Thinking about it

Category: programming

  • Building a Simple Web App Part 5 of N : Gitlab Pipelines

    The post is going to be about setting up a build / test pipeline that runs automatically when you push new code change. I am doing all of this with gitlab. While most of the world uses github, I decided to use gitlab because you can do more without paying anything :). So I have…

  • Building a Simple Web App Part 4 of N : Nginx/Apache

    Now we get to the actual servers that the browser will connect to directly. Like a lot of guides online I’ve chosen to put Django behind nginx so that nginx is serving up all the static files and Django is served by gunicorn. The trick here is though that I’m also proxying nginx behind apache…

  • Building a Simple Web App Part 3 of N : Docker

    The first time I used docker was back when the company was called dotCloud. Its come a long way since then and is the heart of a whole ecosystem for deploying software. For me, what makes docker great is that it gives you the ability to create the equivalent of an .exe for you service.…

  • Building a Simple Web App Part 2 of N : htmx

    After spending some time trying to get React and Django templates to play nice together I came across htmx and decided to give it a try. Its not as well known as some other approaches but its popular enough to meet my goal of Ubiquity. There’s plenty of good info out on the web already…

  • Building A Simple Web App, Part 1 of N : Django

    I’ve been exploring ways to build simple web apps that is modern enough without falling into the trap of whatever this week’s hot tech stack is. I am going to try to write down some thoughts about my experience with this, the choices I am making and why. First off here’s the goals I have…

  • Hype that is hard to ignore

    Digital technology has changed many things about our lives since personal computers became a thing when I was in high school. Convenience, Communication, easy access to information etc. It’s hard sometimes to remember how we did things like travel before there were smartphones. The pace can feel faster and faster. In the last decade though,…

  • Transforming Epistimology

    As in these posts, I continue to be fascinated by looking at what these LLM systems “know”. While they are right most of the time, it seems like they accomplish this without knowing things or at least in a different way that people know them. I have a personal project to try to move some…

  • A little more ice-nine

    In a previous post I asked some questions to GPT4 about the book Cat’s Cradle. In particular I asked it “What metaphor did Felix Hoenikker use to describe the structure of ice-nine?”. GPT4 corrected me and told me it was Asa Breed who used the metaphor but was mistaken that the metaphor was using jacks…

  • Unknown Knowns and GPT4

    One thing which comes up in chatting with GPT4 is that it seems to not always be aware of things that it does already know. Here’s an example from a conversation about a book. Me: What is the first paragraph of Cat’s Cradle by Kurt Vonnegut? GPT4: “Call me Jonah. My parents did, or nearly…

  • Langchain

    I’ve been playing around a bit with the langchain library to better understand the kind of things people are doing with complex prompts to extend the utility of LLMs. One example I looked at was how to use the library to enable queries over your own documents. There’s a good example using a notion based…