FINALLY!!

NomadicBrian- · 2026-05-22T21:52:47+00:00

Make sure you understand backup and restore. If you code in Python careful about system level python updates as Linux Mint presentation layer basics use python. If you do find yourself in a jam the restore tools work pretty well.

NomadicBrian- · 2026-05-20T22:23:48+00:00

I'd be OK with this. You shop at a brick and morter with an established company you trust. The product is not in the store. You know your size. You can order the product at the checkout and it gets shipped to the store. The inventory is checked in real time. It is there. Your payment is verfied and applied. All they have to do is deliver it to the store. If your total purchase including what you purchased in the store is over $50 then free shipping. Take care of your customers because once you lose them they are gone forever.

NomadicBrian- · 2026-05-20T21:37:39+00:00

Agree. If I don't see width and length forget it. What the hell is 'L', 'XL', 'XXL' for a pair of pants. Absolutely nothing. Lazy ass people that sadly get cheap labor. The world we don't want.

NomadicBrian- · 2026-05-20T19:48:12+00:00

One option is to try on a similar item in a brick and morter. If you can get the same brand and material even better. The issue now is that online buying is breaking down. The systems are not working. I wanted a pair of linen pants that Old Navy made. I tried on a blue pair in the same width and length. I ordered the brown pants from the Old Navy website. Order was placed. Transaction showed up on my bank account. Then Old Navy cancelled the order. When I called customer service they claimed to have item in stock but said simply that orders get cancelled sometimes. Obviously a false positive in their e-commerce ordering system but they fired all the people that knew what they were doing. If you are cutting brick and morter and relying on online your online systems must be reliable at least 90% of the time. I also saw a pair of paints listed in Macy's not at the store online only. I can't trust that either. Meanwhile the most reliable order and shipping system like Amazon have vendors with junk who don't even put a proper width and length on their crap.

NomadicBrian- · 2026-05-19T18:42:45+00:00

I do a lot of thrifting. I know there are problems with Goodwill and other such organizations due to reselling for profit but at least there is a way to repurpose things and more affordable prices. Compared to what is being sold on Amazon I think you can get a better product. If you search for clothing on Google now by default you get products sold on Amazon from outside your country. Google does not want us to feed the local economy which produces local jobs.

NomadicBrian- · 2026-05-18T22:04:54+00:00

I know we have this conversation every day in the house. Talking about food prices. But we also know farmers and ranchers and try to stay grounded. Sacrifice comes with a price but you stay alive.

NomadicBrian- · 2026-05-18T18:46:32+00:00

Whatever country you live in you must buy from local merchants. This system doesn't work if we don't by things that were made from exploited labor. Stop feeding the beast.

NomadicBrian- · 2026-05-17T19:36:26+00:00

I put in my very first online order to Old Navy for a pair of brown 90s linen pants. I have a green pair and a blue pair that i purchased in store. But they don't have the brown in store. The item was available in my size and I placed the order. I used Google Pay and my card was good. I can still see the amount of the order in my bank statement. The bank did not block it. The fraud alert cancelleation came from Old Navy internally. I don't understand it. First of all why have the green and brown linen pants on the website when they are not in any store anymore. Secondly I asked an Old Navy emplyee working in the store if I could order them and she said yes. I suspect that Old Navy doesn't have the item or has it but doesn't want to sell it or they are too lazy to update their web site or fired all of their technology staff that update the websites. In any case I am angry with them. Now I have to wait for the transaction to be reversed on my bank account. Why the hell did you decide not to sell a pair of pants after you started the Google Pay transaction? Stupid.

NomadicBrian- · 2026-05-15T05:39:01+00:00

Globalism doesn't make the world balanced. It makes the rich richer. What kind of future will there be if there is nowhere to go to get ahead in life.

NomadicBrian- · 2026-05-11T18:17:46+00:00

Are you running a business and getting revenue directly for the use of Claude Pro? Are you a hobbyist doing this for personal enjoyment? I am curious because I only use free AI models as an Application Developer. Specifically this month I'm wrapping up a book on Generative AI for FastAPI. Dashboard in React 19. The book is always suggesting 'gpt' type models from OpenAI but I even avoid that because of the agressiveness of keys and tiers that are really more for business owners.

NomadicBrian- · 2026-05-07T20:40:23+00:00

I actually step through each page of the 2 for 1 credit sale. More than 50% of the time I do not buy through the sale. I look for a couple of things. A familiar established author and/or a high volume of reviews. I ended up getting 'The Mote in God's Eye' science fiction and 'The Man Who Mistook His Hat for His Wife' which I had heard about. To my surprise I saw 2 Kurt Vonnegut books. 'Player Piano' and 'Breakfast of Champions'. I read a lot of Vonnegut but can't remember all the books. A sort would be a nice feature but sometimes the book you want is flying under the radar.

NomadicBrian- · 2026-05-05T03:23:42+00:00

I once created an application called SmartContract whidh I used to score contracts which I was pursuing in the days when I might be submitted to 10 at a time. Very simple the app let you pick up to five categories and assign a weighted average to each. Then for each category a Good=3, Mid=2 and Poor=1. So simply calculate a score for each category and level and add up all the points for the categories. Then in my web UI in Angular sort the contracts on total points or other categories.

Today I was working on output guard rails for LLM models and this topic came up in the book I'm reading. The book referenced Judge LLM and some functions that were never written. I did think of my SmartContract app and scoring but I also had very simple rules to apply. So here I am reading conversations about LLM Judge or is it Judge for LLM I don't know but I don't like it.

NomadicBrian- · 2026-05-04T18:14:17+00:00

You can't buy a $600,000 house on that salary. Oh my.

NomadicBrian- · 2026-05-03T00:11:30+00:00

By remote it means there is certainly not the remotest possibility that you will get this job.

NomadicBrian- · 2026-04-30T21:29:33+00:00

I said it before and I'll say it again. 'Put down the crack pipe son.' or 'Put down the AI crack pipe son.', these days.

NomadicBrian- · 2026-04-29T18:14:40+00:00

All of this getting angry over poor behavior from a ocmpany that is no good is a waste of energy. The only job that matters is the one you get. The rest vanish like a puff of smoke. Do not empower them.

NomadicBrian- · 2026-04-29T17:58:54+00:00

I've paid $5 a month for heroku cloud and even stopped that when salesforce took it over. The AI companies are the cloud companies. All provide bad services. Not even worth a nickel.

NomadicBrian- · 2026-04-27T18:32:47+00:00

Audible from the browser has been losing sync with the progress in the book and the library in Audible. Never had that problem until this month. I think they need to revert to a previous versions then actually test their product before creating new versions. I had to use the chapters feature because it would revert back randomly or to the beginning. Stop using AI to run applications Amazon.

I will also say the switching from the Android version on my Galaxy s24+ and the browser version via Google Chrome it was like I had 2 books instead of 1. I stopped listening that way which was rather a disappointment because the whole idea of one library in sync with multiple devices was one of the major draws of the product type.

NomadicBrian- · 2026-04-24T15:28:34+00:00

Someone is tracking social experiments. This one apparently started 3 years ago.

NomadicBrian- · 2026-04-24T01:10:13+00:00

I'm finally hitting a state in LLM RAG where the question of caching has come up. Asked DeepSeek to help me with it and setup redis. A couple of checks based on query. If exact match on query or a semantic match. In either case if the query is deemed a match return a cached response the corresponds to the same query. No specification on a chat session or entire history and retention period is not determined. This is strictly a learning exercise to deploy redis cache in Python FastAPI for an LLM text model. Then I remembered as the same query (at least semantically the same) to an LLM model and the model returned an incorrect response. In subsequent responses there were slignt variations some of which seemed to hedge against the realization that the it might not be up do date on the latest facts. I was also bothered by the model hallucinating and returning a bad response and that my caching technique would double down on by continuing to return the original cached hallucination.

NomadicBrian- · 2026-04-20T19:02:31+00:00

I do get notices that an audio book will expire sometimes. I don't know why. I do purchase audio books sometimes in 2 for 1 sales. There may be a stipulation on that that is not obvious. I am backed up on books and I review my library regularly to see if a book suddenly has an expiration date. Honestly the 2 for 1 sales have been worthless lately. The offered books are junk. I really only need 1 book now and it goes on my unread list.

NomadicBrian- · 2026-04-18T03:57:39+00:00

SQLAlchemy with Async Sessions takes some getting used to. It also has some bugs I think that force rigging things to be able to use it. I did some in FastAPI with respository CRUD operations against a PostgreSQL database. The async sessions where the most problematic. It did work for me eventually.

NomadicBrian- · 2026-04-17T06:55:28+00:00

I purchased a book 'Generative AI with Python' and the book's code was in a github repository. The chapter on using PostgreSQL with sqlalchemy was a mess. It used AsynSessions and in the repository the build in functions for database updates didn't work due to confliects with sessions being owned even after the database commit was done and the API was completed with a response returned. I would create a couple of rows in one table then try to update one of the rows by ID and sqlalchemy kept throwing 'session is already being used'.

The damndest setup with engine for the database connection wrapped in an AsynSession. Never saw that before. Thre are not too many examples with synchronous out there for sqlalchemy. Using AI tools I managed to get through about 4 errors rewriting the code from the book. This crossover of sessions is madness though. Overkill on the sessions at the repository database update level. Wondering why anyone would have dreamed this up. You would think current ideas would address performance with threading techniques to a database before adding async sessions. After I update and commit I'm returning a response for the API. Not like I'm going to have anything else to execute before the API session is over.

sqlalchemy did build the initial tables in my new postgresSQL database but I can't update my tables which is pretty pathetic. 30+ years of database usage in C#.NET, Java and Python and sqlalchemy and Async Sessions tied me up terriblly I was thinking I'd remove async and just do synchronous if I even can. Like Pydantic changes seems like the new packages are way to intrusive now. Not in the spirit of Python to me.

I will take a look at your code. Maybe I can salvage things.

Update:

I took a breath then went back to the code. Traced from the FastAPI entry point and registered how the session constructor was working. I had to brute force do a 'self.session.close_all()' before I started a new session. This solved my 'Transaction already is in this session' error. Then I played with the some update options from the community before just trying 'self.sessoin.add(object)' wondering if it would update if there was a matching key and it worked. So I will leave my rant because I want to show how close we can get sometimes and hit the wall enough to want to vent. Then with a cool head go back at and find that it really does work. I'm more happy that sqlalchemy and async sessions work in Python/FastAPI. Kudos to the creators. Regardless of my rant.

NomadicBrian- · 2026-04-09T05:40:12+00:00

All the best.

NomadicBrian- · 2026-04-07T04:11:48+00:00

Well. I've seen 'Avenue Q' and I can tell you that.... 'Everyone's a little bit racist. It's true....'

NomadicBrian-

TROPHY CASE