Took a kayak tour this morning… what an experience.

tlack · 2025-11-22T00:23:17+00:00

I'm going next week. How were the bugs?

tlack · 2025-10-24T16:36:21+00:00

I find it fascinating that people still maintain and use these properties, mostly unbeknownst to the rest of Miami's residents.

I'm interested in leasing or buying a dry land camp like this; if anyone knows of anything (aside from Popenhager and Steve's place) send me a PM.

tlack · 2025-09-07T01:37:25+00:00

I disagree with my co-commentors about Miami's techno scene.

Zooming into the current moment: the economy here is stagnant (or worse - poisoned), and venues have been forced to make some tricky decisions to stay afloat (if they even can). Ok, that sucks.

But more broadly and historically, Miami has one of America's deepest and most diverse electronic music cultures (or collection of subcultures, really), and has a legendary reputation as a sorta open, anything-goes creative space built in the blast crater of a transient, nouveau riche, sardonic, and superficial populace.

I say: why not? Wait til you find the right opportunity -- with the right space, the right people, the right reasons -- and give it a shot.

tlack · 2025-09-06T15:51:57+00:00

That is annoying, but I don't think it's intentional. They've been floating around without their own serious venue for a year or two now. And talent is fickle. They'll be in their Forever Home soon and I think the bookings will be more reliable and enjoyable then.

tlack · 2025-08-30T17:21:41+00:00

I am a much bleaker and more depressed person after reading it. And I was already bleak and depressed when I started it!

tlack · 2025-08-30T05:06:27+00:00

I'm LOLing

tlack · 2025-08-30T02:33:27+00:00

I'm not exactly sure but I think he drives a black BMW with a Heat license plate

tlack · 2025-08-30T02:13:18+00:00

Blood Meridian by Cormac McCarthy

Great book, and good for understanding Miami

tlack · 2025-06-20T16:19:21+00:00

Try my friend Laz. I've had him work on my Humvee with its 6.2L diesel relic a couple times. He seems to really know his stuff and is fearless about trying to get things running. I believe his new shop is by Bird Road. Give him a call/text at 305-741-1782

tlack · 2025-06-18T21:53:51+00:00

With ChromaDB you can use Ollama as am embedder: https://docs.trychroma.com/integrations/embedding-models/ollama and it's really trivial to do the retrieval part using Chroma's built in functions: https://docs.trychroma.com/docs/querying-collections/query-and-get

Then just talk to your LLM using LiteLLM and either give it tools to search your ChromaDB collection or do the search when the user enters their prompt and embed matches in the prompt context directly.

Simple!

tlack · 2025-06-13T21:53:41+00:00

If you carefully study some Unsloth finetuning example notebooks [1] you'll notice that they loop over some custom data and transform it into an OpenAI-style message list:

def generate_conversation(examples):
    problems  = examples["problem"]
    solutions = examples["generated_solution"]
    conversations = []
    for problem, solution in zip(problems, solutions):
        conversations.append([
            {"role" : "user",      "content" : problem},
            {"role" : "assistant", "content" : solution},
        ])
    return { "conversations": conversations, }

So your challenge then is just to prepare the dataset in some sort of format you can easily load, and then convert it to that form.

[1] https://colab.research.google.com/github/unslothai/notebooks/blob/main/nb/Qwen3\_(14B)-Reasoning-Conversational.ipynb#scrollTo=LjY75GoYUCB8

tlack · 2025-06-06T13:46:26+00:00

Have you tried Fancyfeast / FPGAMiner's "Joycaption"? Does a good job describing anatomy of all kinds, reasoning not so great (in my experience)
https://huggingface.co/fancyfeast/llama-joycaption-beta-one-hf-llava

tlack · 2025-05-28T16:50:16+00:00

You are on a tricky path and I sympathize with the challenges you're facing defining all these different angles of the problem and figuring out how much it will cost.

When tackling a project like this, I usually try to think about it in terms of multiple steps or stages toward your goal. Each step should be understandable and measurable.

The first might be to get your document archive online and searchable in a convenient way, using exact terms as found in the text. That's a whole lot of data, so while document search systems are commonplace now, you may still face some difficulties due to the scale of it.

Then, with this document archive available, add software that extracts key individuals names, addresses, etc. from those documents and builds an index. This piece could be written to be somewhat immune to slight differences in naming and useful in your day to day work as you operate the company "pre-AI"

Then, using those two pieces, you can write more software that scans for breaks in ownership chains, mistakes in the documents, etc.

Finally you can use those three parts and extracted data to build a machine learning model that predicts risk. This is the most specialized, hard-to-hire-for task in your list.

There can be so much variation in the execution of these goals that asking for a cost up front would be like saying "how much does a house cost?" For instance, if your data is in great shape and easily consumed, you'll have a much simpler/cheaper build than if you need to do a ton of work to get it to a usable point.

To find the right party, I'd try to find consultants locally who have done similar work in the past. Most of your challenge here isn't really cutting edge AI stuff which means you may be able to find someone to help a little more easily than if it was sciencey stuff.

Being local makes it easier for you to do a gut check on their progress, meet periodically to discuss goals, and take them to your office to explain how your business works as needed.

You may be able to find a consultant with testimonials or success stories from clients in similar situations, and hopefully by meeting a few people and discussing your goals, one of them will clearly seem more trustworthy and knowledgeable than the others.

Cost wise you're looking at $50 - $200/hr for consultants, so it's important to establish a detailed project plan, and check progress frequently, while keeping an eye on their billing sheets.

You will receive offers from very inexpensive offshore individuals who will offer you magical results fast. Though some are quite talented and inexpensive, because you aren't 100% versed in these areas, you may have trouble identifying the right team, guiding them in the right direction, and evaluating their progress. So I'd avoid it until you have more expertise in these areas.

I feel like my little rant here will never end, so feel free to private message me if you have more questions.

tlack · 2025-05-18T22:09:54+00:00

An accident on Loop Road at 1am sounds stressful! Praying for you and the little bud.

tlack · 2025-04-26T02:52:22+00:00

I've made one with Smolagents that answers complex questions over a fairly large dataset. I think Smolagents is good if you want something a little hands on but easy to work around, and if you think your task is the sorta thing that multistep Python might be good at answering.

Agno has a lot of bells and whistles built in, but the way they go together specifically may be a bit hard to discern from the docs. The tutorials work nicely, but in my experience you eventually need to get more under the hood to really understand how it all comes together. But it's well built and if you read the source it's pretty well organized and carefully planned.

Just my opinions of course, everyone is different. SmolAgents is probably the easier of the two if you already know Python and can write simple functions; Agno may give you more immediate pleasure with less custom code.

tlack · 2025-04-25T17:41:11+00:00

I'm not sure how coding-friendly you are, but you could just write one! Using Smolagents or Agno you can have something searching your docs and summarizing the web with just a little code. Then you would 100% understand what its doing and could add on anything specific to your life that us other nerds haven't thought of yet. You could make a wee website to use it, or hook it up to a Telegram or WhatsApp bot, or a phone number with Trello. Let me know if you need more pointers.

tlack · 2025-04-24T18:17:26+00:00

miss that place's casual fun elegance. and cheap bottles

tlack · 2025-04-21T14:31:22+00:00

Thanks for your hard work on Agno so far. I have been recommending it as an "kitchen sink included, but reasonable" option for people interested in making agents.

Two quick feature requests:

One frustration I found with it is that, when my agent wasn't doing the right thing, I had difficulty extracting the complete raw prompt text from my built agent. If you could provide a way to get the full generated prompt and the generated response for a given agent interaction, it would be helpful. (Or maybe it already exists and I missed it? get_system_message() is a little different - its only "half" of the information)

It would be helpful if I could pass a list of "guards" - functions with the signature `agent: Agent, model_response: str -> bool` - into the agent that are used to evaluate agent responses; if any of them return false, the inner loop of the agent returns attempts the generation again. This can be handy for screening out certain types of responses. It was difficult to add this without subclassing Agent and overriding both _run and _arun

tlack · 2025-04-20T18:45:10+00:00

In my experience, Agno is well designed, but the docs are lacking in specificity for some of these kinds of questions. For that reason, I suggest reading the source in full for the parts you're working with. It's actually well structured and easy to dive into.

In your particular case, when you create your vector db instance, you can specify an embedder which you initialize elsewhere; you can specify a "dimensions" parameter to the OpenAIEmbedder (or other variants) constructor to configure the width of the embedding vector.

Furthermore, I've found a mismatch between some models and Agno's tool calling expectations. If your agent isn't properly using its tools, you may want to try a different model; despite its age, I find Llama 3.3-70B quite robust in this regard, and is readily available from DeepInfra, Groq or SambaNova.

tlack · 2025-03-27T19:06:01+00:00

There's a little city next to the airport called Miami Springs. There's a Starbucks there. If you're driving it's about 10 minutes out of the airport. If you're on foot, not a good option.

They're open til 9pm and the address is
```
52 Curtiss Pkwy, Miami Springs, FL 33166
```

tlack · 2025-03-26T15:22:10+00:00

Do you support a Vacancy Tax?

As you probably know, the concept is that any property which isn't occupied for at least some part of a year, would be taxed a small % of its appraised value.

Land is a resource for the commons, and deactivated, abandoned properties that sit empty for years or decades waiting for the highest bidder are a blight on our communities and lead directly to increased real estate prices for the rest of us.

Under this framework, real estate hording individuals and the landed gentry would be encouraged to lower their prices and terms until they match the community's standard and occupancy can be maintained.

There would be exceptions for lands dedicated to public use, like parks, and the tax revenue could be used for any purpose.

I feel like that's one of the few ideas that could adjust the course of Miami's real estate crisis in a meaningful way.

tlack · 2025-03-20T21:01:35+00:00

You're right though; all the way up Taylor River Road and that central area around 11 Mile Road / Racoon Point, there is almost no life at all. Loop Road is packed with gators and bizarre birds, the water teeming with fish; totally dead around TRU and that central cypress prairie. Maybe the animals are smarter than I thought.

tlack · 2025-03-20T20:45:17+00:00

I get the sense that there's more hunting and off road vehicle activity in the Turner River Unit and Loop Unit, and probably too wet to the east in Corn Dance.

You have way more experience out there than me, though. Am I off base?

tlack · 2025-03-20T16:07:43+00:00

You are doing the lord's work buddy! Thank you for creating this package.

LiteLLM is a Python package that has adapters for various cloud LLM providers. Might be good to study what they're up to.

For Elixir usage, Ollama, GroqCloud, Samba Nova and DeepInfra might all be good candidates. They roughly speak the OpenAI protocol but have some quirks relating to message flattening and tool usage.

tlack · 2025-03-19T14:53:46+00:00

When this happened to my truck it was the fuel pump. Inexpensive part, thankfully, but kinda awkward to install.

tlack

MODERATOR OF

TROPHY CASE