The sun has returned!
I mean, it has always been there. Relatively speaking in the same place it was over the last few months. But the Earth’s tilt is such that as it revolves around the nearest star the portion on which I live (the northern hemisphere) is getting ever so slightly closer and faces it just long enough that temperatures are beginning to warm.
And I’m a very happy person indeed.
I think I wrote far too many times on this blog that it has been a cold winter. But, it has been, in fact, a cold winter! And this has really cramped my style. It has stifled my creativity, hampered my movement, and chilled my emotions.
March is a bit of a wildcard. It came in like a lamb so I sort of expect it to give us a good sock in the stomach on its way out. As I look in my photo library at photos of past Marches, I clearly see that winter is not yet over and that I need to temper my excitement.
I almost, almost, got out into the garden and began to move soil (we’re rebuilding our raised garden beds this year, and I’m eager to get started). But not only is it too early I think it would result in double work. I think if I move the soil now I’ll only have to move it again in the near future. We’re planning on lots of backyard changes; shed being moved, pathways laid, top soil deliveries, new drainage trenches, felled tree removals, etc. Lots to do. But I think getting started too early will only lead to frustration and disappointment and the chance of needing to do things twice.
I’ve scanned in most of my film backlog. There is more to do, I haven’t edited any of them, archived them, or cataloged them. But, at least I’m making progress. One of them is above.
I worry that as the weather breaks I’ll likely want to do this even less than I do right now so perhaps I’ll prioritize this work for the very next rainy day.
I keep whittling away at getting a local LLM to become an agent that knows a lot about our business. It is more of a pet project at this point – a project that gives me a direct way to learn these tools. Of course, we already have apps and services that can chew our sales data and let me know about trends, statistics, etc. But I think it would be very useful if I (or any other team member) could ask an agent a question and it return the answers, charts, etc. I think these LLMs are already capable of doing it, but I think the tooling around them needs to mature more to make this far easier to do locally.
Right now I’m using Ollama to download, manage, and run the models locally. I do this on the command line sometimes (I’ve set up a bash alias called “bot” that runs my local models via Ollama). But lately I’ve been playing with Open WebUI via Docker. It can see my local Ollama models and gives me a ChatGPT-like interface for interacting with them (which is far nicer than the command line for most things).
Again, huge shoutout to Simon Willison for his work in testing all of these tools and copiously writing about them.
A cluster of links:
- The Social Life of Photographs – Jessamyn West writes about how the Flickr Foundation is focused on maintaining the serendipity of bumping into other photographs while doing research.
- I MADE THIS FOR YOU – Ethan Moses releases a bunch of art made with his amazing cameras in hopes to raise enough capital to give away his 3D print files for free. I linked to Moses work in WIS #88 and just recently mentioned this on Mastodon. If you’re into photography I recommend looking at his work.
- PHOTON – The visuals in this…
- V.H. Belvadi – Belvadi’s personal website is so very nice. /via Naz.
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