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October 29, 2025

LLMs playing text adventures, weather forecasts, making a base template in Yesod

Curious how the latest crop of LLMs do on text adventures, I set them at it. They're better, but not great. You'll also learn how to interpret meteograms, and how to set a base template for a Yesod site.

You have arrived at the mid-week hump. Have a $container of $beverage and enjoy some reading before you speed along with the rest of your life.

New articles

Haiku 4.5 Playing Text Adventures

I burned some more money on having LLMs play text adventures. We get to see how the real GPT-5 performs, and how it compares to the newer Sonnet 4.5 and Haiku 4.5. Oh, and the open-weight OpenAI models are not great.

Full article (1–4 minute read): Haiku 4.5 Playing Text Adventures

Weather Forecasts Are Punctuated

You may have seen this article already since I accidentally published the wxpull announcement before this one, which is probably confusing. This one goes into more background on probabilistic weather forecasts, accompanied by the default ECMWF meteogram graphs.

Full article (3–7 minute read): Weather Forecasts Are Punctuated

Flashcard of the week

I haven't done a lot of Yesod-specific stuff recently, so I was happy I was able to answer this one correctly.

If we want to write a custom defaultLayout implementation, what do we need to call?

Similar to how pages are built from components in React, pages are built from widgets in Yesod. We can set the base HTML template for our site by overriding the defaultLayout method, which gets the top level widget and ultimately builds the HTML for the full page around it to send back to the user. To extract the separate parts (title, description, header, body) from the top level widget, we call a specific function:

widgetToPageContent

Then we can apply our base HTML template, where those parts are included in the right places.

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