This is a break from the tech posts, as recent events had me think of Yoda. Not the baby one who ate frogs and stole ship parts, but the elder Yoda that knew how to hide such behaviors. At the dinner table recently, I brought up the most famous of Yoda quotes. As Yoda warned... Continue Reading →
Which LLM should I code with?
Like a lot of developers experimenting with large language models (LLMs), I ran into a common problem: I wasn’t sure which LLM to use for code generation. Some models seemed to excel at performance, others at documentation. Some were more secure, others more adaptable. But evaluating them side-by-side was tedious. Copy-pasting outputs into an editor... Continue Reading →
AP Statistics & Warhammer
I have one kid who is insanely interested in Warhammer. This is a Dungeons & Dragons-like game where armies battle each other. Things have evolved since my DnD days. There are units that kids buy for hundreds of dollars, and have long-running fights (and arguments) over which army is better. The same kid is starting... Continue Reading →
2048 part 2
About a week ago, I published how to get AI to develop a 2048 game emulator. See here for that post. That was fun, but you know what would be more fun? Having a simulator that can try various sequences and heuristics to solve the 2048 game. Yes, I did that - again with AI.... Continue Reading →
2048
I'm in the software business by trade, so it should come as no surprise that my work environment has been using AI as soon as it was available. First endeavors were testing the security and guardrail components, model differences, and integration patterns such as retrieval-augmented generation and now model context protocol. This has led to... Continue Reading →
So many drafts
My last blog post was in 2018, back when I thought I had a little bit of free time between jobs. Little did I know, life had a penchant for playing with my schedule, jumping in whenever I tried to sit down and write. Honestly, it wasn't that I was avoiding my blog. It was... Continue Reading →
Combining mongoDB collections to show on one page
In my current project, I'm displaying a country's corruption trend from from Transparency International alongside Kiva loans. Since both of these data sets have different refresh intervals and sources, I do a mongoImport to get them into the database. Example records: The data is pretty clean at the get-go with a logical join on the location.country... Continue Reading →
From a ReST-API to a local data store using MongoDB & NodeJS
After the research for my last post, I've gotten a bit more curious into micro-loan services like Kiva. I have been a Kiva member for over 10 years now, and love reading the stories of the folks I'm helping. Kiva is also more transparent than the non-profits I've donated to. I can set how much... Continue Reading →
The Giving Conundrum
Over the last week, I've received snail mail solicitations from 5 charity organizations. This is about typical. I have given to some of these in the past, so I've been on their list. In looking at the 5, I can recall a specific point in which I felt compelled to donate. MD Anderson Cancer Center... Continue Reading →
Quick primer on MongoDB from a SQL nerd – part two
In part-one I started a journey on implementing and setting up an initial database using MongoDB. At the end of that post, I had a single collection, called "projects" with a defined schema and about 1000 records populated in it. In this post, I will explore how query many tables/collections, how to update data, and... Continue Reading →