It’s four weeks already! I spent most of last week writing. I mean, I did give time to other projects beyond writing too but it was mostly writing. I thought I had quite a lot to write about and that I was going to produce as much. But that’s not really what happened. I only wrote 3 articles. There was some lessons to learn from that still. And I’ll share those.

How likely it is that some outcome will be the outcome given some event. That is what probability is. Its a ratio. Given an event, there’s many possible outcomes. The probability of some outcome being the outcome that happens is a ratio of how much of the outcome is represented in total outcomes to the total number of possible outcomes. For unweighted or equally likely outcomes at least.

Its a very important foundational concept in a lot of Computer Science Fields. Without understanding how it works, you’ll have a hard time understanding more advanced concepts like the Baye’s theorem, or wrapping your head around what’s going on with Markov chains or, working with the foundational concepts for most of modern AI i.e: Neural Networks. I’ll try to explain my understanding of it to you here without using any formal terms. So don’t be surprised if you don’t see a lot of P(A n B n C) or posterior and the such. There will be time for that.

Let’s look at what happens from download instantiation by some download client to when all data in its completeness is transferred from the remote location to the downloader’s storage.

Getting a uri to a remote resource

You have been given some link of the form http://somesite.com:8031/file.txt to a remote file. From the URL we can tell the remote file is located at the root folder / on the hosting server and that it is called file.txt. This website is on some server that supports the http protocol. Its hosted somewhere off your system accessible via a network.

If something in my surroundings looks too good I can't stop thinking how to make it look better. Maybe its ADHD but that's thrown around too much these days its hard to tell who's just making things up. But anyways. I looked into modding my alacritty terminal just out of curiosity. I have been using it as it was out of the box for a while. But I felt bored and thought modding it would be a good pass time.

If you have used Linux before, you have most probably heard about Grep, Awk and Sed. These are super useful text manipulation tools available on all Unix and Unix-like systems. Learning all that each can do is an insurmountable task and I’m sure you’d stand with me on that. But having less than functional usage knowledge in at least one can waste you a lot of time while you work with text in the terminal. Which is very often. In this article we’ll look at one of the tools: Grep.

I like self hosting but have not yet gotten a hosting service to stick to so I have to go through the whole reinstall process every time I switch operating systems. Yes, I run my apps on my PC. So I spent most of the past week setting up some applications. I set up Navidrome for my music server, Firefly III for financial management and Jellyfin for managing my movies and tv shows collection. I also played around some with Snapcast but then learnt how much I’d have to read before I’d be able to use it like a craftsman. So I dropped it.

I guess you need a quick solution. If you do, here’s one.

su
faillock --rest

Okay, now the narrative.

I have run into this issue quite a number of times. I enter the wrong password, say once or twice, but do give in the right one on the next attempts. But then, all recurring attempts are flagged as incorrect entries. It makes you confused if someone changed your password or if the system is actually faulty. Before learning it was part of how Arch secured accounts, it was confusing and at times had me considering re installing the OS.

Last week I decided I’d be going on an AI fast. Listed what services AI was providing me with then tried to get alt providers. For the mindless AI usage, I think the underlying cause was boredom, then outright addiction to the solution. I chose to use that time for a better addiction. An addiction to reading tech blogs. I’ve heard about Hacker News before but I’d never read much from the website. Well I discovered its way more than I thought. Which wasn’t much really. But that changed this week.

While talking about what interview questions I’d been studying, I mentioned to a non technical friend how interesting it was finding questions so basic included. Why would you ask a Software Engineering graduate to define a computer? Such a waste of time right? My friend’s response was even more interesting: “What is a computer?” he posed the question to me. And there I was… answering my own question. Remember? “Why would you ask a Soft….”

I cannot say I am the heaviest user of AI since, I lack the stats to back that up. But I am sure anyone that uses it can tell if they are usage is getting out of hand. And for me, that sentiment is always strongest when I feel my productivity levels are dipping too much. When I feel simple tasks are becoming unusually harder to do. So I was like, how about a simple challenge this week. 5 Days No AI.