THE LACK THEREOF

One pattern I like a lot is a bin/service wrapper. In each of your services (I like to call them [[Macro Service]] instead of [[Microservice]]).

A project which puts LLM-powered gremlins right into your runtime!

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

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

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!)

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!

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!

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

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.

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!

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!

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.

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

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?

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

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

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 [[http://es6-features.org/#PropertyShorthand es6-features.org]].

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

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

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:

right:PO33.jpg 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.

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: audio:docs/music/yo_oliver_v1

I Dockerized this website yesterday! I had already built a https://thelackthereof.org/cpanfile 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 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 :)

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: audio:docs/music/electric_accordion_white_roses

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: audio:docs/music/gitmo_v1

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

Last night at the https://www.meetup.com/DC-Perl-Mongers/|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

A fun thing to do is to explore things using https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Type_introspection introspection/https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reflection_(computer_programming) 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 https://github.com/grosser/parallel_tests 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.

<include "ICFP Contest 2016">

Listen: audio:docs/music/pigirl7

Idea for a programming language: make experienced programmers twitch by forcing minor and common errors to be part of the language.

As both a learning exercise and a fun use of Bracketology, I built a web app to help you pick out a great white elephant gift! I did it initially with Clojure, ClojureScript, Reagent, Figwheel. I've now re-built it with Ruby, Opal, React.rb, and helped build the new opal-hot-reloader!

I enjoyed presenting at DCRUG tonight on React.rb, which I've been playing with for the last few weeks. Good turnout too!

Listen (acoustic draft): audio:docs/music/dont_repeat_yourself

Welcome to the DC-Baltimore Perl Workshop!

Today I attended http://retroruby.org, a great un-conference in Arlington. I got my toehold in the local Ruby community at the Arlington meetup, and was happy to visit with lots of familiar people. I didn't meet any new people, though that was mostly because it was easy to spend time catching up.

Listen: audio:docs/music/Segfault_v1_2016-02-14

Work-In-Progress

I often see people porting libraries from language to language, and new languages often have a rush to re-implement a bunch of things. Some of this makes sense, some of it is madness.

Github project: https://github.com/awwaiid/p6-Inline-Ruby

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