Tag: Tools

Copilots on the cheap

Didn’t realize just what it takes to start out with a programming assistant — expect prices to go up a lot later!

Individuals pay $10 a month for the AI assistant. In the first few months of this year, the company was losing on average more than $20 a month per user, according to a person familiar with the figures, who said some users were costing the company as much as $80 a month.

Source: this WSJ article from Oct 2023

A tale of three agents

I had an experience that I feel encapsulates the tradeoff between a few different products that each claim to replace part of the “general search experience”.

I asked the following question:

How can I find a list of every PDF I uploaded to Heptabase ?

(Ignore the content of the question for now)

GPT-4

I’m sorry for any misunderstanding, but as of my last programming date (February 4, 2024), there’s no available information on a platform or software named “Heptabase”. It might be possible that you’re confused with the name, or it is a new software that was developed after my latest update, thus I can’t provide instructions on finding every PDF you’ve uploaded to it.
Typically in such document management system, you’d either use the search function (if available, use filters for file type to narrow down to PDFs), or traverse through the user interface to find a documented list of all uploaded files. You might also need to consult the specific user guide or help resources provided by the service.

A very reasonable response (but useless in this cotext)

Bard

Bard performed completely (insert expletive) here. First, it took several seconds to mull over. Then, it showed this … this … bizarre response-that-is-really-an-error.

(It asked me to connect Google workspace … why?!)

Perplexity

Perplexity gave me the response in the screenshot below. This was both quick and useful – I tried it out and it worked.

So yeah, I’m shifting most of my daily cognitive load to Perplexity now, with the balance handled by chatGPT.

P.S. Yes, this is dated already, Bard is now Gemini, which is likely better at this (though not as good at other things, but my perception of their relative utility is still the same)

Link curation re-evaluation

Some random thoughts here, on the topic of “sharing bits of what I come across”.

I’ve had this WordPress blog for over 12 years (including items that started here, and other sources ingested here over time).=.

There hasn’t been any “stable intent or focus”, and both the frequency and content have been quite … random.

I like it that way 🙂

There is one strand of content that has existed in some form or another, though, that of “periodic curation”.

In the beginning, this was a “monthly collection of links”.

After a few years, I had two monthly collections, one for “math/science/programming”, and one for “everything else”.

After a few more years, I reverted back to a single monthly curation, and then abandoned this altogether, thinking I’d automate this somehow.

One attempt to do this was via micro.blog, where a given tag can be selected for a monthly newsletter.

I recently realized that there doesn’t need to be an explicit collection.

If I simply throw everything into a bucket, and provide a “monthly view” into that bucket, it serves the same purpose.

And so, having already once had a Roam graph to use as a Personal Homepage, it makes sense to re-purpose that for this.

Given tools like Funnel (really, just a “shortcut” into Roam’s Quick Capture), it’s ever easier to just dump in whatever I’m looking at in the moment.

Let’s see how this version goes.

Random Note #987346

(reviving an old draft)

A blog shouldn’t be a series of posts. What if I want to change an older post?

A blog should be a graph of posts, and the “chronology” should be a series of diffs, some of which are entirely new posts, and the rest are modifications to earlier posts.

The chronology is just one of many views of this graph though, it should be possible to view a personalized “recently viewed”, “recommended”, “random tag/category”, etc.

What is special about a blog anyway? Isn’t it just a nested collection with different kinds of tags?

Just do it

(Old draft)

I remember coming across Allegro as a graphics library for games (10? 15?) years ago.

My impression at the time was that it was too simple, and “real games” would require more sophisticated stuff.

Turns out Factorio (a game that I came across and got briefly addicted to) is built (https://www.reddit.com/r/factorio/comments/6bzjmw/how_many_lines_of_what_language_of_code_is/dhr96ok?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web2x&context=3) using Allegro, which as a library, is still around today (https://liballeg.org).

The (lol, painful) lesson should be: if you want to make something, make it now, using whatever tools you have now.

Nix is (still) unusable

I first tried out Nix in 2018.

The second round — I went through “Nix Pills”, which helped get a better idea of what was going on — was in 2020.

I heard NixOS getting some popularity (you know when the “Arch folks” are talking about it …), and thought I’d try — not the OS, not yet — the Nix-package-on-a-VPS experience again.

I had, I’ll admit, forgotten some of my intuitive grasp from three years ago.

Context

All I wanted to do was to install Emacs.

It turned out to be much harder than I expected.

Here are some things that partially or didn’t work:

Searching and installing

What didn’t work:

nix search emacs

What did work:

nix search nixpkgs emacs

However, this shows a result like legacyPackages.x86_64-linux.emacs29

Note: it’s not obvious whether that legacyPackages prefix is a good thing, a bad thing, a neutral thing …

What doesn’t work:

  • nix install legacyPackages.x86_64-linux.emacs29
  • nix install emacs29
  • nix install nixpkgs emacs29

Using nix-env

AFAICT I should’ve been able to use the “new” nix CLI, and not had to fall back to nix-env … but nope.

Something that becomes very obvious when you try to use nix-env …. it takes forever.

If you’re used to apt cache ... returning quickly, this is 10x or even 100x slower.

What didn’t work:

  • nix-env --install legacyPackages.x86_64-linux.emacs29
  • nix-env --install emacs29
  • nix-env --install nixpkgs.emacs29

Note: that last one is very similar to what finally worked !

Using flakes

This kept popping up, but I didn’t try it. I don’t know if it would’ve been faster with it or not. But surely, I can’t be expected to create a whole file describing what I want to install instead of running a one-line install command?! Especially after I’ve searched for it and verified that it exists?! (i.e. the nix search ... above)

Here is what finally worked:

nix-env -iA nixpkgs.emacs29

Between searching, forum posts, and Bard, there was no way I’d have “normally” arrived at this.

Closing notes

To be clear, this won’t stop me using Nix — but I expect it’s enough of friction that I think blocks wider adoption.

At a minimum, allowing something like nix install foo to just work after nix search foo has succeeded would be a worthy goal.

Of analog “anti-nets” and slip-boxes

Came across this series of “emails” or “letters” about someone embarking on an analog thinking system.

An Antinet is for those who wish to read more effectively, take valuable notes from readings, and transform them into potent long-term material that significantly impacts your field.

Noble goal, one I would’ve mirrored in zealotry few years ago. Now though, I’m apt to wish them well. “How to Take Smart Notes” by Sönke Ahrens has become the over-recommended guide in these quarters, and “Zettelkasten” the correspondingly over-used word.

The author’s description of over-doing reliance on an app must ring true to many today:

I had set out to use Obsidian to map out all the concepts from the books I was reading. My goal was to organize them into a cohesive whole that would become greater than the sum of its parts. I hoped to use the concepts to produce a book or a newsletter on marketing, copywriting, and cryptocurrency. Yet I ended up with a rat’s nest of 1,272 linked files, and a nifty diagram presenting me with a bubble graph of the mess!

Still, there’s something to like about it. One should write things down.

I’d recommend adopting the general idea, but change it slightly, and advocate a hybrid approach instead.

Avoiding technology for the sake of avoiding it is just as pointless, IMO. Yes, use pen and paper —because your ability to use it would atrophy otherwise — but don’t shy away from the “right tools for you”.

If you’re looking for a piece of software that will prove a good companion here, I’d modify the suggestion slightly, to Devonthink instead of Zotero. It does everything and more, allowing for multiple individual stores, and an iOS app.

Either way, writing and thinking is definitely a good alternative to passively scrolling the feed … avoid that at all costs! 🙂