My blog still has a long way to go when it comes to accessibility, but I’m excited about two new plugins I’ve just added to make things better.

The first plugin uses AI to generate image descriptions for me – far better than I could write myself. It even works in multiple languages, adapting to the blog’s language settings. The second plugin improves how these descriptions can be accessed on mobile devices. Now, you can simply tap on an image to read its description (on desktop, the descriptions are still available as tooltips when you hover over the image).

Since image descriptions aren’t created automatically for older posts and I haven’t manually updated all of them yet, you can check out this post as an example of how it works.

It seems like I finally fixed a memory leak in GoBlog yesterday, that sometimes made my blog crashing. How? I used Anthropic’s new Claude 3.5 Sonnet to write me a new HTTP compression middleware that compresses HTTP responses using zstd or gzip when possible. I needed to instruct a few changes and modify some code lines as the initial implementation was wrong, but thereafter, it finally seems to work better than my original implementation that probably leaked some objects anywhere. Claude also helped me to write unit tests (which I adapted a bit, though) and increase code coverage.

Even though I wonder how they finance it (reading their post suggests, there will be a paid option later), DuckDuckGo’s AI Chat is probably a good privacy-friendly way to try out the different LLM models for chats. You don’t have to register, you don’t have to pay, you don’t have to change settings that your chats aren’t saved or used for training.

Due to OpenAI’s move to prepaid billing, I (finally) had to pay for using the OpenAI API. But this also allows me to finally use the gpt-4-turbo-preview model as I have reached tier 1. Now the AI-generated summaries on this blog will be created using this new model. 😄

I quickly played with OpenAI’s new Text-To-Speech model to check if it’s an alternative to Google’s API. And wow! English is fantastic and even German is not bad. Just some syllables in German have a weird English accent. But even then, it’s still good. But sadly, it’s also a bit costly. Let’s wait a few months until it gets cheaper and better, and you can enjoy my blog’s “Read aloud” feature even more. 😉

Google Bard is a bit too creative. In another chat, where I asked who “Jan-Lukas Else” is, it also said that I developed the “Quarkus programming language”. But this clearly shows the limitations of language models and the current state of AI. Just because the answers sound clever, they are not always right.