Building a memory assisted AI application is a pain, Cloudflare made latency less of a worry with Vectorize

In short, Cloudflare released a sentence embedding library which is directly embeddable in their Workers edge runtime which is a big deal if you're trying to cut down on query times and using something like OpenAI or another LLM API over the network. When I first started playing around with internal clientside apps leveraging these generative APIs, I can't tell you how bummed I was to learn that not only did I need to host a DB but also required spinning up infrastructure to transform queries into vectors OR needed to ping OpenAI to do the same. This turns a simple search query into a multi request affair and may not be helpful given how sensitive the application is to waiting.

Having a more turnkey setup is super useful when your requirements aren't sophisticated enough to require a shed load of services in your infrastructure.

Leave it to Cloudflare to give you not everything you'd find on AWS, but enough modern primitives to accomplish everything you'd do there and more 👏

Unlocking My Local Network With Tailscale

I have always been hesitant to self host anything I needed access to outside of my local network. Security is hard and opening up ports to your home is scary stuff. Instead, I tend to lean on a cheap VPS for anything I need access to remotely.

That has started to change since I heard a recommendation for Tailscale. In short it is a service that let's you connect and coordinate machines across the internet as if they were on a single LAN over the secure Wireguard protocol. At a high level, I can install Tailscale as a VPN on my phone and access a Nextcloud instance on my home LAN without opening any inbound ports on my router!

I heard the idea originally on Linux Unplugged and tried it out over the holidays. And without a doubt, it has been the most exciting thing to happen to my home networking setup in some time. I encourage anyone reading to try the same!

(For example, I currently have a little NAS box hosting: Nextcloud, Jellyfin and Home Assistant. I am thinking of hosting little, toy CMS's on my LAN and add a ephemral key access in CI, which is super rad and saves hosting costs for my goofy little throw-away projects.)

Double-wrist-ing

I think Antonio looks pretty rad with two watches on. Not sure if it's the right look for me for the season of life I'm in. As a homebody I haven't been wearing any of my watches let alone two of them and I am sadder for it. I'm now inspired to change that fact.

Everything I googled in a week as a senior software engineer

I found this great post while perusing random Bring Back Blogs for new feeds to follow. The conceit is simple, a list of all the mundane things Sophie Koonin (aka localghost) looked up in a week in her. Sharing with the aim of humanizing the profession. It's okay if you look things up, particularly when things are new, don't sweat it.

You aren't expected to know everything no matter your level of "seniority". But worth noting, to stand out it's a good habit to memorize what you use often, and keep some kind of note on less frequent knowledge. I promise over time this practice will increase your efficiency and keep you in flow. Nothing more frustrating than an hour (or more...) of random searches to find that "thing" you sort-of remember seeing once.

Know How Your Org Works

I don't think I've read anything as profound in the past year. As a developer, writing code is definitely the job, but remember everything you write serves people. Knowing how the people you work with/for think and prioritize will take you far in your career.

Honestly, I'm off to read this one again. As an explanation of how "work" works, I can't think of a better example.

Motion One

A web animation library that uses native browser APIs for performance and low bundle sizes. Can't wait to use it!

Marginalia Search

My kind of search engine! Marginalia is focused on surfacing the best kind of results: the weird, obsessive ones. The kind of results written by people who care about whatever you searched up, not the highly polished SEO traps you land on via Google.

Zellij

I work on a Mac for my jobby-job. It's Unix-based and has access to all of the *nix based tools you know and love from Linux, so what's the problem? Well, dear reader, the problem is that tmux is slooow on macOS. Not train wreck slow, but when you open a larger file inside a pane, you can feel each line peel at your skin.

Zellij is working itself up to handle all of tmux's main use cases. It's a work in progress for the fledgling Rust project. You can track their progress here. Right now, it's mainly a multiplexer for your terminal, which is fine (great even if you've not considered using multiple terminal windows yet!). What I'm waiting for is persistent session support... that and it's promise of speed. Heck, I should probably switch now and use tmux only for ssh connections.

(I'm riffing here, so don't mind me: I wonder if persistent sessions and multitasking between projects are not actually helping my productivity but harming it. I promote jumping between projects because it's an easy habit, I don't have to commit anything to git quite yet and this little thing I need to check on will only take a couple of minutes... I won't lose my frame of mind in both places and spend more time remembering what I was doing than actually doing it, right? I realize I just wrote a paragraph explaining why I couldn't possibly use Zellij or even my bare terminal, but maybe I'm wrong here.

I am going to need to get back to you, dear reader, on this one. An experiment is in order!)

What is this Place?

This is the weblog of the strangely disembodied TRST. Here it attempts to write somewhat intelligibly on, well, anything really. Overall, it may be less than enticing.

Places of Note