My name is Joost – I am an engineer and this is my digital garden where I write sometimes about things that interest me. Also I keep lists of books I have read 📚 and things and tools that I use 🔧.
I am completely into drums 🥁 and espresso ☕.
Summarize large files - an introduction
ChatPDF providers, where you can question large files with large language models (LLM’s), are sprouting like mushrooms. The technique is mainly based on vector embedding with a vector index or vector database; based on the question, semantically relevant chunks from the file are provided to the LLM so it can compose an answer. While this technique is cool, it is limited when you ask a question that spans the entire text, such as generating a summary, since that requires not a couple of chunks, but the full text....
Interactive Scala with Almond
Almond is a Scala kernel for Jupyter. Some features: Ammonite, a Scala REPL implementation. Coursier, an artefact manager. You can deploy Almond on Kubernetes with the following manifest: apiVersion: apps/v1 kind: Deployment metadata: name: almond labels: app: almond spec: replicas: 1 selector: matchLabels: app: almond template: metadata: labels: app: almond spec: containers: - name: almond image: almondsh/almond:0.13.11 resources: requests: memory: 384Mi limits: memory: 384Mi ports: - containerPort: 8888 --- kind: Service apiVersion: v1 metadata: name: almond spec: type: ClusterIP selector: app: almond ports: - protocol: TCP port: 8888 targetPort: 8888 --- kind: Service apiVersion: v1 metadata: name: almond-headless spec: clusterIP: None selector: app: almond Port forward:...
Some hatch mechanics 📐🔨
I am often a DIY’er and I have a really heavy hatch (32 kg) at home that I want to open automatically with an electric actuator. Something like the hatch in the image below. You can buy these actuators for 50 to 100 euros online: but which one do I need? or: What is the minimal and maximal length (and stroke) that I need? What is the force the actuator should be able to push?...
Collecting stickers 📷
My local supermarket runs a campaign where you can collect stickers for a photo album 📔 with historic pictures of our pitoresk town. For every 10 euros you get a package of 4 stickers and in total there are 229 unique stickers. My question is: How many stickers including doubles do you need to get a full album? 💁 This is known as the Coupon collector’s problem (a variant of the birthday problem)....
Skiing in the Alps
While skiing in the Swiss Alps last winter, I got into a discussion about speed. Following my engineering knowledge, your skiing speed does not depend on your own mass. Without the intention to offend anyone, skiing is basically a form of falling at an angle. We can build a model based on Newton’s second law where acceleration times mass is equal to the resultant force. We can see that mass ($m$) will drop out of the equation:...