A few friends have asked how I use LLMs to write code these days, so I decided I’d write this blog post to share my current setup. There may be better ways to use them, but this is what I found works well for me. First of all, I use the $100/mo Claude Max subscription. I’ve heard that OpenAI’s Codex works pretty well these days too, though I haven’t evaluated it lately. Last time I evaluated…
A few weeks ago, I automated my air purifiers in the house using Home Assistant, MQTT, and a Python controller to turn the air quality data from the sensors that I have into a speed control for the air purifiers. One thing that I noticed is that the air purifiers in one part of the house tended to run faster than in a different part of the house. I originally assumed it was because the kitchen and…
While working on the submission for A394980 — the count of anagram pairs in halves of TOTP codes — one of my more mathematically inclined friends asked if this was just a different series in disguise. I couldn’t find any other matching sequences initially, but when working on it, the other dimension that I didn’t explore initially was the assumption that one is working with base 10, as would be…
This morning, I entered yet another of those six digit TOTP codes to log into an online service. One thing that I always find interesting is when the second half of the code is similar to the first half, like say 675567 . My curiosity got the best of me and I just had to know how often that happens. The interesting cases would be a palindrome (eg. 123321 ), a repetition (eg. 123123 ), and an…
Since we’re now in the era of LLM-based code writing, I’ve been working on writing more code using Claude Code. Obviously, one can say “Hey Claude, I want to build a snake game. I think it would be funny if the snake ate hot dog emojis,” and it’ll probably write something half-decent, but when it comes to larger projects, that kind of one-shot prompt doesn’t work so well. To be fair, LLMs have…
During the terrible wildfires that we had in California in 2020, it was possible to know how good or bad the outside air quality was through PurpleAir’s excellent sensor network . However, having all the windows closed due to the poor air quality outside, I was wondering about the air quality inside as well. While it’s definitely possible to get pre-made devices — such as PurpleAir’s indoor air…