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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…
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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…
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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…
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AI
I’ve decided to use the free time I have to learn more about AI. I had taken the Andrew Ng ML course a long time ago so I know what some of the words mean but I wanted to also have a better understanding of the things people are actually doing now. First, I wanted…
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Starting again?
So It looks like its been around 9 years since I have written a blog post. I think I stopped when I took a job at Amazon and didn’t want to have to make a disclaimer about these views not being the opinion of my employer. I’ve been thinking of starting again but I am…
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Django CRUD and Angular.js
In the post on Simple Django Class based CRUD views the focus was on setting up simple views with ModelForms to build all the CRUD views for a Model. I have been playing around a bit with Angular.js and wanted to see if I could link the two up. A word of caution. I really…
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Simple Django Class based CRUD views
Class based CRUD views in django have been around for a while, but I haven’t been using them because every time I tried I ended up with more code that seemed no better than the old way. I just started a small project from scratch and decided to give it a go again. The basic…
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Flattening the Backbone.js Learning Curve
I just spent some time getting into Backbone.js finally.  The learning curve was a little steeper than I expected, mostly because I think I expected Backbone.js to be something that it is not. From the docs: Backbone.js gives structure to web applications by providing models with key-value binding and custom events, collections with a rich API of enumerable functions,views with…
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Advice for Tech Handicapped Computer Users
After several years of helping non tech savvy neighbors with various problems, I wanted to make this list as a standard advice that anyone should follow. This is not intended to be a list of best practices, rather a list of simple important practices. If you are smart enough to figure out a better solution…
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Learning Spanish
For the past few years I have been trying to learn Spanish. My main motivation is that I enjoy traveling in Latin American and speaking the language opens up many opportunities. I have tried several different methods, cds, books, rosetta, immersion school in Costa Rica, personal tutors etc. They all have their benefits but in…
“You know what truth is? It’s some crazy thing my neighbor believes. If I want to make friends with him, I ask him what he believes. He tells me, and I say, “Yeah, yeah – ain’t it the truth?”