_^15/10/2023

The Disappearing Act

I seem unable to escape the cycle of “4 weeks of productivity followed by 2 weeks of couch potato”. While I’m not sure if this is a bad thing or not I had fun. Outline;

1. Factorio
2. Lino cutting
3. Small LLMs
4. Learning Dutch
5. Movie Nights
6. RaspBerry Pi
7. Room Redesign

The details;

• Factorio

  Played Factorio with my girlfriend. Launched the god damn rocket in 33 hours. The optimization of the factory is an endless well, either fun or despair, depending on your point of view. I remember playing this game in college with my friend, Berker, I also remember that because of the optimization aspect of the game, we weren’t able to launch the rocket. This time I picked a more laid back approach, didn’t pack the factory too tightly just focused on the material bottlenecks.

  Here’s the moment of the launch:

  

• Lino cutting

  I’ve been carving and printing some lino cuts. While I blame the quality of my equipment, I’m really happy with the results even though they are blotchy, crude and uneven. Here’s some of my recent prints;

  I also want to make a lino cut logo with 2 rats that says “lil gang” in Turkish to print on fabric. Experimented with Bing’s Image Creator and got extremely satisfying results. I generated nearly 50 good looking logos -Bing had some problems with their service and let users generate practically unlimited images, hehe-. Here’s some of them:

  Mind you these were generated specifically for lino cutting which makes Bing’s Image Creator even more impressive - not sponsored :^). It can even generate decent looking pixel art and manages to generate text some of the time.

  Also wanted to have a Welcome to Night Vale t-shirt with the logo of the radio station. Here’s some samples - ignore the typos;

• Small LLMs (SLMs?)

  Played around with the Retrieval Augmented Generation and Microsoft’s Phi models. I’ll write about them in Small LLMs Are Here soon. The general idea that the our big, slow, expensive models can reason well and knows a lot about the world but they are limited by their dataset, specifically the date which they were trained on. A small yet good reasoner model can take input from a huge knowledge base based on the input and generate text combining the relevant information from the knowledge base and the input. The result is a model that can be “trained” on the fly and can be used for a variety of tasks fast.

  Sadly, the support for Turkish is limited - but more than I expected - but there were some interesting developments in the field. For example, Mistral 7B OpenOrca model can generate pretty good text in Turkish if supplied with a long Turkish prompt, which is pretty cool.

• Learning Dutch

  Got curious about Dutch and started learning it. I’m using Duolingo and I think it will suffice for now. A mix between German and English, with some alcohol in the mix, a perfect combo hehe. I don’t take notes but that’ll have to change.

  Fijne dag, beste lezer. :^)

• Movie Nights Babyyy

  As of writing this, we are watching the finale of Dark. :^) Here’s a complete list what we watched;

  • Gravity Falls
  • Barbie
  • Coherence
  • Mandalorian
  • Better Call Saul
  • Over the Garden Wall
  • Gibi
  • Prens
  • Infinity Train
  • The Midnight Gospel (wtf)
  • Steven Universe
  • Why Women Kill
  • Bee and Puppycat
• RaspBerry Pi

  Thinking about buying a Raspberry Pi Zero 2 W so that I can host this very site on my own hardware and not pay Vultr 5 bucks a month. :^)

  Also, it would be nice to not drag my work laptop every time I go to the office. I could just SSH or VNC in to my PC at home and do my work there.

• Room Redesign

  I redesigned my and my girlfriend’s room. I measured every piece of furniture in my room and created cubes with the same dimensions in Blender. I didn’t bother with the details, just some cubes and lights. It was a really fun exercise. :^)