Notes for July 10-13

After this week’s events (and a little over six months of regular summaries), I’ve decided to stop posting weekly notes regarding my off-work activities.

Like I wrote at the halfway mark I began doing these as a way to cope with the lack of motivation and focus I was feeling at work and right now, at a renewed low ebb, I’m pretty sure they’re just eating into what little remaining enthusiasm I have to write and tinker with things.

Things at work are still very much in flux and mostly OK, but definitely not motivating or fulfilling enough, and I can’t wait to go on vacation in a few weeks.

That is not to say that there won’t be more notes–just that I need to change things up a little.

More layoffs and the usual yearly re-orgs, which despite being expected still took a toll in terms of productivity (and mood). Decided to unplug early and just watch TV.

Did some more langchain-related tinkering, this time delving into selecting a vector database I like. Unfortunately I cannot use Postgres, but most of the grunt work is about data chunking and importing anyway. I do wish there was a nice SQLite wrapper to do that from Python (I found at least one extension, but can’t be bothered to work out the details to write dedicated Python bindings right now).

Resumed fiddling with vector databases. Not particularly happy with the tendency for brand new, completely untested SaaS offerings popping up, which makes it kind of hard to do self-hosting (plus Azure Cognitive Search would shred my personal usage cap if I used it for what I want to do).

After a particularly weird afternoon at work, decided trying to find meaning through my hobbies isn’t going to improve things.