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Technology
💾 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
🎮 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
📓 The moral superiority of stowing your hand luggage under the seat in front of you as well as putting your jacket on the hook. 🛫
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Casual
📓 Came across a post in my LinkedIn feed advertising a role which requires “12+ years of experience”. Fair enough, but such a specific number. What happens in these magical 2 years after 10? Eh, maybe it’s an Illuminati thing.
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Gaming
🎮 The Lake House expansion grabbed me back immediately. I think I had left the difficulty on hard during my unfinished New Game+. I’m getting pummeled and I love it, so I didn’t bother checking. Unlike the main character I’d like to spend as much time as possible in this FBC facility.
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Casual
📓 I don’t think about the Roman Empire often. But what I’ve realized crosses my mind almost daily is that we’ve destroyed old forests and the quality of hardwood is not what it used to be a couple of centuries ago. 🤷🏻♂️
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Casual
📓 Just finished the 3 Body Problem season on Netflix 📺 I want to like it a lot more than I do. I have unusually many “why don’t they do this” 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
📓 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
📓For about 2 years I’ve managed to keep brief journals almost daily, with a weekly review. It’s been paramount to keep it simple. No overthinking, a short stream-of-thought account is infinitely better than nothing. Now, I’m ready to deepen my practice with more structured and deliberate sessions.
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Casual
📓 PSA. If you are enjoying a webcomic for free - give back. Buy the artist’s book, support them on Patreon, etc. Today I was reminded how much I like Adam Ellis’s work and ordered Bad Dreams in the Night.
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Technology
💾 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
📓 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
🎮 The latest DF Direct Weekly #174 is fire 🔥 Especially enjoyed the discussion about bespoke console tech and its intersection with PC. Spoiler - they haven’t fully converged. TIL current gen consoles have a dedicated hardware decompression unit.
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Casual
📓 Long time no Pien bar 🍺
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Gaming
🎮 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
📓 Summer’s had a slow start for me. By now I’m afraid it willl accelerate exponentially and poof it’s gone. Trying to be mindful about this but can’t just force myself into a leisurely mood. Today is a lovely day though 🌞
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Casual
📓 As is tradition - my second Micro.blog cake day post 🎂 Just a random photo from Monday when we moved to a new home. Bernie’s “TV” was upgraded significantly.
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Management
💻 I work for a big company, but today I heard a person “laugh in corporate” and this caught me off guard. Laughed in nerd on the inside and moved on. 🤓
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Technology
💾 Many exciting and deeply technical news from WWDC… But you know what simple usability improvement I’m excited about - native window tiling in Sequoia, with keyboard shortcuts. We’ve suffered for so long. Rectangle did wonders but it had its hiccups.
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Casual
📓 Helsinki has nature even close to the heart of the city. As I’m enjoying one such oasis, what is not seen in a photo is noise pollution. You can always hear the monotonous grind of the roads. I wonder if we’ll ever solve this problem in the future.
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Casual
📓Had to make several difficult decisions during the past week. Needed to lean more on my analitical self than my heart. I just have to trust that the time for pursuing one of my dreams had simply not come. It felt very close. Playing the long game.
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Technology
💾 There is more to artificial general intelligence, and my own human intelligence, than putting the most likely word in front of the other. Yes, it’s a reductive comment.
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Technology
💾 Reminder to self: don't buy cheapo SD cards
We needed an SD card urgently and just bought a cheap one from a basic department store. I should know better, as I’ve worked professionally with SD card benchmarking and filesystems… but still thought “We just need a few photos, how bad can it be?”. Turns out - really bad.
The card got corrupted after first use, refused reformatting and repartitioning (only 2/32GB were useable). I managed to salvage the photos from this first photo session - total luck. Btw, not all repair tools are made equal. The macOS built-in
fsck
didn’t do the job, but the one fromdosfstools
did the trick.Anyway - don’t buy the cheapest card you find from your department store, if you care about what you keep on it that is.
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Casual
📓 Didn’t drink coffee ☕️ during the past week… until today 😵💫
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Management
,Gaming
🎮 💻 On Xbox closing down several studios
This week’s decision by Xbox to close entire studios stunned me. The nightmare of widespread layoffs in the industry doesn’t seem to seize. I’m disappointed of this particular piece of news for several reasons.
I genuinely root for Xbox’s vision of play anywhere. Game Pass and demolishing platform exclusives are pro-gamer pillars in their strategy. That said, Game Pass is not all good news for game developers. It can give critical exposure, especially to smaller titles, but in other cases it can also erode sales and thus commercial success. In my region Game Pass for PC goes for 10 euros/month. Considering the library and how often it’s updated it’s an extremely good value - but does it work?
Closing entire studios wipes out whole work cultures. This is substantially different to e.g. canceling a project, partially reducing workforce or pivoting to a new direction. In these examples, the intangibles of what makes a great team can be largely retained. Closing an entire studio extinguishes something invisible in addition to the business itself.
A sound business decision for Xbox is beyond the scope of a single studio. This is not a rant against capitalism, it’s not the point. I am disappointed because the studio closures show the worst of having a multi-studio corporate owner, VC or the like. Xbox itself is not Microsoft - citing Microsoft’s overall profit is almost irrelevant. Xbox may derive more value by closing a studio than selling it, e.g because of IP ownership and competition considerations. What hurts is that had the studios been viewed in isolation and with a more fully vested owner they might have been considered viable.
Ultimately, I believe Xbox made the decisions that support its long-term goals best. Their operating profit based on FTC leaks from last year is in the 10% ballpark. Revenue for Xbox grew only by virtue of the Activition Blizzard acquisition. The gaming industry hasn’t meaningfully grown in the past year and feels very saturated. Clearly, both Arkane Austin, following the Redfall flop, and Tango Gameworks, following Shinji Mikami’s departure, would have a challenging road ahead. I don’t believe the studios were judged only on the basis of their most recent performance. It’s about future outlook and profit appetite.
Taking all into account, I’m still left wondering if the corporations consolidating the gaming industry at the moment are truly building the world game developers and gamers want to see. This is why I’m having such a hard time reconciling this particular blow from Xbox.