ianjs - Nerdy

Humidity control of a bathroom fan in Home Assistant

I recently decided I wanted a Home Assistant automation to turn on the bathroom fan. I already had an ESPHome temperature/humidity sensor so it seemed simple enough - just trigger the fan when the humidity reached a certain level. The problem was what level? Humidity in the bathroom varies with the time of year and how long the shower is on. This looked like it could become a messy automation with a lot of tweaking.
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→ June 11 2024

Here’s an excellent video from @karpathy@sigmoid.social with some intriguing ways to think about Large Language Models:
1. They are a lossy compression of the Internet.
2. They could be seen as “… the kernel process of an emerging operating system”. – they coordinate a lot of resources (memory, computational tools) for problem solving. The internet is the “disk”, the context window is “RAM” as working memory.
→ December 4 2023

In which I get teary over an archive of Byte magazine covers

Sigh. I came across this archive of all the Byte magazine covers which some energetic soul has scanned. They go all the way back to the first issue in January 1977. Major flashback! Here’s the first one I bought at McGills Technical Books in Elizabeth Street, Melbourne: I’m pretty sure it cost me $4.50 – about $18 or more in current dollars. I was a poor student and I agonised over spending that much.
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→ December 31 2014