justinlloyd

From one dyslexic to another, who never got the option to even use a computer in school or college and instead was forced to write out everything long-hand, thank you so much for this.

I use voice-to-text in the workshop and when taking notes and reviewing a PR. And all the current options are pretty much what you would expect. More focused on accuracy, which is usually quite poor, which, to paraphrase, "It's Erin with an E. Oh for **s sake, Erin. ERIN! E. R. I. N. <pause> N. I said N. Eh-rin. Fine. Whatever." so anything that can improve on that experience will be immensely helpful.

Looking forward to seeing where you go with this, and I hope at some point you make a native desktop application.

As a child growing up in the UK I was allowed to call up, each evening, the bedtime stories phone line run by British Telecom. I used to call that bedtime story phone line from an an old 1970's era rotary Snoopy telephone from British Telecom which I still own.

I ever so carefully updated the phone with a new RJ-30 jack (the original was bare wires), so that in a custom built base that the phone sits on is an Nvidia Jetson running an LLM and trained on Charlie Brown's voice and a voice recognition model.

Dialing 1 will answer questions about Snoopy and Peanuts history and Charles Schultz in Charlie Brown's voice. You can just talk to it. Dial 2 and a very nice lady with a British accent will read you a bedtime story, interactively, like a choose your own adventure of sorts, from a large database of stories. Dial 3 and Lucy will pick up, announce that the therapist is in, and talk with you about what's troubling you, again, voice recognition and an LLM. Dial 4 and you get Woodstock. Any other number gets you an "adult" from the Peanuts cartoon that is impossible to understand, again, voice recognition to understand what you're asking, but the response is unintelligible.

I've worked on build systems quite a bit across a disparity of languages, frameworks, operating systems and engines. I've constructed some really big build systems spitting out 100's of SKUs across a dozen target platform, and I've built studio-wide build systems that again, spit out hundreds of SKU's across dozens of projects, with hundreds to thousands of programmer and artist hours per day of code and art and other binary assets pouring into the version control every hour of every day.

And the universal constant in all build systems is always a problem of management. I've turned 7 hour builds into 7 minute builds, and management doesn't care. I've saved literally thousands of hours of programmer time per year on projects, and management doesn't care. Build systems are a cost center. Always neglected, never funded, and not seen as critical infrastructure.

Build systems, at the end of the day, no matter the language or target platform, are never really that complicated, we just tend to over-complicate them. What I really want, if I had the time to implement, is a build file system.

All that said, I'll never go back to working on a big build system without having a PM that insulates me from the unreasonable demands of being woken up at 4AM by a Producer absolutely frantic because "the build system isn't working at all!" but when checking on the problem, it's because a developer checked in some code late and night and then went home. I have some serious trauma from those years of my life.

Technically the binary language of moisture evaporators would be a good example. But for humans, perhaps Quipu/Khipu. Morse code too, I guess.

My media consumption habits went off a cliff since the pandemic due to life circumstances. I am slowly picking up the pace again. I have read around 3,500 books, not all of which I keep on the shelves. A nearly complete list with reviews of many of them are on one of my personal blogs.

We need to raise the living wage, and the living standard of our people. But that's a separate discussion. The couch was not 10% of my gross annual income.

We drive a second-hand Toyota that we paid cash for. The previous car we racked up 200,000 miles before deciding to "upgrade." I wear worn out Skechers sneakers that have seen better days. The leather belt that holds up my pants is getting on for 20 years old. The red sweatshirt I am currently wearing is stained with paint and varnish and food, and has at least three holes in it.

I pay, very rarely, for good coffee outside of the home. I prefer the coffee I make at home. It costs me around 8c per cup, 12c if I steam some milk. Some really good beans that cost around $25 a pound. Admittedly the coffee is made on a Jura X8, or a WEGA espresso machine at the RV.

Nobody really comes in our house, so we're not status signalling to anyone other than this casual mention on social media about some stuff. Money is a tool, and deployed properly, can bring a lot of leverage to problems.

You're free to make a judgement, and would probably blow a gasket knowing what I dropped on three office chairs, but at the end of the day, I used the tools I have at my disposal.

Last time I bought a couch, a new one, it set me back $6,000. It took me the better part of eight months to find it. Solid wood. Proper joinery. Thick padding. Pig skin leather. We kept it for 20 years before giving it to some friends who had it reupholstered where I expect it will last another 20 years.

I used to have some expensive, but ultimately crap, book cases. Book cases are not designed by people who own a lot of books. 36" to 48" spans of fast growth pine will stretch and bow within a year or two. I designed my own book case. I went to a furniture making store. We went back and forth a few times. The biggest sticking point that took four attempts for the furniture maker to understand was where to put the fixed shelf. It does not go in the middle because that wastes space. We made it out of pine. 7' 8" tall, so that when standing it up, it will clear an 8ft ceiling in modern American homes. 22" wide shelves so they cannot flex. Fixed shelf to counteract gravity. Made specifically to carry paperback novels and similarly sized books. "Sand it three times, prime it, sand it, prime it, sand it, paint it, sand it, paint it, no I don't care that a single book case will cost $200." I bought 24 of them. Many hundreds of lineal feet of book cases. We still have them 24 years later and they are as good as new. And the paint job, because it is two layers of prime and two layers of paint, on a mirror surface, looks like you just took the item from the showroom floor.

I have a plywood bookcase I made to store cooking books. The cheapest plywood you can imagine from the big box store. But because of the structural design, 15 years later it still holds up without any bowing or flexing.

Modern furniture is absolute junk. Even the "good stuff."

The notion of a homelab is really, more of a suggestion. I have, what you might call, a "homeprod."

"Be aware, the video server and sync server will be offline between the hours of 8PM and 10PM on Friday, March 8th for hardware upgrades. Expected downtime should not be more than 20 minutes but please plan around this disruption to essential services. Other services should not be affected during this work."

Like someone else mentioned in this thread: It was really best described as a "home network with more than one computer." But you can't really put that on your C.V. under "experience."

"Improved SLA uptime on client's network to five nines. Upgraded storage controllers in a live environment without disruption to established services. Deployed k8s cluster into a production environment serving thousands of hours of compressed video files with real-time format transcoding."

I will freely admit, my home network probably needs to be pared down a bit. The problem is the salvaged hardware and good deals at the liquidation auctions accumulates faster than I can cart it off to the street corner. There's also far too many laptops floating around the house doing nothing useful that could be donated away. A lot of the homelab is salvage or bought at (in-person) liquidation auctions. There's some new stuff, but I rarely need the latest and greatest for my setup. In my home network diagram I try to document everything that touches the network so I can stay on top of the security patches, and what has access to the outside world and in what way.

https://justinlloyd.li/wp-content/uploads/2023/11/home-netwo...

Have been acquired/acquihired a few times. Universal. Some holding company you've never heard of but probably have spent quality alone time on their primary website. Activision. General Electric. Accenture.

The distractedness of the executives is spot on. But it always seems to be in hindsight that we look back and go "huh, funny..." I am sure we could write an inference bot that monitors the calendars of people in the organization and estimates that an acquisition is imminent.

And the security/bug fixing. "Yeah, that bug has been there for three years, nobody has time to fix it." Well, all of a sudden, we are fixing it. And more besides. And the licensing of software and source code. Getting a full run down of every open source license, and I mean _every_ license, and then going back and checking them again. A sudden drive to document everything.

I've also seen the ugly side of acquisition too. An equity claw back that happened to me many years ago that I am still sore about. Sudden acceleration of equity grants and a "re-interpretation of what 'it' means" or extreme scrutiny of whether you actually qualify for the equity in your contract. I've seen a few good people suddenly not get anything because there was a missing signature on a document even though the person had been at the company three years.

Large amounts of acquisition money does strange things to people.

> Are you evaluating the pay at the current place as if there was no missing back pay?

Correct.

> As "slightly more money" sounds like "lots more" when the current place isn't making payroll

Also correct.

I am also evaluating the offers in terms of what I think I should be paid to make me satisfied with the compensation on offer.

I am just outlining the current situation. Nothing stated in my grandparent comment about my future plans.

Had a one hour casual chat with a start-up game studio in early February, and the offer came through in email on Friday for significantly more money and an interesting problem.

Had a one hour on-site casual chat with an established robotics company today, that stretched out in to about five hours of casually meeting the team, grabbing coffee with the CEO and CTO and a verbal offer at the end of the day. It is for more money than my current position, but it isn't significantly more money.

I have some thinking to do over the next couple of days. Plus a few more casual chats with companies lined up. Not sure if I should pump the brakes until Game Developers Conference though and see if there is anything there that's interesting. Work tends to fall out of the trees at that place if you shake the trunk hard enough.

Probably. :)

Look to your left.

And whatever it is you do, don't blink. Don't. Ever. Blink.

I am currently working with a start-up where the company is incapable of meeting its capex obligations. The founder raised a good amount of capital from investors a few years ago, and that provided a decent runway, but there's no traction, no KPIs, and whilst we've built some impressive technology, impressive technology does not bring in revenue. One of the problems (amongst many) is that the primary stakeholder has a perfectionist attitude to the user experience. Which in a start-up is deadly.

Now, as I said, the start-up cannot meet its capex obligations and the current funding round is looking grim. It is definitely going to be a down round and it ain't going to be pretty should a term sheet get thrust under our collective noses. To get the developers motivated to stick around a little longer, "generous" equity packages are on offer, with a request to convert over-due back pay and future payments too, into equity .

When I sought transparency - "Can I see the cap table?" - "Can I see the terms of the investors?" - "Can I see anything?" - the answer was invariably "no." Essentially, they're asking me to make a nominal investment of over $200K in the company, accepting common stock in lieu of pay without any insight into the financials or the terms provided to other investors.

It's worth noting that I had previously given the start-up a sweetheart deal, significantly discounting my usual rate and offering generous payment terms, in the spirit of support and belief in the project. This makes the current scenario even more disheartening. Compound that with what has become an overall toxic environment that I have euphemistically called "challenging" when asked to sum it up, and the future isn't bright enough to wear shades.

Now this isn't exactly my first rodeo. I've seen the beautiful side of start-ups and liquidity events. And I've seen the dreadfully ugly side too. Hard lessons learned. And the ugly side shows up way more than the pretty one.

I swear, some entrepreneurs must think I stepped off the boat yesterday.

Android in my pocket. Windows (and Linux) on the desk. Apple in the backpack. Yep. Pretty much. And the Apple Macbook Pro, apart from macOS, is also the best Windows laptop I've ever owned too. We have several Surface Book laptops of various versions scattered around the home, but our small collection Macbook Pro's are "old reliable."

Networking and marketing. Many opportunities come through LinkedIn. Plus several other smaller channels. I engage recruiters in conversation, but not one of them has ever come to me with an opportunity that is worth a damn that I would consider leaving my current position for. I've always viewed recruiters as a means for job seekers who don't want to pursue the opportunities themselves.

Of the times I have used a recruiter get get a new job (maybe four or five times over my entire career, only once in the past 23 years), not once have any of them helped in the negotiation or pushed the process forward. I got the feeling they just submitted my C.V. and then collected the cheque once I got hired.

Not much advice I know, and what works for me doesn't necessarily mean it will work for other people.

I have pastimes that bring me joy and make me happy. Apparently you derive your happiness from trying to make other people feel bad about themselves. We all need a hobby, I guess.

I have always used humour, proper humour, not sarcasm, in a variety of ways. Find the dark humour in a dark situation. Make a wise ass remark during a stressful situation. Sometimes the humour is inappropriately placed; inappropriately placed but still funny. "I had an absolute shit Christmas - I got laid off, my dad died, and someone gave me white sport socks. Seriously!? Who the hell gives white sport socks as a gift?"

Humour is my armour.

Sometimes my clowning is seen as unprofessional by "serious business people" but I honestly don't care to work with those kinds of people anyway. I use humour to start conversations with people. I make my wife laugh every single day.

"What's up?" I asked as I walked in the bedroom.

"I'm burning up" replies my wife on a cold January evening.

"She's burning up. She wants the world to know. She's so hot she'll glow. She's burning up. She wants to know the cause! Maybe it's early on-set meno-pause! 'coz she's burning up!"

I'm an introvert.

"Hah!" exclaims someone at the back of the room.

No. Really. I'm an introvert.

I know all the names of the people at Trader Joe's on Sunset. I know the names of the people at the Starbucks opposite. I know the names of many of the regulars. Many of the people that work the stores around the area too. The people at the post office. Our regular UPS and Fedex drivers stop to chat. I can tell you about their kids, their jobs, their life. They know me too, or many of them do. I talk to them all. Ask questions about their day.

What you see in-person in front of you at the office, at the restaurant, making sure everyone is included, talking to anybody I run into, working a room at a networking group, that's not me. I put on my Oxford shirt. I put on my black cashmere jacket. I pick up my electronic business cards. That's my sword and my shield. I step into battle. Face the world. Talk with everyone. Make sure they aren't left out. Approach everyone. Show interest. Ask questions. When people come together in a social setting, I'm usually that single connection between a lot of disparate people.

At a networking meeting where I know nobody to start I will know dozens by the end of the night, "Hey Dave, great to make your acquaintance! Have you met Jeff? Let me introduce you, he's this awesome software developer out of Facebook. You guys should talk." A minute ago I didn't know Dave. Fifteen minutes ago I didn't know Jeff.

People want to talk about themselves. And nobody knows how to break into the conversation. I'm that catalyst. Their ice breaker.

"Here, let me find Mike in this crowd, he knows Android stuff, he can answer your questions." I know Android stuff too, but let's introduce two new people to each other, this isn't about me.

I go home and I close the door and I sigh a sigh of relief that it is over and I can just be alone and recharge.

I studied improv and comedy for a few years, had a small side career in it too for a while, even appeared in a few Hollywood clubs, which sounds more impressive than it really is.

Robin Williams and Steve Martin were teenage heroes of mine. I wanted to be like that. That non-stop onslaught of stream of conscious pinballing from one comedic observation to another. The art of improv isn’t that it is all done right there, but that its rehearsed, and rather than an entire show, a six course dinner served at a fine restaurant like many comedy routines, improv is a Chinese buffet where you are elbowing the last words from your mouth out of the way to get at the next crunchy morsel your ADD brain just leapt too.

There is a scene, where Pam Dawber played by Sarah Murphree in the test footage for a biopic tells Robin Williams, played by Jamie Costa, "Shut up for a minute, I'm being serious."

When I watched that footage with my wife, she looked at me and said "That's you." And I had to apologize to her for having to live with that.

Years ago, when I first met my wife, I said "one day, you'll tell me to shut up. It'll happen."

"Oh, that'll never happen" said she.

"She wants the world to know, that she's burning up!"

"Shut up for a minute would you? I'm being serious!" she said.

Do I suffer from anxiety and depression? No, actually, I enjoy it. Who wouldn't? All those awesome memories flooding back to you in vivid detail at 4AM in the morning.

Pain takes away your humanity. Comedy brings it back.

When people ask me how I'm doing I deadpan that I am living the American dream, but really, deep down, I'm fine, I'm just a little tired that's all.

That would be me too. Though for that laundry list, I'd expect commensurate pay too. Used Ceph on a studio wide build system, built a couple of plugins for it. Don't really like Nix and use it under protest.

Loc8tor tag on the cat collar, and a couple of low-power ESP32 beacons in the house to triangulate.

https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/weekend-side-project-justin-l...

It posted a MT task when it detected weight in the litter box that was less than a cat but more than a little pee. Very sensitive digital weight platform and some fine tuning of the heuristic to get it just right. Then the MT task had to be finished in X minutes from when they start, but the Turker could request extra time on the task. But if they didn't, it would time after N minutes. Then, if they have clicked "done", two more MT tasks would get generated for two new people, where the MT worker would be asked to look at a before and an after shot of the litter box and decide if it was clean.

I kept it online for about six months. It was obviously a "dumb idea taken to the extreme" project, which included "and what can I do with computer vision and robotics for my final project with this really expensive Fujitsu robot arm I picked up from a surplus auction?"

You may be referring to the "farming" to be first in line to get the job. I didn't really prevent anything like that. Cats poop at different times, so no real way to predict when the job would pop up on MT. The Kinect and weight sensor in combination determined there was no cat present, and then the job would post. The job would always be gone in seconds. People got very creative with their cleaning, treating it like a Zen sand garden. I would come back and see pure art at times. Once, the MTurker stacked up the excrement like they were recreating the mashed potato scene from Close Encounters. They were not invited. Much like the popular meme: "Except for Billy. Billy has created the opposite of art."

I did have the usual "if the person who cleaned it last didn't do a job that passed review, they would be barred from taking future cleaning jobs."

We had physical green and red lights controlled via USB on a build machine. So when someone checked in code to SVN, the build monkey would kick off, and if the build passed, the green light would come on. And if the build failed, the red light came on. Whilst the build was running, no lights would be on. You could glance up from your desk and see the status of what was recently checked in and it motivated people to keep the red light off. Someone then installed a USB camera that would look for the green light or the red light, and send a notification to their desktop computer so they didn't have to turn around to look at the light. And for Halloween we all wore red sweatshirts and red t-shirts to troll the guy.

"Selfhosted" solutions:

Retro chores: A chores list mounted to the wall. It has a 4K OLED touchscreen that is 20" tall but only 4" wide. Physical toggle switches controlled by electro magnets so that the Raspberry Pi inside can physically toggle the switches. Complete a chore? You toggle the switch. Then the Raspberry Pi, at the end of the day, resets the toggle switch and clears the chore from the list. It's made with 21st century technology looks like it came straight from Atari in the 1970's. All walnut, and teak and brush metal.

Retro Jukebox: Two vertical 4K OLED touch screens, two curved 2K AMOLED touch screens, lots of physical jukebox style radio buttons that can be programmatically reset, all controlled by a Raspberry Pi, brushed metal and wood case, and now wired into ChatGPT so I can say things like "whatever happened to these guys?"

Time-synchronized wall clocks: Eight separate analogue timezone aware clocks controlled with dual axis stepper motors, and a sizable amount of VFD displays, all run from a single Raspberry Pi. The controller changes the VFD under each clock to show the name, the offset from local time, weather in the time zone, and a few headlines. It's motion and IR sensitive so the VFDs shut down when nobody is around to watch them.

Daily Guk: It's a newspaper running on an old 21" android tablet that shows good news for the day, our calendar, comics, local weather.

Memories: It's 18 x 9" OLED displays artfully arranged on the wall and driven by a Raspberry Pi that pulls images from our stash of digital photos. Motion sensing so they turn-off when nobody is around.

Arcade Cabinet Rack: I have two 4U workstations and a 3U UPS, plus a 1U network switch I installed in a custom built cabinet that is about 30" tall, and then I built another cabinet on top of that which is an arcade machine that plays a bunch of retro games on a Skull Canyon NUC.

The Wall: I salvaged a bunch of 55" 4K TVs, stripped them down to their components and then built them in to a fake wall, with sliding rice paper shoji screens in front of them, and the screens show peaceful calming nature scenes. Display can run in 2D or 3D mode. Driven by an old i7 and a quadro card.

CNC Controller: An android tablet that talks to a Raspberry Pi that controls my two CNCs littleboy and fatman because I got tired of the CNC cuts failing due to network connectivity issues.

CNC Dove tailer: It's an aluminium jig that I cut on the CNC that lets me vertically mount a board at the end of the CNC to cut dove tails nice and clean.

Walking timer: It's a simple stop watch Windows app with some big buttons to start and stop the timer and add laps that my wife and I use to track our neighbourhood walks. I added some computer vision smarts to it so it can pull the video from the front door camera and automatically start the timer and track our laps around the block using gait analysis and image recognition.

Home health: It's a custom made home dashboard that tracks calendars, emails, locates the cell phones, locates our wallets, tracks the cats, shows our meal plan for the week, local weather and so on.

Cat toy robot arm (no longer available to play): I built a robot arm with different attachment options; a laser pointer and a feather on a bendy stick. You could control this robot arm over the internet, through a web browser, and there were live camera feeds to the web browser window. And you could donate money to play with the cats in the shelter for a period of time. Like an arcade game. And all the cats got adopted.

Cat toy touch screen: I salvaged a 50" LCD and installed an infrared touch screen and turned it into a large cat that sits on the floor that lets the cat chase a virtual mouse around the screen.

RTS sand box: A couple of high res overhead projectors and a few kinects and some sand in a box and we have an RTS game you can fight little war games on. I don't think the installation is at the science museum anymore.

Litter box cleaner: A kinect, a digital weight scale, a couple of cameras, a robot arm, a litter box, an internet connection and I would pay 25c for people using Amazon's Mechanical Turk to manipulate the robot arm and clean the litter box for me. And people would wait in line to take the job.

Waterfall Ring toss: I salvaged a 55" 4K TV and made a physics based retro game where you try and get rings onto pylons, that was then installed in the door of an art gallery, which was closed due to the pandemic. Big mashable button on the front of the machine so you could play the game.

Early in my career, with the bravado of youth, I sold myself as a hacker/computer whiz. Now I sell myself as someone who solves interesting problems.

I did game development, then embedded development, more game development, back to embedded, then robotics, then machine vision, then deep learning, then virtual reality, then back to game development (with machine learning), then embedded software in healthcare, then game development again, then vr & computer vision, and back to game development (back-end). And there's probably a few segues into other areas in there I have forgotten to mention.

I maintain multiple online profiles, that sell me as a specialist in a specific area. From blogs to single page websites. And why do I do this? Because when you go to a steak restaurant, you shouldn't expect their pizza selection to be great.

In Feynman's words "specialization is for insects." And I agree, but when selling yourself, specialization closes the deal. Specialize to win the bid, generalize when you've won their trust.

Customers, like patients, usually identify a pain point they have, and they want a specialist to take away that specific pain, be it software or medical. You sell the specialization, you keep that customer coming back with the ability to solve all of their problems.

I liken software development, and especially contract software development to follow the first principle of improv (also something I've done): You never so "no", you always follow with "yes, and..."

Many moons ago, when silicon clock speeds could be counted by man, I had written some software that looked innocent, that booted from floppy, that played a game, but really walked through the ROMs and EEPROMs plugged in to the BBC looking for anything of interest, and then would dump said ROMs, if they were not recognized as anything standard, to the floppy disk. "My little ROM reaper."

At a trade show I hopped around a few booths, showing off some of my work, putting the floppy disc into various Beebs, usually with the permission of the people who worked the booth (usually). Letting a random person run their software from floppy on your computer at a tradeshow? It was the fashion back in the day.

My software dumped those ROMs quietly as I worked my patter on the sales person. Even the British Army BBCs used for recruiting succumbed to my little ROM reaper. They didn't have anything of interest in them.

For reasons unknown, at one booth, my game crashed, and dumped out some text, "reaping ROMs...", and in my youthful bravado I brushed it off and worked some more patter. One of the onlookers was a sales person from another booth who was very technical, a hardware & software developer and I don't think my patter worked on him, but that person worked for Morley. We got to talking about what my software was _actually_ doing. Which lead to some work for me.

I played only a small part in this particular device. There were other devices of theirs I played a larger part in, i.e. the Beeb RAM disc peripheral, and their never released 10MB Winchester. Which still sits on a shelf in my office. Which I conveniently forgot to return. Also there were other accessories from other manufacturers I had a small hand in for the BBC; the Digigraph, a light pen, a mouse, a genlock (used quite literally by the BBC (BBC Wales)) and a robot arm to name a few.

> The main difference between this and some of the others is that it is tuned digitally via the BBC

You're welcome. I recall that one feature, and a few late bug fixes, were my sole contribution to that project.

Yep, LEGO endures. I've done entire branded boxes filled with a custom instruction booklet, such as "build this diorama of our video game studio" or "this is a character from our upcoming game" or "it's a LEGO GameBoy with our game on the screen." And it has to be LEGO. Anything else is considered cheap and reflects on your company.

I learned, quite by accident, that carrying around several boxes of the small Cadbury's Flake chocolate around a conference in Las Vegas was an amazing ice breaker to conversation. From there, the next game developer's conference, I dropped about $400 on custom printed sleeves for small Toblerone chocolate bars that I could give away. I've also always carried a different style of high quality business cards from everyone else, so that also became a conversation starter (about $150). I've also done a glossy magazine for my video game company showing off our achievements and projects for the past year (about $2,000). And a pop-up book of projects ($1,500). And a high-quality custom Rubik's cube (about $4 each). And a colouring book with branded crayons (about $1,200). Custom phone cases. Custom phone chargers. Custom USB cords. Custom tools for network admins. Ribbons for conference badges. High-quality tape measures. Custom branded private blend coffee beans. LEGO in our own custom branded box. Digital single-game "game & watch" style toys. So many different toys that endure. Toys seem to always go over well. All those tiny marketing promotions break the ice and have lead to several successful business deals.

When I lived in Santa Cruz back in the early 2000s I lived in a duplex, and my duplex neighbour and I would cook and give away well over three 30lb bags of baked potatoes each Halloween. Bake the potatoes early in the day, cut them open, put in the butter, salt and pepper, then close them up and wrap in tin foil. Kids and teenagers would go out of their way to get a potato from us.

I used fine tuning to approximate my style. Which is especially important around my logging style as I tend to break it down in to sections, and it is stream of thought writing, example of what I mean is here: https://www.github.com/justinlloyd/retro-chores. In my logging and journals I'll crank out anywhere between a couple of hundred words and a few thousand words per day. I used embedding for adding new knowledge.

I also did a little work in letting it scan through my notebooks (they are OneNote and you can access and search via a Python API) via keyword search because it can point directly to something I've written in the past, and not just rely on model weights.

I discovered that I can be a bit of a tease.