New Blog Website

TL/DR: Blog moving to https://strakul.com/blog

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For the past 14 years, I've been maintaining this blog, Strakul's Thoughts, hosted at blogger.com. As of today, I'm porting the content to a new instance. As I've become more familiar with development tools, I wanted to move away from the limited (but easy-to-use) offerings at Blogger and host my own custom site.

This blog is now running Jekyll with the Chirpy theme. I became familiar with Jekyll about half a year ago since it's being used for blog management at work. The appeal to me was content as markdown files which makes writing and editing posts easier and not needing to worry about HTML or all the other features—that's all handled by the Jekyll build.

There are tons of Jekyll themes out there. I was originally leaning towards Adam Blog 2.0, but opted finally for Chirpy. The Chirpy theme is simpler for text-heavy blogs like this one. I may continue to style it, such as changing some of the colors and such, but I'm happy with how it looks.

While Jekyll serves as the interface, I still needed to host it which is where I turned to GitHub Pages. This is now a version-controlled repo that builds and deploys the site. Furthermore, I integrated giscus to allow for comments. This does require a GitHub account to add comments, but it's an open-source, free solution for website interactions.

The largest change you may notice, however, is in the URL. I purchased the strakul.com domain and this blog is now accessible through https://strakul.com/blog. If you go to the top level strakul.com, you'll see my professional homepage, which has links to some of my socials including the blog. If you accidentally go to blog.strakul.com, you should be redirected to the new URL.

I'm excited for this change as it should give me more control and flexibility in how I manage this website should there be a need for changes in the future.

Book Review: Children of Strife by Adrian Tchaikovsky

Children of Strife is the 4th book in the Children of Time series. It continues the trend of terraforming planets, alien creatures, and forays into the nature of consciousness. Here is the Goodreads blurb:

From the award-winning master of sci-fi Adrian Tchaikovsky, Children of Strife is the unmissable follow-up space opera to the highly acclaimed Children of Time, Children of Ruin and Children of Memory.

In this epic adventure, we visit a far-future after earth fell, where ark ships had hunted for a new home. They sought lost worlds terraformed in earth’s forgotten past. We follow a ship crewed by maverick humans, spiders and a spectacularly punchy mantis shrimp captain as they rediscover one such world, and an ark.

Then human crewmate Alis wakes to discover that she, her captain and the ship’s intelligence are the only ones left on their ship. But what happened to those who left to explore the ark… and the world below?

Children of Strife is the extraordinary next volume set in the Children of Time universe, featuring epic adventure, first contact and the nature of intelligence among the stars.

Read on for my spoiler-free review.

Data Science: An AI LLM Wiki for DnD Session Notes

Graph representation of notes in the LLM Wiki. Green are labels, red correspond to the character Zinjaro, and blue correspond to the character Soren

Over the past few weeks, the AI community has been all abuzz about a post from Andrej Karpathy about LLM wikis. I've seen a handful of videos about it and decided to give it a try with my DnD session notes. This is an alternative to a traditional RAG (Retrieval Augmented Generation), such as the one I did in one of my prior blog posts- Data Science: Querying DnD Session Notes with Vector Databases and AI. While a RAG uses a search engine (a vector database) to retrieve information, the LLM wiki approach uses an AI agent to browse through files like a human would.

Here are the guidelines Karpathy presented: https://gist.github.com/karpathy/442a6bf555914893e9891c11519de94f 

The gist of this is that one offloads the organization and querying of a wiki to an AI agent. An agent empowered with a good system prompt and skills can identify relevant documents and synthesize answers without requiring the full setup of a traditional RAG. This is far easier to set up, though it may fail or become prohibitively expensive when dealing with millions of documents (at that point, the RAG approach is superior).

A lot of people have been praising this approach, so I wanted to give it a try. And since I had prior examples of queries against a RAG, I figured I would do the exact same calls and compare those against this local LLM setup and against a Gemini-NotebookLM approach with the full documents.

Book Review: Queen Demon by Martha Wells

Queen Demon is the sequel to Witch King by Martha Wells, part of the The Rising World series. I picked it up on discount to check it out, even though it wasn't my favorite series. Here is the blurb from Goodreads:

Dahin believes he has clues to the location of the Hierarchs' Well, and the Witch King Kai, along with his companions Ziede and Tahren, knowing there's something he isn't telling them, travel with him to the rebuilt university of Ancartre, which may be dangerously close to finding the Well itself. 

Can Kai stop the rise of a new Hierarch?

And can he trust his companions to do what’s right?

Read on for my spoiler-free review.

Book Review: Project Hail Mary by Andy Weir

While I haven't read Andy Weir's work before, I was familiar with The Martian thanks to the movie and hearing that Project Hail Mary was going to be turned to one I figured I'd read the book before watching it. Here's the Goodreads blurb:

RYLAND GRACE is the sole survivor on a desperate, last-chance mission—and if he fails, humanity and Earth itself will perish.

Except that right now, he doesn’t know that. He can’t even remember his own name, let alone the nature of his assignment or how to complete it.

All he knows is that he’s been asleep for a very, very long time. And he’s just been awakened to find himself millions of miles from home, with nothing but two corpses for company.

His crewmates dead, his memories fuzzily returning, Ryland realizes that an impossible task now confronts him. Hurtling through space on this tiny ship, it’s up to him to puzzle out an impossible scientific mystery—and conquer an extinction-level threat to our species.

And with the clock ticking down and the nearest human being light-years away, he’s got to do it all alone.

Or does he?

Read on for my spoiler-free review.

Book Review: The Well of Ascension by Brandon Sanderson

This is the 2nd book in the original Mistborn series by Brandon Sanderson. It's been a long time since I read these, but I'm making my way slowly through them again. Here is the blurb from the Kindle version:

Vin, the street urchin who has grown into the most powerful Mistborn in the land, and Elend Venture, the idealistic young nobleman who loves her, must build a healthy new society in the ashes of an empire. Three separate armies attack. As the siege tightens, an ancient legend seems to offer a glimmer of hope. But even if it really exists, no one knows where to find the Well of Ascension or what manner of power it bestows.

Read on for my spoiler-free review.

Book Review: Cibola Burn by James S.A. Corey

This is the 4th book in The Expanse series. Just continuing my read of the books and comparing them to the TV series. Here is the Goodreads blurb:

The gates have opened the way to thousands of habitable planets, and the land rush has begun. Settlers stream out from humanity's home planets in a vast, poorly controlled flood, landing on a new world. Among them, the Rocinante, haunted by the vast, posthuman network of the protomolecule as they investigate what destroyed the great intergalactic society that built the gates and the protomolecule. 

But Holden and his crew must also contend with the growing tensions between the settlers and the company which owns the official claim to the planet. Both sides will stop at nothing to defend what's theirs, but soon a terrible disease strikes and only Holden - with help from the ghostly Detective Miller - can find the cure.

Read on for my spoiler-free review.

Book Review: Abaddon's Gate by James S.A. Corey

This is the 3rd book in The Expanse series. I watched the TV series first but have been meaning to get through all the books at some point.

 Here is the Goodreads blurb:

For generations, the solar system - Mars, the Moon, the Asteroid Belt - was humanity's great frontier. Until now. The alien artefact working through its program under the clouds of Venus has emerged to build a massive structure outside the orbit of Uranus: a gate that leads into a starless dark.

Jim Holden and the crew of the Rocinante are part of a vast flotilla of scientific and military ships going out to examine the artefact. But behind the scenes, a complex plot is unfolding, with the destruction of Holden at its core. As the emissaries of the human race try to find whether the gate is an opportunity or a threat, the greatest danger is the one they brought with them.

Read on for my spoiler-free review.