Notes

In February I wrote a post on how I stopped paying for ChatGPT in favor of a self-hosted solution. Since then, I haven’t completely stopped using ChatGPT, and I did resume my subscription briefly, but I’ve cut the cord again, this time I think for good. I mentioned previously that I’m using Ollama as a backend to run large language models on a local machine, and while it has gotten some significant upgrades in the past few months and even has its own UI now, I still prefer the solution I found earlier this year for day-to-day use, Open WebUI. It’s a powerful self-hosted interface for using both local and cloud AI models, and has rapidly gained a massive community and countless new features thanks to dozens of contributors. The team behind the app has kept pace very well with the major commercial offerings, and they show no signs of slowing down, having gained both Tailscale and Warp, the AI-powered IDE, as sponsors. ...

It’s May, and the spring semester is officially over. In true college fashion, it didn’t go out easily. My artificial intelligence course ended on a heavy note, another take-home exam that left everything to the imagination with a simple prompt: design a novel neural network with an architecture that minimizes CO2 emissions. We had 36 hours to turn in our solution, and I used almost every minute of that aside from sleeping and eating. ...

In my artificial intelligence course this semester, we were assigned a research project on a topic of our choosing, focused on a novel approach that improved upon existing research in the domain of AI. Right from the start it was a significant challenge; we were given two weeks to submit a well-defined research proposal without any learning or experience to lean on. I felt like a third grader being asked to invent a new way to solve algebra problems; I’ve heard of it, sure, but I’m missing the fundamentals to build on. ...

I just added a KVM console to my server rack, and it’s easily one of the best upgrades to my homelab I’ve ever made. Gone are the days of digging an old keyboard and VGA monitor out of a forgotten box somewhere in the basement just to regain access to a machine I’ve managed to lock myself out of, or to set up new hardware or a refreshed box. Now all I have to do is go downstairs, open up the console and switch inputs to the machine I need to access. It’s an old-school concept but it really does make a difference. ...

My artificial intelligence course this semester has been an interesting one, and the midterm exam is no exception. Rather than testing in-class on what we’ve been learning, our professor gave us a take-home exam that was a practical exercise in A* search algorithms. The problem we were given was to design an A* search algorithm that can find the shortest path a chess knight can take on a 9x9x9 Rubik’s cube to reach a goal at any position on the cube, from any starting position. The algorithm should accommodate the following constraints: ...

Two and a half years ago I was one of the earliest users of ChatGPT, and like most others I was amazed at what it could do, but right away I started dreaming up potential use cases that it was in no way ready to support. As I started testing ideas, the top of my wishlist read, “Run an LLM at home.” Not for any particular reason at the time, other than my love of self-hosting anything I could reasonably run locally. ...

AI is making my life very difficult these days. And no, this isn’t a rant about AI taking jobs; I’m talking about the Artifical Intelligence class I’m taking in school this semester. The class itself is very interesting, and the approach our professor takes in teaching is quite challenging, something that until now I’ve felt was largely lacking in other classes. On day 1 of the class we were given an assignment due in two weeks to come up with a topic of interest in AI research and learn enough about it to write a formal research proposal. The proposal had to include a description of some problem within an area of AI and the state of research into that issue, and a plan for improving upon existing research with a novel approach to solving the problem. (I’ll talk more about that project another time.) ...

I always have at least a few projects queued up or in progress, but recently I decided to get better organized with some personal project management. I installed Planka in my homelab and I’ve been filling it up with ideas, maintenance tasks, and issues for both homelab projects and house projects. Planka is essentially a Trello clone that’s missing a lot of Trello’s better features, but for now it’s where I’ve landed as it works pretty well and I’m hopeful that the project will stay active and keep adding features. ...

The next challenge I’ve decided to take on in my homelab journey is to replace one of my business’s remote servers hosted at OVH with a custom server hosted in my rack here at home. While technically this server will be separate from all homelab/non-production components, there is enough overlap that I don’t mind lumping it into the homelab category. After all, the primary purpose of my homelab is to support production in my business. ...

It’s no secret that digital assistants in 2023 are clunky and stale. Siri has lost its edge, while Alexa and Google Assistant were thrown at every wall to see where they might stick. Each of them responds to a limited set of instructions, making them only as useful as the number of commands one can memorize. While it’s clear that generative AI and digital assistants will converge at some point, I’m too eager to wait. ...