jakecodes

Appreciate the thoughtful response! I’m actually right in the ICP you described — I’ve run my own VMs in the past and recently switched to Cloud Run to simplify ops and take advantage of scale-to-zero. In my case, I was running a few inference jobs and expected a ~$100 bill. But due to the instance-based behavior, it stayed up the whole time, and I ended up with a $1,000 charge for relatively little usage.

I’m fairly experienced with GCP, but even then, the billing model here caught me off guard. When you’re dealing with machines that can run up to $64K/month, small missteps get expensive quickly. Predictability is key, and I’d love to see more safeguards or clearer cost modeling tooling around these types of workloads.

Hey! It's awesome to read other people's solutions to this.

I've been working on solving this for the past 2 years or so and I went through much of the same struggles in the beginning until we came up with a solution which is fairly complex, to get LLM's to output data in a way we can use.

The big problem is that 95% accuracy is not good enough for calendars. People lose confidence after 1 failed attempt. Trying to get LLM's to output JSON can have a 1 in 1000 invalid JSON problem which is unrecoverable. What I wound up doing is training models for the tasks with tremendous amounts of data. I did not use OpenAI's models as they were not right for the job. Would love feedback.

convoke.ai

This is not a simple "do this", except to say you need to see a doctor. You are not alone! Many suffer with anxiety for their whole life. What helps is therapy to learn to train your brain that many are anxious too and that you are normal. The ones who don't have chronic anxiety are people you can learn from. When you figure it out you'll have superpowers that most would kill for.

You may choose medication to help you with that initial training, you may have a completely different diagnosis.

No one here should diagnose you, because a doctor wouldn't diagnose over the internet.

A helpful book: "Brain Lock" by Jeffrey Schwartz. It's about OCD but in my experience all these things are connected.

Hey there! Nice work, looks great! I've built a few of these and the biggest concern with those motors (I've tried them before) is that they aren't made to handle the torque of even small hills. They'll burn out on mile 25. It's not the wattage that's the problem, they just start to slip and burn out unless you gear them down a lot, but then you lose a lot of their speed. Maybe I've just always bought cheap stuff. Also worried about the tension on the chain, is it adjustable? I also had trouble with XT90 in the past. I would melt them. Proper soldiering iron fixed that. Nice build! It's super unique!

Hi Jacques! A little late here. It's cool to see someone else spot welding! For the DC area, it's totally faster to commute and I took my daughter everywhere! Now we're in Philly and I use it for long ranges. I've built a bunch of these in various forms, my favorite is a big wheel scooter. It's my main commuter. Look up rivet nuts for securing to the frame! Was a big life saver.

One thing: After years of riding various bikes I've built, please for the love of everything, be careful at high speeds because I've discovered the weakest point of the bike is the C shaped thing at the end of the fork for the wheels. At super high speeds the bumps are rougher on the bike and will eventually pull it apart, even with mid motor power. It may not even come apart all the way, but spread open slightly. Maybe millimeters.

I've tried several bikes, offroad and everything. It won't happen now, but like at odometer 6000 or something. Every single time it fails there. I've had 3 bikes, various scooters, all fail that way. It means your wheel may eventually, suddenly come off at a high speed. I think the answer is a custom fork, but haven't gone there yet.

I'm jakecodes on twitter if you want to trade knowledge.

Congrats Douwe and team! I'm super excited!

I always wanted to make an electric skateboard. After a few successful iterations, I decided to make a really fast one that could replace a car. I built my own lion battery out of ~500 18650s. It could go about 30 miles on a charge. It could go about 50mph. It was a very wide body with huge air filled tires. It could pull 10 of my friends up the steepest hill. It was very powerful because I installed an electric motorcycle engine on it. My one extra stupid move was I didn't account for the battery dying at high speeds. Normally I'd stop well before an empty battery but I only had 3 LEDs of primitive battery indication. And that only measured with voltage. Voltage fluctuates wildly in motorized vehicles. It died while only going about 20mph but up a steep hill. The sudden loss of forward momentum flung me off the board into the pavement where I flipped a few times and scrapped across the pavement for a while. Was a painful lesson.

Taubman made a series of videos called "Choreography of the Hands". You can now find them on YouTube. They were originally VHS, and they are very eye opening. But there isn't anything like having a real lesson.

I've been playing piano for 30 years, have a degree in piano performance and have played in many competitions. There are many type of competitions. There's the Chopin International Competition where only Chopin must be played. Also the Liszt, and others. There are also Bach competitions, which don't require large hands. Then there's the Rubinstein and Van Cliburn where you have to adhere to a set of music. Like one sonata from the romantic period etc. Many different competitions and opportunities to play many different pieces with many different requirements.

I've also watched tons of competitions and know tons of pianists. I think a smaller keyboard would make it easier for people with smaller hands, but a lot of these "big chords" that composers write, are not playable by anyone, and were never meant to be played as one chord. Rachmaninoff has chords that regularly stretch 3 octaves. No one has hands like that.

I've also met a ton of concert pianists (name dropping here, but for a reason). I never met Alicia de Larrocha but she was 4 ft 9 and she played tons of very large pieces like Liszt. I've have met Helen Grimaud, Evgeny Kissin, Lang Lang, Jean-Yves Thibaudet, Andre Watts, Daniel Barenboim and a bunch of others. I know Lang Lang has largish hands, but the rest have hands very similar to mine, and I'm perfectly average. Except Andre Watts, who had super thick hands and regular length fingers. I remember that Helen Grimaud was small, but had the strongest handshake. All of them can play all the great pieces. Also in conservatories you'll often see a these kids that can play crazy pieces.

Do large hands help. Yes. But like anything, we adapt, and you learn your own technique. I don't think it's the same as having long legs in running. The biggest difference would be for people who can't reach an octave comfortably. After that, 10th, 11th, 12th, 13th. You're in the same camp as the rest of us. Some I've seen can reach a 10th comfortably. But I can play a 10th, if I stretch, but I don't because that stretching will injure my hand over time. I play it as a quick roll.

I've also analyzed the technique of many of the greats in slow motion. Go watch Evgeny Kissin at 1/4 speed on YouTube. He isn't using his hand size to make the difference, he's just very efficient in his movement. He's the same height as me, but maybe with his fro slightly taller.

Look up Dorothy Taubman, and Edna Golandsky. I studied the Taubman techinique for years. What she did is (in the 70's) rented slow motion cameras and recorded great pianists and not so great pianists, and she realized, it wasn't so much the hand size but they way they used their hands. Great pianists had a natural rotations between notes. They were very naturally efficient. They made large jumps by moving quickly to the notes and then playing vs flying blindly. They move their hands and fingers to play notes vs just playing notes with finger movt. Many large discoveries, She turned it into a whole technique which Edna Golandsky later took over and made the technique her own. I had a lesson with Edna, and it was life changing. It was the realization that it doesn't matter what your hand size is but how you use your fingers, hands, arms and body together. I've been playing wrong for years. Because no one teaches you how to move. There's the "Russian technique" which will give you tendonitis. The movement hasn't been studied as much as it should be. I learned 10 or so major concepts and swore off all other music for the summer and retrained everything. I studied that technique for a few years, and now I am able to play the Liszt's and Rachmaninoff's, given enough practice. It was that I was playing incorrectly. I didn't know how to move my body. It's an efficiency thing, that some discover naturally.

My biggest handicap is my learning speed. I personally think that the real thing that makes the greats great is their ability to naturally sight read. Think about it. If you can sight read very quickly you have solved all other problems with movement. Watch Daniel Barenboim and Vladimir Ashkenazy on YouTube sight reading together as 20 somethings. This is something they are very naturally talented at.

Anyways, key size is only one tiny piece that I think will have diminishing returns.

I’m taking weekends and evening off so I don’t burn out. I’m working on learning a piano piece by a composer named Kapustin. If you haven’t listen to him I highly suggest him. Since I got my degree in piano performance, I’ve not learned any big pieces and I’m excited that I’m finally doing it.