Notes for May 08-14

This was a weird, atypical week. Tiring, too, in more ways than one.

More layoffs (this time here in Portugal), which was a major downer after a personally rewarding week and completely killed the mood for the entire day.

Mostly chores.

• Printed a few Gridfinity grids and storage boxes for my new desk.
• Renewed one of my AI certifications.

Tried not to think about work and did some AI whispering instead.

• Built an OpenAI-powered RSS feed summarizer in Node-RED after figuring a decent way to incorporate it into my current pipeline (I run an RSS “caching proxy” that fetches, enriches and even creates feeds that otherwise wouldn’t exist).
• Dropped “down” to using gpt-3.5-turbo because it’s more than good enough to both do translations and bulleted topic lists, although I suspect I’ll be using gpt-4 for the next iteration since I’m not impressed with its reliability in generating valid JSON–but I am impressed that it can do so so easily:

Did some long-overdue traveling.

• Nothing much else got done except updating my original borg post.

Regular work catch-up day.

• Fiddled with my RSS summarizer a bit more. With some prompt tweaking and a bit of lateral thinking for fine-tuning token usage, gpt-3.5-turbo is indeed good enough for all that I need right now and provide me with headroom for spending less than $0.05 a day on generating nice summaries (and save me at least half an hour a day right now).
• Set up borg at my desk and revamped the monitoring script a bit (I was not doing proper hwmon auto-discovery). Keeping it cool seems to be a solved problem for now, so I am eager to get back to doing other stuff.
• Wrote a letter to The Economist:

Did some more traveling.

• Investigated circle a bit more since I have a project that I wanted to do with it as a base runtime.

Finally, some fun.

• Played some Zelda.
• Cleaned up my RSS summarizer to properly use system and assistant contexts as well, which
• Played some more Zelda.
• 3D printed a Rudist for my kids’ school project:

• Played even more Zelda.