Last 10 notes on Cam s Digital Garden
Guiding Principals LLMs as Talking Machines, Not Thinking Machines LLMs are language tools, not thinking tools. That distinction drives most of how I use them. They generate coherent sentences by matching patterns, not by understanding anything, which is why they can sound completely confident while being completely wrong. “Hallucinations” is the polite term for it. LLMs can be extraordinarily…
BunkerWeb - the open-source Web Application Firewall (WAF) Fool attackers and protect your web services with BunkerWeb, the open-source and next-gen Web Application Firewall (WAF). https://www.bunkerweb.io/ While on vacation recently, I switched my Lab over to BunkerWeb from Nginx Proxy Manager . Before switching over to BunkerWeb, my lab routed all my traffic through Nginx Proxy Manager, and…
According to https://aboutideasnow.com/about , here’s the idea behind an /ideas page: /ideas should be about the future: the crazy things people always wanted to make, concepts they’re mulling over, or planned projects. In that spirit, here are a few of my half baked ideas for projects and features: Coding Projects Similar to an LLM based postmortem generator I built at work, I’ve been thinking of…
Machines My lab consists of 5 machines: my production machine, my secondary, and 3 raspberry pis. War Rig My main production machine is a custom built PC that dual boots EndeavorOS Linux and Windows 11. I try to follow a naming convention for my machines, and since Mad Max: Fury Road is one of my favorite movies and for the general beefiness of the machine at the time of build, it’s dubbed The War…
Professional Life I’m currently a Site Reliability Engineering Manager and tech lead for my team at CFA Institute, and I’ve never felt more in my element. My team is comprised mostly of engineers who are new to SRE or early in their careers, and I am in the fortunate position to get to guide them from curious beginners into confident problem-solvers. I find this work of building up engineers…
Keeping a consistent blog has been a struggle for me in the past. I’ve had multiple iterations that I’ve started and fizzled out in just a few posts. Between becoming interested in other things and honestly feeling like I didn’t have anything to say, writing for the public has always been an easy thing to put on the back burner. Before embarking on this latest iteration, I decided to deeply…
Okay, I’ve done some cleanup of my Karakeep (Formerly Hoarder) instance to now have a few subcategories in the style of https://carol.gg/links/ and https://www.m19y.dev/random/cool-sites/ . Here’s a directory of those sublists. Big Bucket (All Public Links) The giant bucket of all my publicly shared links still exists here: Public Links All Links I Think Others Should Know About…
Defaults In a format inspired by https://listen.hemisphericviews.com/097 and the Defaults Directory . Legend 🖥 : Self hosted in my lab 💵: paid app Mail Client: Thunderbird , up until recently, Mailspring Notes: Obsidian ToDo: Morgen 💵, Jira Photo Management: Photoprism 🖥 Calendar: Morgen 💵 Cloud File Storage: My own NAS coupled with SyncThing 🖥 RSS: Readwise Reader 💵 Check out my RSS Feeds…
Inspired by https://fyr.io/nope and https://baty.net/nope/ , and in no particular order: Will I… watch that ad? Nope , I’ll do everything in my power to avoid doing so. turn on my camera for this meeting? Nope , I built the machine I work on without a webcam for a reason. accept any cookies more than absolutely necessary to render your dumb site? Nope , and if you force me to uncheck each the…
About Me Hey there, I’m Cam! You’ve stumbled on my blog, where I write about stuff that is interesting to me which typically includes tech and leadership topics. This document will cover some highlights of my journey from a kid playing on a dial-up PC to now to leading my excellent team of Reliability Engineers at CFA Institute. Childhood & Early Tech Passion Windows 95, AOL Instant…