Sam Hartman
Yesterday, I had my first successful AI coding experience . I’ve used AI coding tools before—and come away disappointed. The results were underwhelming: low-quality code, inconsistent abstraction levels, and subtle bugs that take longer to fix than it would take to write the whole thing from scratch. Those problems haven’t vanished. The code quality this time was still disappointing. As I asked…
As most here know, I’m totally blind. One of my roles involves a contract for the US Government, under which I have a government email account. The department recently received a message talking about our work to end, to the maximum extend permitted by law, all diversity, equity, inclusion, and accessibility efforts in the government in accordance with the recently signed executive order. We are…
This is part of my series exploring the connection between AI and connection and intimacy . This is a post about the emotional impact of our work. Sometimes being told no—being judged by our AIs—is as harmful as any toxic content. I’ll get to that in a moment. My previous work had been dealing with the smaller Llama2 models (7b and 13b). I decided to explore two things. First, how much better the…
Taking a hands-on low-level approach to learning AI has been incredibly rewarding. I wanted to create an achievable task that would motivate me to learn the tools and get practical experience training and using large language models. Just at the point when I was starting to spin up GPU instances, Llama2 was released to the public. So I elected to start with that model. As I mentioned , I’m…
I wrote about how I’m exploring the role of AI in human connection and intimacy. The first part of that journey has been all about learning the software and tools for approaching large language models. The biggest thing I wish I had known going in was not to focus on the traditional cloud providers. I was struggling until I found runpod.io . I kind of assumed that if you were willing to pay for it…
When I began to read about the generative AI revolution, I realized there was an opportunity to combine two aspects of my life I never thought I could merge. While I’m not working on the cloud or security, I work as a sex and intimacy educator, helping people embrace love, vulnerability and connection. As I first began to interact with ChatGPT, I saw the potential for AI to help people explore…
This is the second in a series of blog posts introducing Carthage , an Infrastructure as Code framework I’ve been working on the last four years. In this post we’ll talk about how we use Carthage to build the Carthage container images. We absolutely could have just used a Containerfile to do this; in fact I recently removed a hybrid solution that produced an artifact and then used a Containerfile…
For the past four years, I’ve been working on Carthage , a free-software Infrastructure as Code framework. We’ve finally reached a point where it makes sense to talk about Carthage and what it can do. This is the first in a series of blog posts to introduce Carthage, discuss what it can do and show how it works. Why Another IAC Framework It seems everywhere you look, there are products designed to…
I could definitely use some suggestions here, both in terms of things to try or effective places to ask questions about Pipewire audio. The docs are improving, but are still in early stages. Pipewire promises to combine the functionality of PulseAudio and Jack. That would be great for me. I use Jack for my DJ work, and it’s somewhat complicated and fragile. However, so far my attempts to replace…
Recently, I migrated this blog from Livejournal over to Dreamwidth. As part of the process, I was looking back at my blog entries from around 2007 or so. I miss those days. I miss the days when blogging was more of an interactive community. Comments got exchanged, and at least among my circle of friends people wrote thoughtful, well-considered entries. There was introspection into what was going…