Switch Hardware Regularly
This post explores the importance of regularly switching hardware, as well as other lessons on working effectively. It also includes videos of a nice walk and a ferry ride as a reward for the hard work.
Discovering the Benefits of Switching Hardware Regularly and Exploring the City on a Spring Fling!
By Michael Levin
Tuesday, May 9, 2023
Murphy’s law. I’ve been jumping hurdles over obstacles all morning. The latest
is that tokens aside, OpenAI is taking forever to process each prompt. It’s
making me want to Ctrl+C break it, but of course that doesn’t work cleanly on
Python. I’ve actually Ctrl+C‘d it 3 times now, and each time it didn’t stop
so I took it as a sign to let it finish. And it eventually got through all 3
prompts, but looking at what it wrote, it’s like it didn’t even read the
article. It must be the same encoding issue that broke the token counter.
Okay, write your own damn meta-fields on just this one post. Note the issue and tuck it into the back of your head. OpenAI has encoding issues when the text input gets funky. Maybe it’s something in there from the new arrows I’m inserting from the venn-nvim diagrams. That would be about right.
The big lessons:
- Switch your hardware regularly. There’s so many reasons to do this!
- Do everything in a rudimentary way first. Don’t jump to the power-tools right away.
- Don’t rely on big 2-monitor situations. One monitor is enough, especially with virtual desktops which all modern OSes support. Learn to switch between them fast. Turning your head and re-orienting yourself is flow-breaking just like taking your hands off the keyboard.
- Do better at capturing ideas and shorting the feedback loop of actualizing a baby-step version and then iterating on it.
- Watch out for rabbit holes and back out when they’re excessively deep, but then also know fake signals of deep rabbit holes. They’re not all as deep as they appear at first. There’s great skill in rabbit hole depth evaluation.
- When you’re working well, you feel both the love and the intensity. This feeling modulates between wanting to give up and feeling like you’re on top of the world. This is a good thing. Have fun on the roller coaster.
- Everyone’s trying to be different, and everyone’s trying to get your money. It’s dependency injection. They’re trying to make you depend on them. That’s a whopping big part of the game. If you use dependencies, strive to make them interchangeable.
My “big lessons” are always evolving and changing. I have to start keeping a distilled best version, and if I simply talk about the need to do that as I go, it will naturally happen now with my new system, as it will get auto-keyworded and grouped, and “natural sequences” will emerge, and these natural sequences will be able to be summarized with prompts. Soon, I’ll have my own custom-trained GPT-like model that was just trained on my content. Not sure if it will be OpenAI customized, as earlier experiments I was doing for work when everything was proprietary. But now that I work for MOZ, such experiments are just standard SEO deliverables we should be teaching people how to do, and I can do them in the light. Woot!
Now off to the company’s spring fling! Going to the city.