markjgsmith

2023/10/18 #

• It would be really awesome if these ChatGPT PDF Bots get popular for software documentation because then there would be a trend to create PDFs for documentation again, and that would mean we would have offline docs again. Anything that improves the offline experience would be a win for everyone.

  Ultimately we need a way to write documentation once, and be able to easily output in many formats, like web, PDF, epub etc. I imagine that SSGs that focus on documentation sites should be able to make this easy. If all the content is in markdown files, then it's really just another build target, you could even add the fancy AI chat bot stuff to the end of the workflow. #

Today’s links:

• PDF Chat with Node.js, OpenAI and ModelFusion - Tutorial on how to create a ChatGPT bot to ask questions about a specific PDF. This demistified things quite a bit for me. There isn't that much to it. Parse the PDF, split text into chunks, add to a vector index, create chatbot that uses the vector index to get answers to user questions. There's a lot of complicated sounding words, but overall it's not that difficult, it's just the API has a very different shape to what I'm used to. Also this is a classic example of Typescript making it harder to learn something basic. IMHO, it's totally unnecessary in this context. modelfusion.dev #

• Organizing multiple Git identities - A handy way to include reference and include different git config settings based on project path. Enables you to use different git identities for different projects. Could be quite useful if you work say on many client projects simultaneously. garrit.xyz #

• Wages overtake inflation for first time in nearly two years - Interesting to see main stream media equating rising inflation with a tax increase. Of course that is what it is, but historically it's been a hidden tax. Perhaps the general population is finally getting wiser as far as it goes with money printing and inflation. www.bbc.co.uk #

• Speeding up the JavaScript ecosystem - The barrel file debacle - So called barrel files that re-export modules so they can all be easily imported somewhere else is such a common pattern in javascript. It can make code more readable by not having millions of imports at the top of the file. Turns out it can increase runtime in some cases because the module graph becomes unnecesarily large. It's especially noticeable in tests because the same code is running again and again, each time adding the overhead. Tldr, don't overuse barrel files. Check that they aren't slowing down your tests. marvinh.dev #