Fell down the system customization rabbit hole. Looking at switching to Allacrity or kitty as a terminal emulator. Getting goku setup as an app and hotkey launcher on top of Karabiner. Playing with yabai as a window manager. Looking at sketchybar as a custom status bar. Trying to manage it all with nix-darwin and home-manager.I started to play around a bit with trying to setup a Temporal worker using Deno, but quickly ran into issues, then learned this isn’t currently possible.I enjoyed reading James’ post on 100 things you can do on your personal website. I like the idea of adding a sparkline and maybe webmentions.A very timely (for me) article by Hamel about understanding what a language model prompt abstraction library is doing before blindly adopting it. This really aligned with a lot of my own thoughts on the matter, right down to it’s praise of Jason’s instructor library baseline example.After playing around with home-manager for a bit, I realized what I really wanted was to have nix-darwin manage my system and use my home-manager config as a module. It took a bit of trial and error and searching to figure out how to make this work, but I did eventually find a way. With nix-darwin, I set up my nix and macOS settings. With home-manager, I installed my system packages (configured those) and shell aliases.I pivoted to using home-manager using the standalone installation. It seems to provide a reasonable starting point and a found a fair bit of prior art when searching Github, so my hope was there would be good examples to model off of. It took me a frustrating time to realize after running home-manager switch that only some changes took effect immediately. Knowing this probably would have saved me an hour and could have possibly solved a number of my problems from yesterday as well – I don’t have a quick way to check.Today, was a first day setting up a new computer. I spent most of the time installing applications and building up my setting with declarative configurations. This site has been helpful. I also started this walkthrough for setting up nix on a Mac.
I had to temporarily disable my nix.conf that was generated from the installer then run
nix --extra-experimental-features nix-command --extra-experimental-features flakes run nix-darwin -- switch --flake . to run the flake.A new thing I am trying is sending thanks to folks who write articles or build projects that I find useful. I got a taste of this after writing an article on fine-tuning gpt-3.5 to solve the Connections word game, even though the results didn’t turn out that well. Getting the positive feedback was quite motivating and my hope is to give others the same appreciation for the positive impact their work makes on me.I’m currently working on building a language model based chatbot that can answer questions about the contents of a database. There are a lot of products and libraries making efforts at this problem. To start, I tried out the Vanna.ai open source library. I followed this guide to get started with ChromaDB for the indices and OpenAI as the language model to query a Postgres database. I also set up a Postgres database with Docker and the Chinook dataset.For several days now, I’ve been looking into recording audio in a browser and streaming it to a backend over a websocket with the intent to do speech to text translation with an AI model. I know the pieces are all there and I’ve done something like this before (streamed audio from a Twilio IVR to a node backend, the send that to a Google Dialogflow CX agent). The current challenge is finding which pieces I want to connect.