Learning
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I continued taking memory palace photos, choosing number names, and exploring resources for creating more mnemonic tools. I picked up a pair of symbolism dictionaries by Steven Olderr to help me think about visualizing abstract concepts. For ideas on number symbolism and archetypal characters, I picked up a Humble Bundle with books on tarot, numerology, and astrology. And for ideas on assigning stories to everyday objects, I listened to The Rural Setting Thesaurus from the terrific Writers Helping Writers series, though I’ll need to study it to really glean what I’m looking for.
AI
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A project at work gave me the opportunity to dip my toe into several AI technologies I’ve been curious about. I looked into the tool chain frameworks LangChain and Llama Index, the ReAct framework for autonomous agents, retrieval augmented generation (RAG) to let the language model query a document library, and multimodal models to include computer vision in my queries. I concluded that these techniques weren’t a good fit for the project, but exploring them gave me back the feeling I was performing informational alchemy using these models.
Nature
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Saturday I spent the afternoon making a custom Google map of all my walking spots, plus a few I still need to visit. I ended up with about 50 pins. I used the hiking icon to show which places I’ve already walked and the icon color to represent the surface type so I can pick a less muddy trail after it’s rained. The map is way better for picking a nearby spot than the spreadsheet I was going to make.
