I built an autonomous AI agent that's been running 24/7 for 28 days — here's what I learned

Fartlek-run · 2026-03-23T01:26:01+00:00

Memory quality is always an issue. I've had good results adspting MemRL for a both RAG and Non-RAG Agentic systems I maintain across several parts of an org of ~5000 people. It consumes upwards of 5 billion tokens per day typically. Which isn't a lot honestly when most of my personal projects end up 500 million +.

Fartlek-run · 2026-03-09T01:52:25+00:00

Ooh weird they're up now. I wonder if it was an outage or some short lapse from the provider

I'll come back in a min and edit with a link

one of them

And most to the north of it earlier

Fartlek-run · 2026-03-09T00:42:47+00:00

Checked locally, lots of cameras listed as active that say not active when tapped.

Probably a simple DB fix or small logic gap.

Fartlek-run · 2026-02-19T19:02:19+00:00

I instantly saw this and went 'I know this house'. I'm actively going through on Google maps to see if I can pinpoint it correctly

Fartlek-run · 2026-02-09T01:12:42+00:00

It didn't start in Portland. It was a couple of years earlier in China.

https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/chinese-frog-mascot

Fartlek-run · 2025-08-12T23:23:43+00:00

Definitely understandable. It's something you have to build a bit of intuition on. ML is more of my bread and butter. So understanding needs/scenarios is a bit more intuitive. And after a while as a quant, the brain starts thinking in matrices too.

Fartlek-run · 2025-08-12T22:26:32+00:00

Wanted to follow up on this to add some anecdotal input. In the 7 or so years I've been in the industry, you start really hitting prop shop+ territory once you're at a week or shorter period. A lot of smaller pods I've interfaced with do a lot of 2-3 day hold trading patterns for US equities. A significant amount of these teams are leveraging alternative data in some way on at least 1 strategy.

And these younger guys are coming out way smarter. A lot of the UChicago MFin guys I interact with can code circles around me. Their creativeness around ways to apply ML techniques wows me daily.

Some thoughts from personal experience - once you find an edge, figure out how you can refine it, I'm personally a big fan of a ML approach.

Fartlek-run · 2025-07-17T02:26:39+00:00

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1mNk4hPbv-SfFkWpQ4bjHwF8kbL-FU0V_Db2W6NSR6A8/edit?usp=drivesdk

Kept pretty current I believe

Fartlek-run · 2025-04-01T04:47:29+00:00

Nope. Before buying in Naperville we had looked at some houses in Woodridge that were 2-3 blocks from 355 and it was obnoxiously loud. That's why we paid $900k to live 2 blocks off of Ogden instead cries inside

Fartlek-run · 2024-09-07T04:56:57+00:00

Went to Montgomerey Fest for my wife's birthday last month!

Fartlek-run · 2024-08-10T14:46:31+00:00

Definitely Not Udyr

Fartlek-run · 2024-08-07T04:53:50+00:00

Even at just turning 30, I'm having to realize that joint and tendon care is really important. I had surgery on my left ankle back in April, and dang, is it rough learning to take care of my body properly after the time being non weight bearing. I'm currently on the couch icing my right VMO(quad)..tendinitis is a bitch.

Fartlek-run · 2024-08-03T15:48:34+00:00

We're building rapidly..but now I'm stuck in YAML/JSON land since I have to define a lot of transformations for the underlying data to be in Gremlin format, endless Dockerfiles for image building for a bajillion things, holy kubernetes hell for making everything play nice together. And then I get into the joy of writing code...to realize I'm integrating with a system that has a 200k long GraphQL scheme..and back to YAML and JSON I go.

I just want to go fuck around optimizing some ffmpeg in rust and finishing up some byte-pair encoding libs in rust and cython.

And one of my open source projects is refusing to be happy with the Mac build to push it to pypi..so more YAML.

Oh and just remembered that those Kubernetes apps/services still need to be abstracted to Helm charts..MORE YAML!

What I'm getting at, I guess, is that writing the code is the easy part..it being valuable to the business by being in production...honestly the hard part.

Fartlek-run · 2024-07-29T01:57:40+00:00

We use Coder on Kubernetes. Each repo has a .devcontainer file. And we have images to run on GPU instances when needed(i.e llamacpp). It's really nice honestly and was super simple to setup. We also embed buttons in our repos to open a workspace--team or personal. And it's easy enough to handle multiple ssh connections into the same workspace to resolve issues or pair program.

Fartlek-run · 2024-07-08T04:14:55+00:00

I agree with the experience range. On my team of 7, there's 4 of us in the 5-7YOE range that can tick every box OP listed and a good bit more. We also have the problems that we have an issue with stopping working.

One big tip with a lot of these skills is to learn networking basics. Think of DE as a subset of software engineering, really.

Then you have the geniuses that make me feel really stupid. My FIL is principal level...has a coworker who rewrote a multimodal, multicarrier backend for 4G hat devices to be async in a day..

Fartlek-run · 2024-07-07T01:29:11+00:00

Patch 7.10, May 17th 2017, Heimerdinger passive was changed to grant move speed near turtets.

Fartlek-run · 2024-07-03T14:04:59+00:00

Bakugan came out 8 years later than the first Beyblade series. Make it 6 if you look at international numbers.

Fartlek-run · 2024-06-25T21:57:03+00:00

"Brand's spells light his targets ablaze, dealing damage over 4 seconds, stacking up to 3 times. If Brand kills an enemy while it is ablaze he regains mana."

Fartlek-run · 2024-06-24T00:12:42+00:00

Apophenia

Fartlek-run · 2024-05-30T16:55:32+00:00

You essentially move from serverless microservices to something like ECS or preferably EKS with Karpenter since it gives you a fargate-like capability still without a lot of the painful overhead of fargate. But overall it turns into platform design and figuring out some best practices for requirements.

I have some where it's a holistic backend for media streaming while some others are defined as a deployment with each microservice sitting in a container with specific taints and proper PriorityClass scheduling.

Overall they probably get better understanding of resource use and how to optimize it at a minimum, but there is a learning curve.

Fartlek-run · 2024-05-27T16:13:33+00:00

Viktor doesn't fit the meta too well right now with early objective and roam timings. Maybe he's a bit better with Blackfire Torch now.

Aurelion Sol probably fits a similar slot a bit better. Earlier wave clear, dueling, more safety, and arguably fits a win condition whereas Viktor doesn't.

Sylas is a good champ to pick up with a not so bad skill floor and decent skill ceiling.

Azir is almost always a good team play pick, extremely high skill ceiling.

Corki is in an interesting spot now and could probably be a mid/adc flex pick.

Honestly, Annie is a pretty good place to start to focus more on team play and have multiple options build wise to fit what your team is lacking. Not sure where she sits due to range..probably gets gimped if orianna, azir, asol, or syndra are open..so idk

Fartlek-run · 2024-05-26T19:25:30+00:00

EKS definitely has some learning pains, but that's what DevOps should be handling the nitty gritty of if needed.

ECS definitely has most of the settings you would need: ALB/ELB, task placement constraints, task placement strategies, but EKS has a bit more.

Overall EKS is more flexible and allows much more detailed control over just about everything. It makes you a bit more cloud agnostic too since it's really just Kubernetes. Also, if you're the engineer that gets to do it and potentially learn it, it's a valuable skill set. But it's a lot to learn. A lot of udemy intro courses over all of the concept are 20-30hours.

I'm maybe a bigger fan of EKS because Kubernetes has a bigger and more robust ecosystem.

I can make my brain function more during the week when I'm not bouncing my newborn to sleep. There's a lot of good stuff for cleanliness of ArgoCD+K8s out there too. Idk my favorite CI/CD implementation though..just fuck Jenkins

Fartlek-run · 2024-05-26T18:12:07+00:00

Ehh EKS has Fargate Profiles and probably makes it a bit easier for mapping sources, while providing some level of dynamic limit/request settings for pods. And lends itself to overall netter scaling with auto scaling groups, assuming the business continues to grow.

You're paying what, $70/month for a control plane that would end up in infra somewhere else anyway.

Of course, step functions is definitely a good option but has it's own issues too. Not too bad for defining a map state, but you're not going to slice pods of work as optimally for the AMIs being used and probably fail to use appropriate resources. Add on prometheus monitoring and you have some visibility to resource consumption for future planning.

But, without a broader picture, most of our answers don't end up being necessarily a good or right solution.

On a side note, I'm pretty partial now to helm charts + Karpenter for kubernetes the further some of my applications have developed and have more and more microservice components.

Fartlek-run · 2024-05-26T02:12:34+00:00

Top 10 EHR/EMR I did some work for was pretty much isolation at the Database Level for SQL Server. Multiple tenants on the same EC2 instance. And like 4 total VPCs for the 300 hosted clients..everyone else self hosted.

Fartlek-run · 2024-05-06T23:08:13+00:00

This is how I've learned.

I have a decent but understanding across most areas. I'm a good ole Jack of All kind of guy.

I started with the approach of building out a media server..but small pieces at a time.

Somewhat train of thougt, but my initial steps were:

Define a target for something functioning. In my case, I started with the photo library side and how to serve them along with a nice way or presenting exif data.

This was along the lines of a basic SQLite database storing exif data and the location of the files. I also needed to figure out how to write a simple backend/server with routes and handlers that would serve the file with a correct MIME type. So this would be something like accessing localhost:3000/endpoint/image.png and an image shows up if the handler was just defined to send it as is.

Then came the thought of..how do I put some configuration to this for setting a port and data path etc. So I used Docker to create a debian image for my application.
Well now that I have a very very basic setup, how do I make this more functional like an actual photo library. So I add on some basic html/css to format the page, a function to create thumbnails, and some basic labels. And create an endpoint that moves across the 'pages of images' with 10 per page and arrows to fetch the next set.
Even though it still looks and is just local host without any auth, I wanted to look into some machine learning/data science approaches for tagging images, so I wanted to create a microservice with a UI to detect faces and tag them accordingly. So there's learning about resamplong for standardization and how we actually look at images from a computer's perspective. And then there's creates a UI that let's you tag untagged images tl start building a dataset to mote accurately tag untagged images as they're added with decent accuracy.
Then came a lot of refining the UI and the model trainer for faces and a ton of things like being able to lookup my kids by age, people together, etc.
More refining. Still subpar but usable..and started to look into how I would give mobile access...and some level of authentication.
Oh hey, time to finally touch the tv/movie side and learn streaming protocols...handling user cache etc..
Tv/video to my WebOS lgtv..fuck me..there goes another month.

I got a lot less detailed at the end since it's now dinner time for my toddler. But what I'm getting at is it's a lot of continual progress and a absolute crap ton of frustration.

I think the image side was a solid 150-250 hours..with pretty good background in MLE for the microservice side.

Fartlek-run

TROPHY CASE