Notes for May 15-21

My free time was mostly spent in Zelda, which is understandable but feels like a guilty pleasure.

No Zelda was played today.

• Ritual sacrifice of office clutter to the productivity gods.
• Did a fair amount of experimenting with formatting and some fine-tuning of ChatGPT token limits and prompt complexity on my RSS summarizer. Also added output validation (and retries), a couple of gnarly feeds (yes, Slashdot, I’m looking at you) and a “seen” filter to avoid summarizing the same item twice.

My biggest takeaway so far is that using gpt-3.5-turbo is nearly completely unreliable at tracking references if you give it free rein on format, and just barely more convenient than Azure Cognitive Services for summarizing 15-20 items at a time because it will do translations and pick topic headings all on its own. I’m going to add a few more feeds, let it run for a few weeks and then revisit this.

Very busy day.

• Went out to lunch for a change.
• Opened up rogueone, dusted it, applied fresh thermal paste and upgraded the box fan to a 50mm one. Am a bit annoyed that the new fan is a little noisier than the 40mm Noctua it had, but it will keep living in the closet anyway.
• By sheer accident, I realized that borg‘s GPU will sit at 12W consumption and reach 52^oC on idle but will drop to 7W/42^oC if I reboot/power cycle the machine, which is just nuts. Nothing was using the GPU, and I suspect this is a bug of some kind.
• Was bitten by a Fedora upgrade that completely broke all my nice remote desktops: xrdp-1:0.9.22-3.fc38.x86_64 removed libxup.so (apparently by mistake). However, it also looks like RFX support is being removed in another commit–this was all fixed in a day or so, but it was a distraction.
• I reached out to the maintainers and “fixed” it temporarily by doing sudo yum downgrade xrdp. Also, a few handy commands when debugging this kind of thing:

# disable graphical boot (which kills any display managers and lets you launch one manually)
sudo systemctl set-default multi-user.target
# enable graphical boot
sudo systemctl set-default graphical.target
# query which package contains a specific file
rpm -qf /usr/lib64/xrdp/libxup.so

Most of my free time was a Zelda-shaped blur, although some coding was done. Absolutely genius game, and I am going to need to exercise some restraint if I want to do anything else in the evenings.