Love Heinlein! A Googler recommended Stranger in a Strange Land to me many years ago and it was excellent - sent me down a Sci Fi rabbit hole for years.
On IDEs: I've been using VS Code at Meta the past couple weeks and there's really good integration with AI assistants, has a vim plugin (crucial!), and really good community support. I use it on a laptop but it connects to the equivalent to a CloudTop backend for terminal/compiling/etc. And of course Colab Pro is also nice for ML-y stuff :)
Hey Brian, congrats on your retirement! The weekend mentality thing takes a while to get over. It's been several years and I still find myself being over-protective of my time. But I also still have a lot of "I can't believe I get to do this" gratitude moments too :)
I haven't been doing a lot of tech projects but when I do I've been using VS Code on a macbook, it supports just about anything I've wanted to do and doesn't get in the way.
I'm loving your posts Brian. Retirement has been a topic around my house recently as well, and it's great to learn about your experiences. I've already got all the books from your first post queued up to read.
On the compute front, my preference is a 14" mac book pro and if you want to run local models go with the M4 max and all the ram. Another option for local AI is to build a dedicated server with a good GPU. Either way I still really appreciate having the ability to run models on my laptop.
For IDEs both Cursor and Windsurf are very good. I tend to switch between them depending on what I'm doing and what I'm trying to evaluate at any given time. If I had to pick just one I'd go with Cursor for now, but this space changes really quickly.
Thanks Allen. Ah Windsurf, I had heard that mentioned by another friend as well so will have to check that out too. Interesting idea on a local server with dedicated GPU for running models. Is that kind of setup something you have going? At that point I'm wondering about just working with various cloud based solutions.
I've been following a couple of your obsidian Gemini extension posts. I'm definitely interested in diving into that space to figure out the future of organizing all my notes, thoughts, etc. I've got a big multi-tab doc for my upcoming posts brainstorming and I'm not sure it is going to scale.
I decided to go with a homelab machine rather than using cloud vms with GPUs because of the high cost and uncertainty that comes with metered usage for GPUs. I do a bunch of things on my machine, but one of the big ones is hosting local models for transcription, llms for general use, and vision models for a few projects around the house. I wrote about building that machine here: https://allen.hutchison.org/2024/09/01/building-my-homelab-the-journey-from-gemma-on-a-laptop-to-a-rack-mounted-powerhouse/
I'm a huge fan of Obsidian for notes, in particular because the underlying system is just markdown formatted text files. Those files are well suited to AI workloads both within Obsidian through plugins, and from outside Obsidian as well.
You said in your post "it took him a while to get over the weekend mentality and wanting to pack it all in, which I am definitely still feeling."
What is "the weekend mentality"? I've never heard this term before.
Also I played with cursor this winter (in fact this reminds me, I'm pretty sure I still have a subscription to it that I need to cancel), however it was great. I had a lot of fun coding using it. It's a bit maddening with vi bindings (wouldn't recommend that part), but beyond that, it was great.
Thanks Brett. Yeah, will definitely be checking out Cursor for sure. As for the weekend mentality, he was just referring to the fact that when you are working and busy all week that the weekend often gets packed with your to-do list and you try to get as much done as possible if those two days. I felt like I was doing the same early in the week where I had a bunch of TODOs and was trying to figure out how I could get the most done in a few days, but there was no need to rush. Doing one or two things a day was enough.
Since you asked, Firebase Studio is pretty great for implementing frameworks I've never touched before (ok, I'll say it.. vibe coding). I've been using it for a few prototypes in the last couple weeks, and it's pretty amazing what you can get done in an hour or two.
However, Firebase Studio does feel a bit WIP. For instance, Firebase does static code analysis and gives you warnings... which you have to Ctri-C/Ctrl-V into the Gemini panel if you want AI fixes. And it also seems to work best when I use a web-based Gemini model as a companion, since that does much better with RAG to find real working code examples that I can then pipe into Firebase Gemini code assist.
Try it out - it's the most fun I've had "coding" in a long time.
Love Heinlein! A Googler recommended Stranger in a Strange Land to me many years ago and it was excellent - sent me down a Sci Fi rabbit hole for years.
On IDEs: I've been using VS Code at Meta the past couple weeks and there's really good integration with AI assistants, has a vim plugin (crucial!), and really good community support. I use it on a laptop but it connects to the equivalent to a CloudTop backend for terminal/compiling/etc. And of course Colab Pro is also nice for ML-y stuff :)
I've definitely been going down the scifi rabbit hole for years. Thanks for the IDE recommendations, I'll be exploring those soon.
+1 to VS Code. For OS, I'm too lazy to dual boot so I just use WSL (https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/wsl/about) and the WSL VS Code extension (https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=ms-vscode-remote.remote-wsl). WSL has some warts, but works well enough for personal projects IMO.
Oh, that's cool. I didn't even know WSL existed. I always just had a dual boot setup going, but that is a bit of a pain.
Hey Brian, congrats on your retirement! The weekend mentality thing takes a while to get over. It's been several years and I still find myself being over-protective of my time. But I also still have a lot of "I can't believe I get to do this" gratitude moments too :)
I haven't been doing a lot of tech projects but when I do I've been using VS Code on a macbook, it supports just about anything I've wanted to do and doesn't get in the way.
Thanks Tom. Yeah, VS Code seems to be where it's at or at least what everyone is building on. I may have to get a MacBook in my future.
I'm loving your posts Brian. Retirement has been a topic around my house recently as well, and it's great to learn about your experiences. I've already got all the books from your first post queued up to read.
On the compute front, my preference is a 14" mac book pro and if you want to run local models go with the M4 max and all the ram. Another option for local AI is to build a dedicated server with a good GPU. Either way I still really appreciate having the ability to run models on my laptop.
For IDEs both Cursor and Windsurf are very good. I tend to switch between them depending on what I'm doing and what I'm trying to evaluate at any given time. If I had to pick just one I'd go with Cursor for now, but this space changes really quickly.
Thanks Allen. Ah Windsurf, I had heard that mentioned by another friend as well so will have to check that out too. Interesting idea on a local server with dedicated GPU for running models. Is that kind of setup something you have going? At that point I'm wondering about just working with various cloud based solutions.
I've been following a couple of your obsidian Gemini extension posts. I'm definitely interested in diving into that space to figure out the future of organizing all my notes, thoughts, etc. I've got a big multi-tab doc for my upcoming posts brainstorming and I'm not sure it is going to scale.
I decided to go with a homelab machine rather than using cloud vms with GPUs because of the high cost and uncertainty that comes with metered usage for GPUs. I do a bunch of things on my machine, but one of the big ones is hosting local models for transcription, llms for general use, and vision models for a few projects around the house. I wrote about building that machine here: https://allen.hutchison.org/2024/09/01/building-my-homelab-the-journey-from-gemma-on-a-laptop-to-a-rack-mounted-powerhouse/
I'm a huge fan of Obsidian for notes, in particular because the underlying system is just markdown formatted text files. Those files are well suited to AI workloads both within Obsidian through plugins, and from outside Obsidian as well.
Love it. I'll be checking that out for sure. Summer project.
You said in your post "it took him a while to get over the weekend mentality and wanting to pack it all in, which I am definitely still feeling."
What is "the weekend mentality"? I've never heard this term before.
Also I played with cursor this winter (in fact this reminds me, I'm pretty sure I still have a subscription to it that I need to cancel), however it was great. I had a lot of fun coding using it. It's a bit maddening with vi bindings (wouldn't recommend that part), but beyond that, it was great.
Thanks Brett. Yeah, will definitely be checking out Cursor for sure. As for the weekend mentality, he was just referring to the fact that when you are working and busy all week that the weekend often gets packed with your to-do list and you try to get as much done as possible if those two days. I felt like I was doing the same early in the week where I had a bunch of TODOs and was trying to figure out how I could get the most done in a few days, but there was no need to rush. Doing one or two things a day was enough.
Since you asked, Firebase Studio is pretty great for implementing frameworks I've never touched before (ok, I'll say it.. vibe coding). I've been using it for a few prototypes in the last couple weeks, and it's pretty amazing what you can get done in an hour or two.
However, Firebase Studio does feel a bit WIP. For instance, Firebase does static code analysis and gives you warnings... which you have to Ctri-C/Ctrl-V into the Gemini panel if you want AI fixes. And it also seems to work best when I use a web-based Gemini model as a companion, since that does much better with RAG to find real working code examples that I can then pipe into Firebase Gemini code assist.
Try it out - it's the most fun I've had "coding" in a long time.
That sounds great. Definitely want to try it out on a fun project. Thanks Dan.