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Gaming
๐ฎ During this Steam spring sale I finally got Elden Ring. I generally bounce off Soulslike games pretty quickly, so I was apprehensive. Taking my time exploring the first area and enjoying it. I still expect to rage quit the game on a mandatory boss, but I’m already better for playing it.
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Casual
๐ I inhaled Running Point over the last 2 evenings. ๐บ Helped me decompress after relatively hectic work days. Laughter is the best medicine.
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Gaming
๐ฎ I thought I needed Parsec’s subscription as I had 2 annoying problems with the free version when streaming to my Ally. 1) My desktop display would turn on and 2) I need to disable HDR. Solved both today in a decent enough way, so I’ll save a few bucks. The monitor can be turned off via an app and I managed to set up a taskbar shortcut for disabling HDR with AutoHotkey. Still a couple of clicks before starting a game, but certainly worth it for the savings.
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Casual
๐ Engaging with your Personal Knowledge Management System
At the beginning of the year I started working on improving my note taking setup in Obsidian. I dove (again) into personal knowledge management systems, Zettlekasten, atomic notes, etc. I’m not too dogmatic about any of these topics but enjoy learning about them and incorporating what resonates in my note taking.
I haven’t posted on my blog in a bit. So, I decided to dip into my Zettlekasten-ish cards and lower the barrier for posting by sharing what I’ve already written.
๐๏ธ Easy entry points to a PKMS are key to engagement
Engaging with a Personal Knowledge Management System (PKMS), e.g. one based on Zettlekasten, could be overwhelming. Once a PKMS grows it can be challenging to decide how to work on it, as it may feel like a giant unorganized mess. The creator of Zettlekasten used index cards with potential entry points to his system. The index cards were not excessive, as once you enter the system you could quickly traverse it in unexpected and expanding directions via links.
Thus the main idea here is that easy entry points to the PKMS are key to engaging with it. Having many threads to grab and enter the system removes a huge point of friction and potential procrastination.
In my personal system, potential entry points include:
- ๐ Home note which aggregates a lot of the following entry points
- ๐ Daily notes in Journal
- ๐ Maps of Content (MoCs)
- โต Boat notes - floating notes of unshaped thoughts, ideas, questions, etc.
- ๐๏ธ Unreviewed sources, such as articles, podcasts, etc.
- ๐ฑ Sprout cards in need of more fleshing out to become evergreen notes
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Casual
๐ A few days ago I stopped drinking coffee for a while to give my sleep quality a boost. Iโm bummed at how brutal caffeine withdrawal is. This is only strengthening my resolve to skip coffee for longer. Eventually Iโd to return to a cup a day. โ๏ธ Right now I sleep better and function worse. ๐คฆ๐ปโโ๏ธ
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Management
๐ป Unexpected Anti-Patterns for Engineering Leaders โ Lessons From Stripe, Uber & Carta
People want metrics to show reality. They want them to show the truth. But metrics are only partly about showing the truth. The other half is about educating people, to inform their mental model about how the truth works.
This is a constructive approach to metrics. Measurement is traditionally a contentious topic due the many ways it could go wrong. However, even the wrong kind of metric could be useful for learning and generating insight. The key premise is to act, learn and move forward.
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Casual
๐ I’m the kind of person who’ll remember a couple-of-years-old Reddit thread and go post an update. It ain’t much but it’s honest work.
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Casual
,Technology
๐ Iโm trying to loosen up the rigidity I feel in my note organization in ๐พ Obsidian. I have a misc directory, but โmiscโ doesnโt resonate with โeverything and anythingโ. Today I came up with something that does. Behold
๐บ๏ธ Atlas / ๐ Ocean
. Naming game is strong. -
Technology
๐พ Analyzing my Obsidian journal with local LLMs
TLDR; Wasted a day on trying out local LLMs as reflection assistants for my journal with underwhelming results.
As the year turned, I’m still reflecting on 2024 and contemplating how to approach 2025. I’ve kept somewhat regular journals during the year. Reading through the weekly reviews has been very helpful in processing the last 12 months. Neverthless, there is a lot of information and I didn’t go through each and every daily journal. In addition, I’ve logged highlights from other sources such as blog posts, Youtube videos, etc.
Since I was anyway inspired to review my setup (I use Obsidian on mobile and desktop), I decided to explore local LLMs as potential reflection assistants. Privacy is important to me, therefore the emphasis on locality. Having had reviewed my journal manually already, I knew what a high quality bar of analysis would be.
Unfortunately, I ended up sinking a good chunk of my day off (Ascension is a public holiday in Finland) for not much benefit. At least I did learn something about local LLMs and a few apps. In fact one of them, LM Studio is user-friendly enough and I’d keep it on my machine for more tinkering.
One of the first hurdles is the ability to ingest a number of files, i.e. my Obsidian vault. The first option I tried was NVidia’s Chat With RTX. In principle, it supports exactly that. Except that it doesn’t have official support for
.md
files. Luckily, there was supposed to be a simple tweak to cheat it into ingesting them. However, it seemed it would just ingest 3 files and I couldn’t figure out why. As a side note, I had lost my patience debugging its installation via the NVidia app failing, when the the installer from the website worked out of the box.Next I moved onto the already mentioned LM Studio. It was really straight-forward to set up and get going. It does support uploading up to 5 files, incl. some size limitation. So I resorted to Co-Pilot writing a script of merging my Obsidian vaults files into one
.txt
file, this went swimmingly. I used the default Llama 3.2 1B model. With some prodding I did get some meaningful answers, but it was clear as day I can’t trust it. Still I’m up from trying out other models as it’s so easy to obtain them.The final attempt for the day was with PrivateGPT.dev. It’s also supposed to be able to ingest a number of files. As it turns out, you can’t specify a parent directory. This one required more of a setup and I was trying to be careful with the Python environments on my machine. After some fiddling downloading dependencies from left and right, ultimately the web UI ran… and failed miserably importing my files. I threw the towel.
In retrospect, I’m disappointed with this experience, but there is still some curiosity left in me to fiddle more with this. In principle, analyzing my writing for insights should be an excellent application for LLMs. Alas, my first take was a resounding failure. At least I did learn a few things and got to do something technical on my day off. Now… let’s try passing this post through LM studio for proof-reading.
P.S.
Assistant llama-3.2-1b-instruct
Spelling and Grammar Mistakes:
- TLDR" should be spelled as “TODAY’S SUMMARY”
I can’t.
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Gaming
๐ฎ Let’s kick off 2025 with a hot take. I don’t get the hype around the new Indiana Jones game. I’m about 10h in and I’m bored. I definitely appreciate it as a high quality product and I’m impressed by some aspects of it. But I’m pushing against it hoping that it would click and so far it hasn’t.
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Casual
๐ The moral superiority of stowing your hand luggage under the seat in front of you as well as putting your jacket on the hook. ๐ซ
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Casual
๐ Came across a post in my LinkedIn feed advertising a role which requires โ12+ years of experienceโ. Fair enough, but such a specific number. What happens in these magical 2 years after 10? Eh, maybe itโs an Illuminati thing.
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Gaming
๐ฎ The Lake House expansion grabbed me back immediately. I think I had left the difficulty on hard during my unfinished New Game+. Iโm getting pummeled and I love it, so I didnโt bother checking. Unlike the main character Iโd like to spend as much time as possible in this FBC facility.
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Casual
๐ I donโt think about the Roman Empire often. But what Iโve realized crosses my mind almost daily is that weโve destroyed old forests and the quality of hardwood is not what it used to be a couple of centuries ago. ๐คท๐ปโโ๏ธ
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Casual
๐ Just finished the 3 Body Problem season on Netflix ๐บ I want to like it a lot more than I do. I have unusually many โwhy donโt they do thisโ kind of questions. Not sure if the novels are more thorough and set better limits to what is possible and why (or why not).
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Casual
๐ It’s OK to take your time with hobbies. Sure, some concrete goals could be helpful guides. But it’s a journey and it’s OK to go down the occasional rabbit hole. Get completely off track, stop and smell the flowers. Hobbies give us this rare luxury if we only allow ourselves to grab it.
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Casual
๐For about 2 years Iโve managed to keep brief journals almost daily, with a weekly review. Itโs been paramount to keep it simple. No overthinking, a short stream-of-thought account is infinitely better than nothing. Now, Iโm ready to deepen my practice with more structured and deliberate sessions.
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Casual
๐ PSA. If you are enjoying a webcomic for free - give back. Buy the artistโs book, support them on Patreon, etc. Today I was reminded how much I like Adam Ellisโs work and ordered Bad Dreams in the Night.
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Technology
๐พ Year 2024: Outlook Calendar still doesn’t support “Cancel future occurrences”. The workaround is to update the invitation with an end date and confuse everyone. One should not change history. Old man yells at cloud.
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Casual
๐ Cleaning before the party, cleaning after the party, but it was worth it. Sending off our summer vacation in style and with a bang.
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Gaming
๐ฎ The latest DF Direct Weekly #174 is fire ๐ฅ Especially enjoyed the discussion about bespoke console tech and its intersection with PC. Spoiler - they havenโt fully converged. TIL current gen consoles have a dedicated hardware decompression unit.
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Casual
๐ Long time no Pien bar ๐บ
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Gaming
๐ฎ I got a Rog Ally (Z1E) a couple of months ago. And I’m loving it. Between a house move and cottage trips, it’s seen a surprising amount of use. You need to know what you are getting into, though. UX, battery, performance have drawbacks - it’s not a PC Switch. Right expectations = great experience!
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Casual
๐ Summerโs had a slow start for me. By now Iโm afraid it willl accelerate exponentially and poof itโs gone. Trying to be mindful about this but canโt just force myself into a leisurely mood. Today is a lovely day though ๐
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Casual
๐ As is tradition - my second Micro.blog cake day post ๐ Just a random photo from Monday when we moved to a new home. Bernieโs โTVโ was upgraded significantly.