Patrick Lee patleeman

LLM Wiki

A pattern for building personal knowledge bases using LLMs.

This is an idea file, it is designed to be copy pasted to your own LLM Agent (e.g. OpenAI Codex, Claude Code, OpenCode / Pi, or etc.). Its goal is to communicate the high level idea, but your agent will build out the specifics in collaboration with you.

The core idea

Most people's experience with LLMs and documents looks like RAG: you upload a collection of files, the LLM retrieves relevant chunks at query time, and generates an answer. This works, but the LLM is rediscovering knowledge from scratch on every question. There's no accumulation. Ask a subtle question that requires synthesizing five documents, and the LLM has to find and piece together the relevant fragments every time. Nothing is built up. NotebookLM, ChatGPT file uploads, and most RAG systems work this way.

Setup WSL 2

Follow steps in https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/wsl/install-win10
If Microsoft Store cannot be used, install manually from https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/wsl/install-manual
Sections below assume Ubuntu 18.04+ is installed

Setup Neovim

Neovim on Ubuntu

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:neovim-ppa/unstable
sudo apt-get update

Falsehoods programmers believe about time

This is a compiled list of falsehoods programmers tend to believe about working with time.

Don't re-invent a date time library yourself. If you think you understand everything about time, you're probably doing it wrong.

Falsehoods

There are always 24 hours in a day.
February is always 28 days long.
Any 24-hour period will always begin and end in the same day (or week, or month).

FWIW: I (@rondy) am not the creator of the content shared here, which is an excerpt from Edmond Lau's book. I simply copied and pasted it from another location and saved it as a personal note, before it gained popularity on news.ycombinator.com. Unfortunately, I cannot recall the exact origin of the original source, nor was I able to find the author's name, so I am can't provide the appropriate credits.

Effective Engineer - Notes

By Edmond Lau
Highly Recommended 👍
http://www.theeffectiveengineer.com/

What's an Effective Engineer?

Hofstadter on Lisp

In the mid-80s, while reading through my roommate's collection of Scientific American back issues, I encountered this introduction to Lisp written by Douglas Hofstadter. I found it very charming at the time, and provide it here (somewhat illegally) for the edification of a new generation of Lispers.

In a testament to the timelessness of Lisp, you can still run all the examples below in emacs if you install these aliases:

(defalias 'plus #'+)
(defalias 'quotient #'/)
(defalias 'times #'*)
(defalias 'difference #'-)

	const MY_DOMAIN = "agodrich.com"
	const START_PAGE = "https://www.notion.so/gatsby-starter-notion-2c5e3d685aa341088d4cd8daca52fcc2"
	const DISQUS_SHORTNAME = "agodrich"

	addEventListener('fetch', event => {
	event.respondWith(fetchAndApply(event.request))
	})

	const corsHeaders = {
	"Access-Control-Allow-Origin": "*",

	# -----------------------------------------------------------------
	# .gitignore for WordPress @salcode
	# ver 20180808
	#
	# From the root of your project run
	# curl -O https://gist.githubusercontent.com/salcode/b515f520d3f8207ecd04/raw/.gitignore
	# to download this file
	#
	# By default all files are ignored. You'll need to whitelist
	# any mu-plugins, plugins, or themes you want to include in the repo.

	# Hello, and welcome to makefile basics.
	#
	# You will learn why `make` is so great, and why, despite its "weird" syntax,
	# it is actually a highly expressive, efficient, and powerful way to build
	# programs.
	#
	# Once you're done here, go to
	# http://www.gnu.org/software/make/manual/make.html
	# to learn SOOOO much more.

	# -----------------------------------------------------------------
	# .gitignore
	# Bare Minimum Git
	# https://salferrarello.com/starter-gitignore-file/
	# ver 20221125
	#
	# From the root of your project run
	# curl -O https://gist.githubusercontent.com/salcode/10017553/raw/.gitignore
	# to download this file
	#