26: Emily Short
If you know who Short is, you know exactly why she's on this list. If you don't, you're probably in the majority. She's an absolutely legendary author within the interactive fiction (IF) community, which gets somewhat pigeonholed by stuff like Zork when there's actually a huge range of stuff in the medium some of which isn't even puzzle-focused, and Short has been writing & coding on the bleeding edge of things for decades.
I was lucky enough to be introduced to Short's work in graduate school, where we played "Galatea" as part of an interactive fiction class. Short uses a lot of clever parser tricks to make your conversation with a statue feel very fluid and conversational, giving to contemporary audiences a great example of how vibrant interaction with a well-designed agent can be in contrast to an LLM, if you're willing to put in some work on bespoke parsing & responses (although the user does need to know basic IF conventions). While I didn't explore the full range of Galatea's many possible outcomes, it left a strong impression on me as a vision for what IF could be besides dorky puzzles, and I think that "visionary" is a great term to describe Short.
If you'd like you get a feel for her (very early) work, you can play Galatea here: #30AuthorsNoMen

this made me wonder why anyone would write a url parser for node.js in ada
https://mastodon.social/@bagder/115190240946299368

SparkUI-Parser: Enhancing GUI Perception with Robust Grounding and Parsing
Hongyi Jing, Jiafu Chen, Chen Rao, Ziqiang Dang, Jiajie Teng, Tianyi Chu, Juncheng Mo, Shuo Fang, Huaizhong Lin, Rui Lv, Chenguang Ma, Lei Zhao
https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.04908

SparkUI-Parser: Enhancing GUI Perception with Robust Grounding and Parsing
The existing Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) for GUI perception have made great progress. However, the following challenges still exist in prior methods: 1) They model discrete coordinates based on text autoregressive mechanism, which results in lower grounding accuracy and slower inference speed. 2) They can only locate predefined sets of elements and are not capable of parsing the entire interface, which hampers the broad application and support for downstream tasks. To address the a…

Also:
- got yelled at (uncalled) by someone who thinks he owns the place (ofc he doesn't)
- got frustrated by Liquid and YAML parser, their combo especially
But still.

from my link log —
Runtime-extensible PEG parsers for SQL.
https://duckdb.org/2024/11/22/runtime-extensible-parsers.html
saved 2024-11-22 …

Runtime-Extensible SQL Parsers Using PEG
Despite their central role in processing queries, parsers have not received any noticeable attention in the data systems space. State-of-the art systems are content with ancient old parser generators. These generators create monolithic, inflexible and unforgiving parsers that hinder innovation in query languages and frustrate users. Instead, parsers should be rewritten using modern abstractions like Parser Expression Grammars (PEG), which allow dynamic changes to the accepted query syntax and b…

Just ran into a basic flaw in the commonmark spec/parser.
https://github.com/commonmark/commonmark-spec/issues/807
Going to try and work around it in Kitten as I’m using Markdown-it, which implements the commonmark spec, and exhibits the same behaviour.
(This …

Contents of

 tags wrapped in 
 tags are not left alone if they contain empty lines · Issue #807 · commonmark/commonmark-spec
Contentions of HTML preformatted text blocks (
…
) are, correctly, left alone: e.g., 
a b 
 rendered correctly as, with the contents untouched: 
a b 
 However, if you wra...