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I’ve been researching LLMs, trying to find practical ways I can use them for myself, in my work or at home. One area that interests me is as tool to better understand the notes I’ve taken, topics I frequently learn about and areas I might want to explore more. I’m not the first to explore this territory (https://x.com/fortelabs/status/1749861644245848361). I’ll be looking at using a local model and building the system myself. I’m going to detail how I’ve built a toy system to chat with my notes. I’ll be using Ollama1 to serve an open-source model locally, and building the application using LangChain2 and StreamLit3. ...

Reading A quiet week, not much read. How I Give Formal Written Feedback Primary thing of note I read this week. Good guidelines on an explicit process for feedback.

Reading Gene Wolfe Was Sci-Fi’s Most Enigmatic Writer Always good to read about Wolfe and the slight renaissance his work is seeing. Interesting to learn Wolfe’s papers are in Northern Illinois University 2022 State of the Tools I’ll frequently read about how other people set up their work, just to learn about tools people find useful. I’d forgotten about mosh, glad to see it seeing use. Why Programmers Burnout Into Existential Depression: The Broken Promise of Computing ...

Reading ChatGPT Isn’t a Great Leap Forward, It’s an Expensive Deal With the Devil Programming AIs Worry Me How To… Use ChatGPT to Boost Your Writing Chatbots Are Not a Good Replacement for Search Engines A lot of chatGPT reading this week, a lot of experts understandably skeptical, or worse, missing its flaws and being overly impressed. Chat continues to be a poor search interface though.

Reading Blueprints for Recommender System Architectures: 10th Anniversary Edition A lot to take from this, Amatriain has both assembled architectures from industry leaders and revisited his own work at some of the biggest recsys companies in the world. Real-Time Semantic Search Demo I’ve built a few systems like this, it’s great to see they are getting easier to build. All Programming Philosophies Are About State All code is data, I’m sure of it. ...