Good morning. Hello. How are you? #1021
Jane is still sick, greenhouse progress, the dream of a personal library LLM, Bing is still doing the trick for me, RIP Netflix's red envelope I miss you already.
Good morning, wassup growers. Greenhouse got gravel yesterday. And some floor. And now I have a ton of gravel left. Anyone need some gravel? It’s good gravel. Cheap. Nah. I’m gonna keep it. I have uses for gravel. It will be useful. Gotta get it out of the middle of the driveway, though. Gonna build some hoppers out of pallets on the “ugly” side of the house, fill ‘em up. Store it. Very exciting. Look at this shit:
I mean how awesome is that. This thing is gonna rule. I know it’s hard to imagine still, but IT IS HAPPENING.
Jane is still sick. It sucks. She woke up in the middle of the night, wanted her mommy. Neither one of them got any sleep. I am trying to help but probably making things worse.
Our friend Alice was staying at the other house (which really needs a name other than the number of its address, which is not a good name for public consumption. Guest house? I don’t know. Still thinking about it. It has not sufficiently developed through its improvement projects yet to take on its own character). Anyway Alice came over from some fire and chat times last night and she said that her son was sick for a full year when she first introduced him into the school system — it was at a way younger age than Jane, but still. A year. And I suspect that’s about the norm. This fucking sucks. I am growing to hate the school for making her sick, continually. And its our fault because we did not make her sick continually during a pandemic, when she was younger. The whole thing sucks, and no one else agrees and it’s one of those things that once you’re through it you look back mildly sympathetically and say “oh yeah that sucked” but not really, because you’re over it and you knew it was that bad but you know what? This whole thing is a societal failure of vision. Is it the biggest problem in our society? Lol no. But it is stupid. It is stupid and we could avoid it and we don’t and it sucks and it makes me cranky.
Here is a cute picture Jane drew of herself and two of her friends from school because she misses them. I do not know if the friend on the left is holding a cell phone or what but that would be weird. Maybe it’s a die? A card? No idea.
Here’s what I want: I want an LLM of my own shit. I want an LLM of everything on my computer, and everything on my book shelves. I want it to link into my kindle book purchases, and I want to be able to scan barcodes from my books, to verify I own a physical copy. The Kindle and barcode scan will ensure that authors get paid. The software also scans my computer for everything on it. It can use a chunk of the internet if it wants, but only a moral chunk, people who have opted into using their stuff and get paid. Then it provides me with a command interface and it uses all the shit I own. It then points to the relevant original sources, including the books I own. I want this so bad. It is moral, it pays artists, and it would be hella easy. I would pay $100 a month for this, easy. Some portion of that could potentially go to the artists, but the important part is it’s only searching shit I already bought so they already got paid. There seems, at the moment, nothing illegal about me tediously, manually scanning all the books I own into documents, then indexing them in an LLM along with my own shit. Authors already got paid for me to own that book.
There is so much unique, useful information at my disposal in this machine, in this house, and I want a way to quickly index it all and access it all and query against it all.
The frustrating thing is this is not technically complex at all in this day in age, it is just tedious AF and I don’t know that there’s a market larger than me and, like, fifty other people. Maybe I’m wrong in that. Maybe everyone wants that. But I get the sense most people just don’t have a ton of data laying around in their computer and house. So it seems impractical to, you know, raise the $10 million or so you’d need to make a business out of this, because who else would pay for it. Libraries, maybe? Hrm. yeah. That could be cool.
But, like they say, libraries: if we didn’t already have them, would we let anyone build them?
Do I really own the rights to my books to do with them as I please, just for myself? Is that ethical? Am I creating a new thing that I can do with a book that was not contemplated when we set this system up? Do authors deserve another payment if I put a book I own into an LLM that only I use? Or is it more like music rights in TV shows and when DVDs and Blu Rays came along, they couldn’t use the original music in them because it was a new thing, a new format, and that’s why we didn’t get Buffy in its original form on DVD or Blu Ray forever (have we yet? I don’t even know. I don’t think so).
But with this model I don’t really care. I’ll pay for it either way: books I bought (and records!) and if a chunk of the monthly payment goes to the creators involved, all the better.
Also I would like it to run on my own hardware: a server or something. Like Plex. Not in the cloud. I don’t know what kind of machine you need to run an LLM of a finite amount of data – say 50 TB. This Stack Overflow page seems to indicate it is doable.
Shit I want this so bad. I want to spend my elder years querying my own library.
Day three of using Bing and it is still good. It has dark mode. It has so many fewer ads. It is so fast. It doesn’t have a ton of bullshit surrounding the organic search results — it has some bullshit but not near as much. I would say that it’s not as good as Google even from a year ago but Google is so bad now that Bing, even if it had stayed the same, would have become the more performant search engine regardless. I, personally, am not the top search result on the search query “Rick Webb,” so I guess I resent that, but otherwise, yeah, it is doing just fine. One time I thought “that can’t be right there must be more results than this,” so I went over to Google to double-check and, yeah, nope. Bing had done just fine.
Bing. Gonna be the Tortoise to Google’s Hare. Or Sea and Cake.
Netflix’s disc service is done. I am sad. I will miss it. My last disc was “Promising Young Woman.” They told me I could keep it. It, along with its red envelope, are going into the library into the “startup artifact’ archives. They said at one point we would all get ten discs, but that does not seem to have happened, though I suppose they could still pick ten random discs from my queue and send them to me.
Even up to the end, DVD.Com was a great service, and I will miss it.
Pour one out for the red envelope.
Jane took this picture. It is a self-portrait. A+.
Justa mix for you, old and new. Does it flow? I dunno, might get a bit too randomly synthy toward the end for a hot second before returning to guitars, hard to say. But i think it has a little something. Man I wish I could see that Spice band live, they are so good. A Spice, High Vis tour would rule. Cmon to town, peeps.
Until tomorrow. Remember: If you can’t get out of it, get into it.
Did I say that?! I think I was exaggerating for dramatic effect. He did get sick several times but he wasn’t literally sick every day for a year! Just normal colds and coughs. R barely got sick at all when she started preschool.