ProbableOdyssey | Blake Cook

Setting up a home server to replace Dropbox is a project I’ve wanted to tackle for a while.

Past month or two I’ve made an interesting observation: The more I use AI agents to write code, the more review fatigue I experience My solution: inspired by Ankur’s recent blog post (see references) no more AI writing code for me (unless its boilerplate)…

A new recent trick I’ve added to my repertoire: justfiles for each branch I work on.

Further into this technological chapter, I’m noticing a few more voices out there who appear to have scaled the cliff of anxiety and inexperience that we’ve all felt (to some degree) when faced with new AI tools.

After almost 10 years in Python, I’m making my way into the land of Java.

GitHub’s reliability has gone down the drain.

I constantly forget the right way to set up logging in Python without messing with other packages log levels.

MacOS has two incredibly useful commands: pbcopy and pbpaste.

Yet another set of commands I keep forgetting!

One set up does not fit all tools.

To serve multiple services on a node on my Tailnet, I’m going to use Caddy as a reverse proxy.

Constantly something I have to search on the web for: posting it here so I can come back to it immediately next time I need it Source sudo install -m 0755 -d /etc/apt/keyrings curl -fsSL https://download.docker.com/linux/ubuntu/gpg | sudo gpg --dearmor -o…

My first smartphone was an iPhone 4 — a well-crafted, great device, but one where software and customisation were limited.

An educational procrastination technique is managing your dotfiles.

Chop 1 onion, 2 carrots, 2 celery stalks Make a sofrito with the chopped veg Heat gently in a large pot (lid on) with olive oil and a pinch of salt 10 – 15 mins Grate 2 zucchini into a tea towel with a fistful of salt Wring the fluid out of the zucchini by

Writing PR descriptions has always been the most tedious part of working with git for me.

The LLM tool is easily one of my favourite CL’S in the past year.

Git only tracks files, not directories, but sometimes you need to “track” a directory to ensure it exists in fresh clones, like an output folder.

Last year I wanted to build a live transcriber/fact extractor to learn more about the process of building such a system.

This week, I had a wonderful experience when returning to R.

It has been impossible to avoid the sheer amount of coverage of OpenClaw (formerly MoltBot, formerly ClawdBot).

Something I’m constantly forgetting is how to declare scripts with pyproject.toml.

Many bash scripts you’ll see in the wild often have some variation of set -euxo pipefail at the top of the file.

Recently I came across a video from author John Green about hope.

This is something I’ve written on a sticky note on my desk recovering from burnout for the N’th time: - Harder to wake / morning drag - Sleep doesn't restore me - Irritable at minor friction - Routnes slipping - Avoiding basic maintainance - Functioning on

When I moved out of home, I came across this enjoyable and informative article from Brett Mckay on establishing a self-reliant mentality One of the best answers I have found to this question actually comes from a great, albeit endearingly cheesy, 1950s ed…

A curated collection of blogs, books, and tools that have influenced my thinking and work.

This past year I set myself the goal of entering a powerlifting competions.

The sheer volume of content served up on the infinite scroll of Reddit effortlessly steals focus and legitimately wastes much more time than anticipated.

In the latter half of this year I felt my momentum on side project slow down to a crawl.

Imagine you have configuration data, API payloads, or test expectations, and you want to verify that a smaller, “subset” dictionary is fully contained within a larger “superset” dictionary, including all the nested dictionaries and lists that it may conta…

ipdb supercharges Python’s built-in pdb debugger by integrating it with IPython.

Starting with a “dumb” baseline in data science feels embarrassing.

When building effective machine learning systems, it’s rarely as straightforward as “pick the model that maximises a metric”.

Sometimes in an IPython REPL, you just need to quickly unpack an object to see what attributes an object has.

I recently discovered that using regex to extract phone numbers from text is significantly hard than I initially thought.

You’ve granted some roles to a service account, but your application is still throwing permission errors.

I’ve been enjoying using simonws llm CLI tool.

A common practice when serving models is to dynamically download model weights at runtime to keep Docker image sizes small.

You’ve trained a brilliant model and/or built a nice web app with FastAPI or Flask in Python.

If you’ve used Pandas, you’ve probably seen: SettingWithCopyWarning: A value is trying to be set on a copy of a slice from a DataFrame It means Pandas isn’t sure if you’re editing the original DataFrame or a temporary view.

Despite their overlap, the best practices of software engineering in one field often falter when applied directly to data science.

Building text summarisers with LLMs is a fascinating project to take on.

Progress demands consistency, but consistency doesn’t survive on willpower alone.

Excellence in anything is a byproduct of having fun.

Have you ever found yourself in this situation?

I have three computers I use on a regular basis, and my Vim-based shell workflow is heavily dependent on my configuration.

One of my least favourite things about writing code is writing PR descriptions.

Suppose we have the following class in.

The coding ability of LLMs fascinated me the first time I saw it in action with Github Copilot towards the end of 2021.