Journal
¶ I read/study well when I am on my feet, pacing.
¶ Be mindful of the things you own, because they end up owning you somehow. Even the box of cables that you have been carrying around for three years hoping one day you will triage them.
¶ Purchased a Blood Glucose Monitor - Stelo by Dexcom.
¶I read the U. S. Constitution
¶I should commit more whole(some) things to memory. Poetry, songs, …
¶You must make plans. That is the first step. When you have no plans, a plan is what you need. Once you have a plan, then it is easy to see if that plan is sufficient to achieve all the things that you wish you had achieved. Do you plans align with your stated or unstated goals? If not? why not?
¶ “I have made more money being brave than being brilliant” — Overheard
¶ For month of February; so that I can keep up with the, crowd, so I plan to finish reading Build a LLM from scratch by Sebastian Raschka and do the self evaluation guide
¶ Watched Eagles defenestrate Chiefs in Superbowl 59 at Twinpeaks sports bar with few friends, and their families.
AI
¶ “Something becoming abundantly clear: AI won’t take your job. Someone using AI better than you will. — alex ohanian”. How can you show that you are using AI better?
¶ Self-Verification, The Key to AI from Richard Sutton, Nov 2001.
The Verification Principle: An AI system can create and maintain knowledge only to the extent that it can verify that knowledge itself.
“Never program anything bigger than your head”
¶ Using different AI models based on use case
This set of recommendation collected from this thread; these are not my own recommendations, as I do not have such wide experience with all the models, but it is interesting to see various (expanding) usecases and what might be good model for each. This list also serves as a catalogue of models for me to check out in the ever expanding list of contenders.
| Use Case | Model |
|---|---|
| Coding | Claude 3.5 Sonnet / o3-mini-high |
| Writing | Gemini Expo 1206 / Claude 3.5 Sonnet |
| PDF Analysis | Gemini Flash 2.0 |
| Video Analysis | Gemini Flash 2.0 |
| Math | o1 pro / DeepSeek R1 |
| Data Analysis | o3-mini-high / DeepSeek R1 |
| Code Debug | DeepSeek r1 (thinking process will hint towards a solution) |
| Editing Gen AI content | Deepseek R1 |
| Web Search | Grok and daily use |
| Low latency tasks | GPT-4o mini, Gemini-Flash |
| Image Generation | Flux, Recraft |
| Video | Kling, Hailuo |
| Audio | Eleven labs |
| Research | OpenAI Deep Research |
| Brainstorming | Cluade |
| Quick Image Editing | Meta |
| Math | Gemini Flash 2.0 thinking |
| News and current updates | Perplexity |
¶ Jason Liu RAG course
Feb 4; Signed up for the six-day Improving RAG email course.
Feb 6; Read (Radford, 2018) at the taek won do class.
“You are waiting for your moment when something emerges in the world, they need a skill set, and you’re uniquely qualified. You build your brand in the meantime on Twitter, on YouTube, and by giving away free work. You make a name for yourself, and you take some risk in the process. When it is time to move on the opportunity, you can do so with leverage-the maximum leverage possible.” — naval
you can literally design everything about you and become anybody you want just by deciding and consciously practicing it until it becomes unconscious. — anon
AI, Science and Society Conference - AI ACTION SUMMIT - DAY 1 - YouTube; See Prof Michael Jordan’s talk starting at 1:03
AI Applications
Chat is a bad UI pattern for development tools—Daniel De Laney ¶
Current AI tools pretend writing software is like having a conversation. It’s not. It’s like writing laws. You’re using English, but you’re defining terms, establishing rules, and managing complex interactions between everything you’ve said.
You don’t program by chatting. You program by writing documents.
A document centric padigm for programming asissted by LLMs. Isn’t this what Cursor etc help with? they work on the whole document, don’t they?
My own takeaway: try to use LLM assistants as if you are working on a document, and don’t restrict yourself to a hunt-and-peck chat mode.
Books
¶ 100 or so books that shaped a century of science; 1999, via hn
Technology
Rediscovered Cloudflare Tunnel via A mini data center article. I might yet put up a service or two on my spare home linux box behind this yet. ¶
As someone that has done “direct software development on production servers”, the closest to capturing that feeling, & one that can go way beyond is developing a service on your Linux desktop connected to outside world through a Cloudflare tunnel. no vim here. yee yee!
Learnt about unraid as a solution for NAS and local self-hosting. I might build a box to do just this. Should be able to install things like Plex media server on that box, apart from serving as local backup. Apparently it even supports Apple Time Machine, which is a big deal for me. Overall, very positive about this being something to investigate and invest some time and money (yes! it’s a paid Linux distro; based on Slackware).
Link Dump
¶ Jonny Kim - Wikipedia an American U.S. Navy lieutenant commander, former SEAL, flight surgeon, Naval aviator, physician, and NASA astronaut.
The origins of 60-Hz as a power frequency | IEEE Xplore