personal
In part 1 I described how AI has affected my mental health over the last year. But my concerns about AI go further than just "it's bad for your mental health". Sometimes these AI assistants sometimes exhibit weird behaviors. Gemini "feeling" miserable and self-loathing
personal
I wrote my first AI program in high school (around 2009-2010). I found a tutorial for writing a genetic algorithm to find a list of number that sum to a value (I think). It was written in C++, I knew only PHP, I didn't know any OOP, so
Also TIL: Romania was on timezone UTC +1:44:24 until 1930. So if you ever get weird offsets, not full hour (and not even 30 minute) offsets in code, it's probably because of pytz for some reason returns the first recorded offset for a certain timezone. Fix:
I haven't written a blog post in a long time. It's been a tough year. Mostly from a health perspective. One of the highlights was when I cracked four ribs from coughing (yes, the doctors were just as shocked as you are). Before that, I used
food
This evening I came home late after a long day, starving. So I asked my friend ChatGPT what I should eat. It gave me a 5 suggestions, taking into account my food preferences and health issues. I didn't fancy anything from those 5 things, but it did remind
til
I used to use Nginx to proxy requests and set up SSL. It's not super hard, but the config is a screenfull. Enter Caddy. Install it. Put the following in /etc/caddy/Caddyfile: DOMAIN.NAME { reverse_proxy localhost:8000 } Restart the systemd service. And voila, you have an
git
Half a year ago, I wrote about how to push Git repos between random repos. But at the time, I did it like a farmer, having to change the branch on the remote machine before pushing. Today, after fighting with piku, which is really nice, except it doesn't
blog
Every couple of years, I get bored of my existing blogging setup and make some changes to it. Now, I lasted 4 years on my previous server, but I got annoyed with my static site setup. I've been thinking about this change for a long time. In the
Recently I had my second visit to the ER. It was a lot longer than the first one and a bit more unpleasant, even though the hospital building and the treatment processes appear to have been improved since then. While I waiting there for five hours, with brief breaks to
Thoughts of an LLM consultant
Last week I was on vacation in Spain. I was there for only a week, but that was enough for the barista at the closest coffee shop to remember how I like my coffee: "Oat milk, right? And sorry, we don't have sugar"[1]. I had
One of the things that has sparked a lot of joy in my life in the last two years was building an app to keep track of "podcasts" I want to listen to. I'm using podcast in a very loose sense here, it's more
I've been blogging for 14 years now. I started off writing in Romanian, while I was in highschool. I credit writing all those posts with helping me get a really good grade at my Romanian exam at the end of high school. Then in university, I wrote a
When developing FastAPI based web services, I sometimes run into a weird issue on Windows: I kill the uvicorn process, but the port it used remains in use and I get responses in the browser, even though the server appears to not be running. Today I learned what's
Until today, I always used Github as a server, pushing my code changes there, then pulling from there to the deployment server (in a more or less automated fashion). But today I ran into a locked down VM that blocked Github, so I had to find alternative ways to get
As a freelancer, I work for many clients, who have their source code in many different places, often self hosted. I generally create new SSH keys for each separate platform. Unfortunately, Git doesn't provide an option for what keys to use, you have to configure this in the
I work on many different projects and I use some ActivityWatch for automatic time tracking. AW has a feature where you can use regexes to match window titles to assign them automatically to different projects. But, unfortunately, Jupyter Notebook have a "{filename} - Jupyter Notebook" title in the
I often need to set up a VM with a server to run some ML models. While I could package things in Docker and deploy them like that, whenever possible, I like to do things more directly, using systemd services. To create a systemd service, create a file called /etc/
When running long running code in Jupyter, I want to get notified when it finished so that I can get back to it. There is an extension to do that with browser notifications, but there are times when I leave the computer while waiting for an ML training to finish.
I use tmux as a multiplexer and for running some long-running commands on servers. Today I encountered a weird issue: when trying to attach to an existing tmux session (or when trying to do anything with tmux), I would get the following error: can't create socket: Permission denied
Yesterday my friend Marius Corici called me and asked me if I wanted to be interviewed (again) by ProTV, this time about deep fakes. This time it was a Zoom interview, and they asked me not to blur my background (ugh). And I had my second 15 seconds of fame
As I work from home 90% of the time, I run into a small issue during meetings: I sometimes speak too loudly. Before my daughter Gloria arrived, this was something that annoyed my wife and others in the house, but now, when Gloria is sleeping, this is not just an
