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Access LLMs locally with LM Studio
A couple of people have recommended LM Studio to me in the past week, so I downloaded it tonight. The application lets you experiment with packaged Large Language Models on your local PC without sending any data onto the internet. Setting it up is really easy, with downloadable installers for Windows, M-series Macs and Linux.…
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Words I want to learn, part 1
As I’m reading, I keep a running list of words that I want to learn. Some of them were new to me, and some of them I just have to look up every time I come across them. If you like that kind of thing, here you go. I’ll keep creating subsequent lists if people…
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When a problem comes along, you must MIF it
I just finished Al Abdaal’s “Feel Good Productivity,” which is a welcome salve to the endless river of productivity optimization literature. Abdaal’s book launch was, in a microcosmic way, a triumph of marketing: in about 12 hours, one of his videos showed up in my YouTube feed, he was interviewed on a podcast I listen…
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Fitter. Happer. More comfortable.
The Costco pharmacy area is one of my favorite places to walk around and window-shop. Need 2,000 Aleve? Got U. Need fourteen boxes of Sensodyne? Yep. A year’s worth of allergy meds? $10 and you’re good to go. But the real fun is the supplements, which always lead me down a path where I imagine…
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Love at first flip
The year is 1997. The Internet still starts with a capital letter and is accessed almost exclusively by dial-up. Macs are still beige. Titanic is predicted to be the biggest flop ever released. Despite being a desperately broke journalism graduate student, I wanted to buy a cell phone. I was too cheap for the Motorola…
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Baldy by nature
Looking back, losing my hair was inevitable. I come from a long line of bald dudes. My family has, on the whole, more women than men, but all of the DNA-involved males in my family had little-to-no hair in adulthood. I get my baldness honestly. I had an inkling that I was in trouble in…
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RIP, Sports Illustrated
I’m not the world’s biggest sports fan and would never claim to be. Don’t get me wrong, I like sports, but I don’t have a brain that lends itself well to enjoying them. I don’t remember moments or players or stats or trends, and I really don’t care very much about any of it. That’s…
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Life’s essentials: zip ties and duct tape
Our 2022 CR-V’s heat shield popped loose last week and got its front end chewed up by the highway. How? Why? Who can say. I ordered replacement garbled-consonant-brand bolts from Amazon after trying very hard to buy them locally, and got them yesterday, but ended up fixing the problem as I almost always do: jankily.…
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Rabbit ears
With the Super Bowl coming up, I realized that I don’t have a way to watch it since canceling YouTube TV last year. Even though I don’t care a lot about the NFL, the Super Bowl is one of those moments that I like to stay tuned into just for cultural literacy and mozzarella sticks.…
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Bully, Craig Finn and The Mountain Goats, Charlotte, NC
Last week I sojourned to Charlotte, NC, to see Craig Finn and, as a bonus, The Mountain Goats and Bully. The concert was at a venue in the NoDa area called the Neighborhood Theater, which was a pretty great place for a show. Big, open bar area where you could hear the band, and a…