Alex's notes

A book by Rick Rubin about creativity and how to let it happen.

The Gameboy Color has a new (to me) mod to replace the screen with a repurposed Blackberry AMOLED screen.

Startups typically have an advantage over incumbents when it comes to adopting new technology.

The following is a list of pricing models from various AI + {THING} products.

The service-as-software model is nacsent but expected to be experimented with in different fields as artificial intelligence techniques improve and enable new applications.

Service as software is the inverse of software as a service.

Outcome-based pricing (or result-based pricing) is becoming popularized again due to services powered by artificial intelligence that are enable intent-based outcome specification.

I was at a high-end clothing store the other day.

DNA is by far the most dense storage medium that we know of.

Working on my personal indexing service, I noticed that large files were getting OOM killed.

One of the biggest criticisms of LLMs is that they don’t actually know anything.

Rather than score search results on the probability that the query is relevant to a document, BM25 provides a ranking of probability.

A study of artificial intelligence on productivity at a materials research lab found that the bottom third of researchers saw no improvement but top researchers doubled in productivity (as measured by materials discovered, patents, and “downstream product…

A lot of tech company workers dread incidents.

When thinking in scenarios, I find it useful to lay it out as a table.

Sometimes I want an emacs buffer to always be visible but I want to ignore it when navigating between buffers.

LLMs are all simulation.

I block every unwanted email I receive to keep my email inbox as signalful as possible (“block” is Gmail speak for “create a filter for this one email address and always send it to spam”).

With the growing popularity of tools like Perplexity, OpenAI, Search GPT, and retrieval-augmented generation (RAG), and a healthy dose of skepticism in artificial intelligence (e.

First Round Capital has a helpful guide to product market fit that helps to orient founders so they can focus on the right things.

I see a lot of startups with domain names like getbarai.

NRR measures the ability of a business to expand revenue over time.

One of the interesting lessons from rock climbing is that people can reach much further than they think they can.

BM25 and nearest neighbor have two different score scales.

I often find myself wondering what I did yesterday.

If a home computer is running on a local network with no ports exposed, how are tools like tailscale working to connect to said computer?

When working in emacs, especially in large org-mode files and completion lists, garbage collection pauses cause the experience to feel sluggish.

The impact of storms can be measured by the status of Waffle House in 1,600 locations from the mid-Atlantic to Florida and across the Gulf Coast.

Dify mashes together LLMs, tools, and an end-user facing UI together to make an LLM workshop.

To set up SSL certificates for use with HTTPs on dokku you can use the letsencrypt plugin.

I have a private network using Tailscale that runs a few local websites and services.

The definition of fragility (and its inverse antifragility) is the acceleration of harm.

I want to access a private network behind Tailscale network so that I can make an API call to update my personal indexing service when a GitHub repo changes.

“Mañana, a lovely word and one that probably means heaven.

The aptly titled “How to solve it”, is a book of strategies for solving problems with uncertainty.

On Mobile Safari, text inputs can not be autofocus by design.

I’m setting up dokku as a personal infrastructure PaaS for running services like the personal indexing service.

Sales is difficult enough, but selling a good solution to the wrong people makes it worse.

Shortcuts add a scripting layer on top of iOS (and macOS but I don’t use that) that can be executed across any app or screen.

In 1895, Paul Otlet and Henri La Fontaine built a paper internet with 18MM index cards affectionately referred to as the Mundaneum.

Soft drinks in the US are all kosher.

I recently picked up rust for a personal infrastructure project and was amazed at the amount of progress on the language and tooling over the years.

An exercise I learned about from Jeff Weinstein about finding a north star metric goes something like this.

As much as I love my emacs setup, I can’t take my laptop with me everywhere and that is my biggest compliant.

Paul Graham’s essay on founder-mode vs manager-mode is about how the advice to “hire good people and give them room to do their jobs” doesn’t work well for founders in practice.

The predominant system for managing data today pushes it far away from the people it represents.

Systems react to external events but behavior is entirely dependent on the internal workings of the system.

A question that Tim Ferriss uses to think about problems in different ways is to ask, “What would this look like if it were easy?

I’m looking into alternatives for LangChain.

I really like the way Paul Graham characterizes the difference between persistence and obstinance in his essay The Right Kind of Stubborn.