Notes

Just hit a mini milestone today w.r.t. a small project I have been working on, to implement cosine similarity search on my logseq4 notes. I have embedded a few months worth of my notes with Qwen/Qwen3-Embedding-0.6B1 into chromadb and I have a small flask fastapi server2,3 around this, for querying. I have chunked up my notes before embedding them and therefore results show those chunks. I am serving this on ec2 using tailscale5, so I can even hit the endpoint from my phone without really exposing it publicly. ...

I have been using apple macos transcription on my handwritten notes every once in a while, where you manually select text from some png or pdf and copy paste, into a text document, but it is pretty awful. Is bad because it misses many of the bounding boxes and even then makes so many transcription errors, that I might as well just transcribe it myself. And so ultimately I was wondering if a hugging face model is better at the transcription. I learned about https://huggingface.co/PaddlePaddle/PaddleOCR-VL-1.5 from chatgpt. ...

I tried out this1 cool tool for extracting amazon kindle notes. It is way better than emailing myself a pdf of notes like I had done in the past. Then I had some script I lost for converting from pdf to markdown. This project just pulls directly from amazon2 which I didn’t even know was a place your notes go! I used this bookmarklet tool from Prime Radiant Inc and pulled my notes, but then I tried looking at my kindle Clippings file directly also, which looks like is even easier. ...

Augmenting your intelligence feels like a high. It’s a powerful drug. It feels thrilling and amazing when you use it but when the high wears off there are racoons in your kitchen eating your trash and you are half dressed sleeping on the floor. You have a headache. You have to go to work now and actually do work. But all you can think of is the next high. And if you get to day dreaming about your next dose, then that helps fulfill one of the attributes of addiction. The other is if it interferes with your ability to fulfill your role at work. Are you at the point where you can no longer function at work without using? And how are your relationships. Are people commenting on you spending a lot of money on your new ehhem activity? ...

We talk about scaling laws have slowed down as they apply to large language models, but we used to have the same conversations about organizations. If you increase the size of a deep neural network, into the terabytes number of parameters, it has been shown over the last handful of years, you get some exceptional results. But either because of a data ceiling – as the AI snake oil book authors describe wrt predictive models – or some other constraint, foundation models pivoted away from generalized models to heuristic routing to more specialized models and to agentic real world action at a distance, getting out of that artificial metaphorical arm chair. ...

Reading Tanya’s Staff Engineers path1 and also yesterday hearing Take Two CEO interview2 on Gen AI. Strauss Zelnick saying, from his game company perspective, hits are always novel. And Gen AI produces what is derivative. Dont expect to get creativity out of an LLM basically. This helps to better direct the plasma cutter, the coding harness, to a tighter subset of problems. Or the better analogy is what are the nails, when youre holding the code gen shaped hammer. ( I also discussed this here 3). ...

Since I have been using fuzzy find fzf1 lately, switching to fzf for reverse shell search2, I was wondering hey can I use this for switching to a chrome tab? With a super quick trial and error session with ChatGPT, I have an Applescript answer to this question, below. So this works really well for me so far. Will try it out a bit more before adding it to my ~/.bash_profile. But pretty game changing for now. ...

I was interested in improving my reverse search Control R experience on my shell because many of my previous commands are not easily searchable or they disappear too fast. Initially I just wanted to figure out if you can use fzf for the reverse-search, but ChatGPT made me aware of atuin too. This sounded super fancy and the atuin1 idea of using a local sqlite db for a command cache looked interesting, so I tried to brew install atuin first. ...

I was worried I would lose the american airlines app notifications but luckily the email notifications persisted. So here is some of my data, extracted from emails from aa.com I wanted to use some data to tell the story of a recent trip I was taking from NY to Arizona. I left a very engaging group discussion at work because I planned a tight bike ride home to wrap up a quick exit to the airport in time to board my plane. ...

Trying to see have I written about this before, but weve had data scuence for a while , where given domain knowledge, programming knowledge, and some maths, you can iterate towards data science (just kidding that’s a blog). You can iterate towards a model that fits your data and generalizes modestly on unseen data. Then we entered ML engineering, where you lean into the formal aspects of rigorous testing and more into the repeatable, so less trial and error perhaps. ...