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But there are alternatives. I would reach for Go. I’m not great at it but good enough that I know I can code up a server. And I know it will be be stable and simple to deploy - upload the binary and run it via systemd.

jweiron Sears offered complete houses in large DIY kits

I too live in one, although it was heavily modified around 2009 with a second story put on it. All the houses on this side of the street are the same Sears house model and all have been slightly greatly modified over the last 110 years.

They are pretty nice!

jweiron Apple Vision Pro Is Apple's New VR Headset

There was a bit of staging going on in that demo.

Like when the fellow walks up in frame perfectly between two windows and hands the viewer something.

Or the FaceTime call where the woman was talking to 3 other people – why weren't they wearing the goggles?

But these would be great on an airplane and probably other circumstances. I doubt I will be buying any time soon though.

jweiron How to start a Go project in 2023

Since we are mentioning these, I use entr

# Makefile test: `find * -name "*.go" | entr bash -c "clear; go test ./..."`

https://eradman.com/entrproject/

jweiron Ask HN: Those with success using GPT-4 for programming – what are you doing?

Text categorization for podcasts.

The prompt asks for specific aspects from a podcast - people, dates, locations - score them by relevance and count the occurrences. Now, GPT can't count for a damn, but it is a useful proxy. The relevance score is pretty good.

There are existing services that can do this, but with GPT and the API I don't need to read a manual and I define exactly what format I want back.

This is what is exciting - GPT will format its responses to _my_ requirements, not the other way around.

jweiron The DRAKON Language

https://youtu.be/yZLedcnFA94

Here is a video of Stepan Mitkin demoing Drakon at an Erlang conference from 2015.

jweiron We will be shutting down neeva.com

You could search news and have an option to select if you wanted your results more right wing or left wing.

It was a show off feature that solved a problem I’m not sure anyone needed solving. And I doubt it was cheap to create.

This alone didn’t raise an eyebrow but looking back now I see it as a misdirection.

jweiron We will be shutting down neeva.com

Neeva was great and I enjoyed using it until…

The media bias feature was added. It was silly and probably not cheap to create.

The StackOverflow integration was terrible and a misdirection. Completely unusable.

Then the LLM came. It was slow and inaccurate and in your face . I asked to have it disabled but found now way. I stopped using it soon after.

Too bad. At its core was a great engine from my experience.

jweiron A guidance language for controlling LLMs

I have not yet played with embedding. It is on my list though. Fortunately for my current purposes 3.5-turbo is fast enough and quite affordable.

jweiron A guidance language for controlling LLMs

Exactly. I have been using OpenAI for taking transcriptions and finding keywords/phrases that belong to particular categories. There are existing tools/services that do this – but I would need to learn their API.

With OpenAI, I described it in English, provided sample JSON that I would like, run some tests, adjust and then I am ready.

There was no manual to read, it is in my format, and the language is natural.

And that is what I like about all this -- putting folks with limited technical skills in power.

jweiron ChatGPT Plugins

I look around me and see a wealthy society that has said no to a lot of technological progress - but not all. These are people that work together to build as a community to build and develop their society. They look at technology and ask if will be beneficial to the community and help preserve it - not fragment it.

I am currently on the outskirts of Amish country.

BTW when they come together to raise a barn it is called a frolic. I think we can learn a thing or two from them. And they certainly illustrate that alternatives are possible.

jweiron Box64 – Linux Userspace x86_64 Emulator Targeted at ARM64 Linux Devices

We migrated from Vagrant/VirtualBox to Mutlipass and Mutagen.io for file sync. The only thing I miss is the private networking options of VirtualBox. So we pull the ip from Multipass and put it in etc/hosts for name registration.

jweiron What Are Signals?

Controversial only because they were hard to learn and those that invested in learning lost that investment. The new architecture is so much better and not hard to explain.

jweiron Recreating ANSI Art from a Screenshot

Well, if you want to browse some ANSI history there is https://artpacks.org/

jweiron Donald Knuth on Machine Learning and the Meaning of Life

Silicon Valley kind of nailed that https://youtu.be/TWoRVaGlFRc

jweiron Clark Foam’s demise, 10 years later (2015)

Clark Foam was a feature of my childhood – we would drive by it on the way to beach – and my dad would say with some pride that it is where most of the surfboard foam came from.

The factory was on Crown Valley at Forbes. The site may have become a preschool - but it is all gone now and a giant condo complex is there.

https://www.ocregister.com/2012/09/27/preschool-approved-for...

https://www.google.com/maps/@33.5578181,-117.6767446,3a,75y,...

jweiron The Decree Design Pattern

We use a similar pattern and have a strict namespace.

Player would be a namespace. It would be a module with no or limited code. Within it would be Controller, Model or the agent noun modules that take call: Creator, Inporter, Mailer - the “er” words indicate there will be a single call function.

We broke from the standard Rails directory structure. All the code for Player would be in one directory - including views.

jweiron Replacing a SQL analyst with 26 recursive GPT prompts

"Hi Dave, the query was taking too long so I optimized SQL query by adding the line `DROP invoices;` It has improved performance significantly. So far there are no orders to examine."

jweiron Always Be Knolling (2018)

The Tom Sachs video is great and sums it up "align or square all objects" for the layout.

jweiron Big meat can’t quit antibiotics

What I would like to see a break down by animal mass. For meat production the US produces almost equivalent amounts of beef and pork. But the US also has about 10 million dairy cows. The FDA report is for food producing animals – which includes dairy cows.

Unfortunately the FDA report does not include mass either, but I reckon if you were to look at the antibiotics/animal mass you would see that swine is a huge outlier.

jweiron Big meat can’t quit antibiotics

The article is terrible.

At the very least break down the use by animal and mass.

Never mind cows are not raised like pigs which are not raised like chickens. To lump them all together is silly and insulting.

jweiron NeevaAI

I put in a feature request to disable the chat.

Also the Neeva StackOver display is useless.

I pretty much hit !g now for my searches.

jweiron U.S. battery storage capacity to increase significantly

The article doesn’t make this clear so I am assuming those numbers represent GWh of storage.

To put this in context Bath County is a reservoir that has 24GWh of storage.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bath_County_Pumped_Storage_S...

jweiron What's Great about Julia?

I started to use Julia to reply to a question on Twitter with a full program.

I tried Ruby first but it was just a bit too long.

Julia fit the ticket. I could write a simple simulation that was understandable inside the Tweet.

jweiron The Making of Dune II: The birth of the real-time strategy game

I had the pleasure of QAing Dune II on the PC while I worked at Virgin Games in 92. The game really sucked me in and was fun to play, despite the bugs.