Author: brice
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Cycling in Europe
On a recent trip to Europe I got to try out some cycling in a couple of the most popular places for cycling vacations, Mallorca and Girona. The trip wasn’t a cycling vacation per se but I did select those two places to be able to get a few nice rides in. I also did…
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Fire HD 10
I’ve never really been a fan of tablet devices. When I want to actually do something I would much rather have a computer and my phone is good enough for mindlessly consuming garbage. This means I’ve never really wanted an iPad even though they are super slick devices. I often feel jealous of tablet owners…
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Travel Items
We just got back from a 6 week trip in Europe. Mostly in Spain with a couple days in Amsterdam and week in Scotland to make it more complicated. A couple of years ago we did 3 months which was great but also kind of too long but that’s another story. This is just a…
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Money and Power
In this country, you gotta make the money first. Then when you get the money, you get the power. Then when you get the power, then you get the women. – Tony Montana I don’t think Al Pacino’s character from Scarface is a good person to emulate but he does capture something about how we…
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NicaPhoto
I’ve lost count of how many trips I’ve made to Central America and I’ve seen many examples of programs that work to improve the lives of people there but none has impressed me more than NicaPhoto. The name comes from its beginning as an idea to teach photography classes to kids in the town of…
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Using Prometheus and Grafana with Django
For my web app project I wanted to add some monitoring and dashboards so I decided to try out prometheus. Since I am using django I also decided to use django-prometheus. It ended up fine but there was a bump or two along the way. The README tells you most of what you need to…
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Vector Database with Django and pgvector
I have a small Django project I have been playing with for a while. There’s more about it in this series of posts. The application just keeps a list of items (mostly weblinks etc) and lets me organize them. I’ve been experimenting with using embeddings for finding similar items or suggesting tags etc. I am…
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Politics, Complexity and the next big Outage
I worry a lot about how complex the world is and how unstable that makes things.
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Agents and Agency
I think the first time I heard about how software agents were going to be useful to help perform tasks for us must have been with General Magic in the 90s. It was all the same use cases we hear about today, flight booking, recipe generation etc. Just taking out all that drudgery from our…
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Do LLMs talk the way humans do?
I wonder sometimes about the difference between how an LLM talks and how I do it. It’s hard to really be confident in introspecting your own cognition but at least it feels like an idea forms in my head and then I render the words. I don’t know if an LLM starts with an “idea”…