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MTA GPT Inc

protobuf, chaining, dead beetles in your ear

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This is a daily standup post of the work put into maintaining bramadams.dev. Ex nihilo nihil fit.

Newsletter (Sundays)

  • i liked how last issue went, specifically the drawing on an index card > edit photo workflow. adds a dash of human-ness to the work
  • next issue im thinking about a potential economic landscape for the creator economy in a llm world

Software (Saturdays)

  • creating a gpt for the mta where ideally a user can type "L east 14th" to get the upcoming train times and any info on delays. working with GTFS-realtime protocol is not straightforward, but there is a promising repo from a similar project when ppl were putting screens in their homes w train times
  • the challenge wont be parsing bc functions are pretty straightforward but managing speed and finding the right convo starters

AI Tip

  • i found out (accidentally) you can chain multiple assistants in the same thread. This allows for some pretty interesting message threads as diff assistants "weigh in" to the same thread
  • dont batch a job into chroma without PersistentClient unless you want to run that same batch every runtime

Books (5/month)

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links are affiliate! if you pick up a copy, i get a little kickback!
  • Supergods - finished! (2.35/5 ⭐️)
  • Black Rednecks & White Liberals - 58%
  • Command & Control - 23%
  • At Home in the Universe - 36%
  • Napoleon: A Life - 49%
  • Glass Bead Game - 44% (+3%)
    • "We do not intend to flee from the vita activa to the vita contemplativa, nor vice versa, but to keep moving forward while alternating between the two, being at home in both, partaking of both."
  • River of the Gods - 41% (+9%)
    • these guys are getting FUCKED UP by nature
    • "For the next few days, Speke could not even open his mouth and was able to consume nothing more than broth. He was now, moreover, not only nearly blind but partially deaf. The infection left behind by the beetle and his penknife “ate a hole between that orifice [his ear] and the nose,” Speke wrote, “so that when I blew it, my ear whistled so audibly that those who heard it laughed.” To his surprise, however, as the days passed he found that the attack had actually helped to improve his sight. “It was not altogether an unmixed evil,” he wrote, “for the excitement occasioned by the beetle’s operations acted towards my blindness as a counter-irritant by drawing the inflammation away from my eyes.” The beetle itself, dead but still stubbornly lodged in Speke’s ear, remained with him until, some six months later, a leg, a wing, and a few other tiny body parts were carried out in the wax."
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GPTs for Mom & Pops

judge whats happening inside for yourselves

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Heist Movies Need CCTV to Work

what can we do in ten minutes? the nearly identical twin dilemma. even emperors cry.

💡
This is a daily standup post of the work put into maintaining bramadams.dev. Ex nihilo nihil fit.

Newsletter (Sundays)

idea for issue 42 – upstream pricing in the SaaS + LLM era:

  • taylorism
  • llms both increasing and decreasing value of knowledge work simultaneously
  • a developer is not "working on a project", the project is being passed through the developer
    • these two things are different
    • the same problem can be solved in many ways by different devs
    • price your software as an empire
    • leverage code's abstraction and composability to "world build"
  • technology is upstream of possibility
    • heist genre = magical realism of computers, phones, cameras
    • sci-fi genre = imaginable + unreachable rules
    • real world = all jobs are downstream of their purpose and the technologies they give affordance to

Software (Saturdays)

If the outputs are not provided before the expires_at timestamp passes (roughly 10 mins past creation), the run will move to an expired status.

(source)

what can be done in ten minutes? what cant be done? nb: you can take "longer" than 10 minutes if you capture all the messages in thread, and simply create a new one. it comes down to what type of tasks are worth waiting a full youtube video are

embeddings do not suffer from scale they suffer from having fraternal twins

im all in on deliverable agents, bb

lets go forms! 2024!

Character Image
<LEDA> isn't every website ever just a css'ed out form or pamphlet? if i move the pamphlet really fast, your brain might think its real, huh?

Books (5/month)

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links are affiliate! if you pick up a copy, i get a little kickback!
,   &  Bram Adams
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How to Price Your S(asS)

chatgpt making pdfs, nflx binges

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ZANZIB(AI)R

essays masquerading as newsletters, my two cents, using functions to change system calls, meditate on being a student for eternity

💡
This is a daily standup post of the work put into maintaining bramadams.dev. Ex nihilo nihil fit.

Newsletter (Sundays)

  • i felt like issue 41 was again a bit too lengthy, i'll be looking to concoct shorter pieces for the near future, more true to form with what i am reading, and choosing themes from wander in commonplace bot
    • truth be told, i like writing a essay per week and it seemed fitting to merge the work with the newsletter. but i must keep in mind that a newsletter needs to be enjoyable in the landscape it is consumed, an email inbox. substack has normalized the "essay in the inbox" problem i suppose. as long as the topics are interesting
  • future large topics i want to cover:
    • website as an art piece and art galley at the same time
    • a creative technologist manifesto
    • the cultural value of programmers and their programs
    • a mathematical guess as to how much zero to one code will be written in the next century

Software (Saturdays)

Google must really value my opinions because they keep asking for my two cents...

AI Tip

Use system messages to change the functionality of the chat completion based on a function response

The idea is when a function call is fired and the data is returned, use system role to simulate instructions to change how the function info is given to the user:

if (messages[0].role !== "system") {
  messages.unshift({
    content: "If you have knowledge loaded in from get_knowledge, you can ask me questions about it. If the match has steps, go through each step with the user in QA format, one by one.",
    role: "system",
  });
}
{
  name: "get_knowledge",
  description: "Get knowledge from user query from a knowledge base",
  parameters: {
    type: "object",
    properties: {
      query: {
        type: "string",
        description:
          "The query -- cleaned up to match knowledge base criteria",
      },
    },
    required: ["query"],
  },
}
// ...
if (name === "get_knowledge") {
  // ...
  const knowledge = {...};
  insert_specific_system_message(...) // insert a system message for this particular fn
  const newMessages = createFunctionCallMessages(knowledge);
  // ...

Books (5/month)

💡
links are affiliate! if you pick up a copy, i get a little kickback!
,   &  Bram Adams
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Drafting Predictions, Jumping Ahead in Supergods

"if i can't be richard burton, i'll simply marry him instead."

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Finding Lessons, Vampires, The Curse of the First Third

(mis)adventures of December 29th

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,   &  Bram Adams
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