I would add I don't know how anyone can do any degree and career without some sort of passion for it.

For me personally, not only do I need passion but I have to have some sort of belief in the product and/or company I'm working for. In the early 00's I worked at a company, not software related nor was I working as a developer, and didn't like what I was doing nor did I believe in the product, it was lacking in so many areas where they were trying to frame it fit in the product market. I left after 3 years and did something completely different.

Every time I use for more than a couple of calculations I think how much I prefer a RPN calculator.

My work is my hobby too, that is why I struggle sometimes wondering if I will ever retire. Why retire when what I'm doing is for the most part fun. Sure, there are days that I'd rather be "doing X", or more like "studying X" than actually working but I'm enjoying work so much lately that it soon passes.

Work also forces me to actually DO instead of thinking about doing. I have to perform. People are depending on me to get stuff done and that is a big motivator. With my personal projects, no one needs it or is expecting it so it is too easy to abandon.

For parsing and vectorizing of the GCP docs I used a Python script. For reading each quiz question, getting a text embedding and submitting to an LLM, I used Spring AI.

It was all roll your own.

But like I stated in my original post I deleted it without backup or vcs. It was the wrong directory that I deleted. Rookie mistake for which I know better.

And like a dumbass I accidentally deleted the directory and didn't have a back up or under version control.

Either way, I do know for a fact that the gpt-oss-XXb model beat chatgpt by 1 answer and it was 46/50 at 6 minutes and 47/50 at 1+ hour. I remember because I was blown away that I could get that type of result running locally and I had texted a friend about it.

I was really impressed but disappointed at the huge disparity between time the two.

> He's a good presenter and his advice makes a lot of sense. Agree

Not that I think he forms his answers on who is sponsoring him, but I feel he couldn't do a lot of the stuff he does without sponsors. If the sponsors aren't supplying him with all that hardware then, in my opinion, he is taking a significant risk in buying all of it out of pocket and hoping that the money he makes from YT covers it (which I am sure it does, several times over). But there is no guarantee that the money he makes from YT will cover the costs, is the point I'm making.

But, then again, he does use the hardware in other videos so the it isn't like he is banking on a single video to cover the costs.

This all day long.

Plus I like to see what can be done without relying on big tech (relying on someone to create an LLM that I can use, notwithstanding).

I ran this on an i7 with 64gb of RAM and an old nvidia card with 8g of vram.

EDIT: Forgot to say what the RAG system was doing which was answering a 50 question multiple choice test about GCP and cloud engineering.

I miss good print magazines

I did start early at 12 y/o with a C64.

Then trying to get drunk or laid took over and I only dabbled with it here and there. Got married, had kids, did other things and might as well say abandoned it.

For about the past 10 years I've been doing programming nearly every day.

I wish from circa 1993 to 2010 I had been more heavily involved with it than I was.

I had a professor point this out to me while in undergrad.

However, I have difficulty in doing a personal site just for my own benefit and pleasure.

I enjoy learning, I enjoy the THOUGHT of building and doing but my execution sucks.

I finally have four ideas that I think worthy to build that I would like to monetize. All would be well within my abilities to build. No vision of grandeur that I'd retire from any of them and if I made $100 from one site I'd be ecstatic.

Two are simple games, one a directory and one a utility type site. No AI, no sign-up, no affiliate marketing, no upselling, just simple sites with ads.

However, my "paralysis by analysis" affliction is strong.

Right now my "servers" are Dell micro i5s. I've have used RPI 3 and 4 in the past. My initial foray into self-hosting were actual servers. Too hot, too noisy and too expensive to run continuously for my needs, but I did learn a lot. I still do even with the micros and pis.

My current setup is to rent a cheap $5/month VPS running nginx. I then reverse ssh from my home to the vps, with each app on a different port. It works great until my electric goes out and comes back on the apps become unavailable. I haven't gotten the restart script to work 100% of the time.

But, I'd love to hear thoughts on security of reverse SSH from those that know.

As long as it never gets to "grokker" (I've never heard the term "grokker", just saying) . I can not stand the term "grok". I don't know why but it just grates on me