THE LACK THEREOF

Taking inspiration from The Star Thrower; Action, even in the face of futility, is the path I take.

Using the new ChatGPT GPT-4o Image Generation to incrementally generate a photo of Hoda! (A "Chipin" is a 50-50 Chuhuahua and Mini-Pincer. Hoda is 70-20, so is a ChuhuaPin!)

Editor Note: This piece is by Loren Eiseley, 1969. Published in The Unexpected Universe. Transcribed here from a PDF scan I found.

Agency (a more useful concept of Free Will), has two important ingredients -- the ability to predict outcomes and the ability to influence outcomes -- both of which come in a spectrum of possible degrees. We can lay these out into a visualization that breaks down naturally into a four-square grid.

Since I'm going some consulting work I have to do a bit of time tracking. And you know what that means! Playing with my taskwarrior and timewarrior config!!!

My friend Brad asked about what I've been reading lately in the AI/LLM space to keep up. Here's my link roundup! Things that have been on my rotation lately.

Figured out how to make opening a CSV in firefox pop open a terminal running VisiData (vd)

What distracted me today? Flameshot and Rofi.

A small data transform / cleanup task using LLM labor.

Drawing Xes in Boxes is harder than you might think! Teaching Ghostwriter a bit about space by pre-segmenting the input image gets us closer.

Working on Ghostwriter, making some incremental progress on playing tic-tac-toe.

Use the reMarkable2 as an interface to vision-LLMs. Ghost in the machine!

I present here a very incomplete list of programming-related projects, and the tools and languages I might use to create them.

VSCode is quite cool and I'd like to be good with it, but my fingers and brain refuse to adapt without some explicit work. Here are some of the things I'm doing to make it a bit more comfortable for me, a long-time vim user.

Each token is one choice from many forking paths. Let's see some of the other possibilities. Also try the Live LLM Token Tree Visualization Tool!

Documenting the data architecture for OGPF (OCaml Genetic Programming Framework).

Part of the Ruby For Good organization; inventory control for diaper and period-supply banks.

I love diagrams! I love code! Mashing them together is delightful :)

This is the website and wiki of me, Brock Wilcox a.k.a. awwaiid. Please see the Home page if you would like a less philosophical introduction to this site. Otherwise, read on!

I use Feedly to subscribe to a bunch of websites and blogs and such. When I see something that is interesting I tag it and bag it. Here is the raw shares.rss.xml. I also share thoughts or commentary on the 'share' tag.

I use Unison File Synchronizer to keep my important files synchronized between machines. This is a description of how I have it arranged and automated. I have been using this setup since 2006!

In-Hub, LLM + Sonic Pi, dash of docker-compose

In-Hub, LLM Club, Mediapipe, Coffee Project, docker-compose

Website updates to break insulation, bit of Human Essentials

A week spent coughing, writing Java, and watching Andor. First World Problems hah. Not bad in the scheme of things! :)

Virtual errands, GPU token generation. Oh right, Alloy

Pairing, unicode tokens, graphviz bling

Pairing, learning about LLM KV-caching

Applied LLM Demos; basic token output visualization with graphviz

Lunch table with Humans!

Llamas, Pythons, Coffee, and Sway

Some notes and thoughts on Peter Kriens' video, as posted on the Alloy Discourse

Fuzzy brained, but starting to figure this thing out.

In The Hub

Pairing, Merging

First day of RC!

Packing up for my 6-week batch at the Recurse Center.

I'm attending The Recurse Center for 6 weeks from March 25 - May 3.

Sharing some thoughts on my Recurse Center project, exploring how to bring Alloy or similar tools into the Day Job.

I'm attending a 6-week retreat at Recurse Center! This will go from March 25 - May 3. So ... gotta get set up!

I'm trying to solidify my understanding of the schema organization for Human Essentials. The goal is to build up some documentation to make contribution even easier for new folks. Also I like to play with PlantUML and GraphViz.

Reflections on Github Copilot and AI coding assistants.

I found a weird self-published book in a street-side Little Library. Here is my review.

Using OpenAI API GPT-3.5 to generate and judge stories.

Creating a simple snake game with the help of ChatGPT.

Notes from the Changelog interview with Cory Doctorow on Chokepoint Capitalism

Jam with Theo -- banging drums, strumming bass, and making up nonsense about Wanda Vision!

Song inspired by Hoda The Dog lounging about in the living room sun!

Here you can play all the music I've written or been involved with in one lovely place. Also check out my Music Gear and Setup!

A delightful song about that one shoe you can't seem to find!

Initial attempt at My Little Dog, part of the 2023 RPM Challenge

I'm going to try to do the RPM Challenge again this year. Millionth try is a charm?

An exploration of mitigating project risks with frequent deploys and prioritizing end-to-end execution.

I had ChatGPT write me a poem .... but first some somewhat irrelevant background information!

During the COVID-19 pandemic I worked with an awesome group to build a harm-reduction dataset. The https://covidcanidoit.org/ website teaches people what to do and not to do based on current community-risk levels.

A hexagon-grid sound and sequence memory game.

Monome Norns is a music-sentric device built on top of the Raspberri Pi by https://monome.org/. There is a healthy community at https://llllllll.co/ ("Lines"), though they talk about a lot more than only Monome. Norns is scripted primarily with Lua and SuperCollider, though is a fully Linux system.

Pair a keyboard with the Norns and Grid. Then you record commands like a set of timed and sequenced macros visible and triggered on the grid. Like a guitar-looper mashed up with a REPL mashed up with a sequencer!

In today's sugary exploration, let's take a look at a shorthand for object key expansion in Javascript (ECMAScript 2015+, es6+). For an overview of the TON of delicious sugar that was added to Javascript at around es6, check out es6-features.org.

A brain-dump of various approaches to debugging (code) things that I like.

We're using Firebase as the hosting service for https://covidcanidoit.com and the experience has been kinda weird, coming from a more traditional server-database world.

Talking DC Vote Blues

A brain-dump of some things I ran into while learning VueJS and related technology (Vuex).

Cool things I saw on the internet at some point:

I got a Pocket Operator PO-33 a while back, and find it super fun -- it is minimalist and usable. It inspires me to play around with beats and tunes ... and it also inspires me to work on my own samplers, sequencers, and synths.

I made this by sampling some random Jazz, looping it, and layering in some drums and effects -- all using my fun Pocket Operator PO-33!

The Pocket Operator PO-33 Knock-Out is a super fun sampler and step-sequencer made by Teenage Engineering! I got one in August 2019, and am using it to play around with sample-based music.

I'm working on making the jump from READING about recent machine learning techniques to APPLYING recent machine learning techniques. I have some nice datasets at work, so I am doing a bit of double-dipping by playing with those.

The graph module uses GraphViz to draw graphs. Here are some examples I've put together, but much fancier thinges are possible. See http://www.research.att.com/sw/tools/graphviz/refs.html for GraphViz documentation, and see http://www.research.att.com/sw/tools/graphviz/examples/ for some examples.

Generative artwork, floating and fading.

(Cats Dominate Our Lives Too Much)

I think it's important to learn through destruction. I like to proble the edges of things, and one of the best ways of knowing where IS the edge is to go over it. So ... let's go over the edge.

I've been doing a spot of accounting at work over the last few months. This is clearly a failure of delegation and management on my part, but it has led to at least one deep observation that I mightn't have had otherwise.

Un-Mixed: (download)

I Dockerized this website yesterday! I had already built a cpanfile that declares the Perl5 dependencies of OddMuse, which made it easy. I'm also going to run this with the data directory directly bind-mounted.

Let's have some fun with tracing code!

I'm collecting all the ways you can use : in Perl 6.

I gave a lightning talk at The Perl Conference about my collection of Perl6 Colons. Looks like Geoff gave me 34 extra seconds... not sure that I approve :)

I've been exploring the world of Open Source Music Production! Here I detail my setup.

There are many tools in my programming toolbox, but one that I've felt is missing is constraint and logic programming. I've done a spot of Prolog and played with some inference systems of various types ... but even when I run into something where I think it's the right hammer... I don't have a go-to tool.

"Pair Programming Musical Chairs"

Listen: (download)

I've been having lots of fun with https://github.com/vimwiki/vimwiki lately! I've mixed in a bit of encryptfs to have a private directory of notes. Sometime during boot, I set it up with:

Listen: (download)

Last night at the DC Perl Mongers meetup we collaboratively built a proof-of-concept for storing key/value pairs as messages in a slack channel, https://github.com/plicease/globalhash. This was made straightforward by great Slack API docs and cpan:WebService::Slack::WebApi. Example usage:

Martin Prescher, CTO, AutoGravity - Scrapping the Monolithhttps://pbell.wistia.com/medias/eoiit75e8p

I never want to be the same thing twice... so:

A fun thing to do is to explore things using introspection/reflection. In Ruby and Perl6, for example, we can get a list of methods for a given object instance pretty easily:

One of the codebases I work on regularly has a large and slow test suite. So slow that it typically only runs in totality in a continuous-integration (ci) environment, and there it uses the parallel_tests gem to slice it into pieces and run in parallel. This gets it to run in like 30 minutes instead of 2.5 hours.

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I enjoy participating in the International Conference for Functional Programming Contest, an annual coding marathon.

Listen: (download)