https://lancecarlson.com/posts/Recent content in Posts on Lance Carlson's BlogHugo -- gohugo.ioen-usFri, 15 Sep 2023 15:53:33 -0400https://lancecarlson.com/posts/setting-up-ruby/Fri, 15 Sep 2023 15:53:33 -0400https://lancecarlson.com/posts/setting-up-ruby/So you heard about this really cool language called Ruby. Perhaps you’re here to learn Rails, or maybe you were enchanted by the elegance and simplicity that Ruby promises. Perhaps you’re a seasoned Rubyist and just got a new machine and need to set it up again (yay). Whatever the reason, we’ve got you covered. Let’s get your environment set up and ready to rock! To install Ruby, I normally reach out to my favorite tool for the job: rvm.https://lancecarlson.com/posts/vector-database-with-rails-using-pgvector/Sun, 13 Aug 2023 00:00:00 +0000https://lancecarlson.com/posts/vector-database-with-rails-using-pgvector/Imagine a system that not only stores data but grasps its very essence. A system that can swiftly navigate through myriad data points to pinpoint the most relevant. That’s the power of vector databases. They’re tailor-made for QA systems, acting as memory boosters for large language models. Their ability to seamlessly link questions to exact answers showcases their pivotal role in modern AI. I’m going to show you how you can setup your very own vector database using Ruby on Rails so you can ask your data questions!https://lancecarlson.com/posts/heroku-is-dead/Thu, 29 Jun 2023 15:34:06 -0400https://lancecarlson.com/posts/heroku-is-dead/UPDATE: In response to the clamor from its users, Heroku has made an announcement on July 28th 2023: We are prioritizing this work and are now actively working on it! I will update with more information once we are working through readiness checks. Aiming to GA within the next quarter. @bf4 You are right that this has been on our radar for a while. To be transparent, we are heavily investing (and prioritizing) in our Postgres infrastructure revamp work, which can provide better performance, more flexibility/elasticity, as well as solid foundation to build up more features, including more extensions (incl.https://lancecarlson.com/posts/what-is-a-transformer/Wed, 28 Jun 2023 00:00:00 +0000https://lancecarlson.com/posts/what-is-a-transformer/The paper “Attention Is All You Need” kept coming up in my circles to read and I finally found time to look at it. It talks about a revolutionary architecture that has been a game-changer in the field, particularly when it comes to natural language processing. For those in the know, the concept is called a Transformer. It’s old news at this point, but for the uninitiated, what exactly is a Transformer, and how does it work?https://lancecarlson.com/posts/chatcopy-chain-of-thought-coding/Tue, 27 Jun 2023 00:00:00 +0000https://lancecarlson.com/posts/chatcopy-chain-of-thought-coding/I was helping a colleague get setup with my semi-autonomous coding assistant utility called guppi recently and realized that he didn’t have access to GPT-4 through the API. GPT-4 is a lot better at coding. This got me thinking that I need to create a solution that works for him that he can use in Chat GPT directly (for now). So, inspired by the work I did on guppi, I made ChatCopy.https://lancecarlson.com/posts/openai.cr-0.3.0-release/Fri, 23 Jun 2023 13:42:37 -0400https://lancecarlson.com/posts/openai.cr-0.3.0-release/Functions! We love when our jobs are made easier. Recently OpenAI announced the support for functions on their blog. Functions allow you to specify the structure of your output in a JSON compatible format. In the past, you’d have to wrangle the output by asking the GPT API to return a computer readable format like YAML or JSON, and specify the fields in natural language. The output would be unreliable. Most of the time I would resort to asking for YAML and I’d have to be very specific about the kinds of fields I would get back so I would get consistent results.https://lancecarlson.com/posts/openai-crystal-library/Wed, 21 Jun 2023 11:23:32 -0400https://lancecarlson.com/posts/openai-crystal-library/Hello everyone! I’ve been developing a new library for OpenAI in Crystal Lang. My fascination with autonomous systems led me to create a semi-autonomous assistant to aid my coding process. There was an existing OpenAI library in Crystal, but it didn’t quite meet my needs and lacked some key features. The most significant addition I’ve made is streaming, which is necessary for streaming code output to the user that guppi is writing.