This weekend im a working on two side-projects:

1) A long postponed soil moisture monitoring for the cherry tomatos on my balcony. For starters, I just connected a simple moisture sensor and a few LEDs to an #arduino board.

2) A tool to monitor the 429 error rate and response times when calling #Gemini via Vertex #AI in different US regions. Written in #Rust, because I am learning Rust.

I've updated my Arduino RGB controller:
- color transitions are now much smoother
- I can now control the maximum color intensity
- The ambient light when my PC is turned off is now much dimmer

Read more here: https://svana.name/2026/04/my-arduino-rgb-controller-is-now-even-better/

#arduino #embedded #rgb #tinkering #pcbuild

Big update to the Embeddings Playground: I've added a simple semantic search interface:

Check it out here: https://embeddings.svana.name/

#ai #nlp #llm #embeddings #ml

The company I work for relies heavily on 3rd party LLMs. We struggle a lot with their reliability. It's abysmal. During working hours, around 20% of requests to Gemini end up with 429 Resource exhausted (and it wasn't us hitting the quota). Claude's uptime is < 99%. It was down just when we wanted to introduce it to a new project.

These people say that SWE is solved. Also, it's a good argument for local LLMs.

#ai #llm #claude #anthropic

I start the week with another incremental upgrade to the Embeddings Playground that includes:

- a few UI improvements, especially for the similarity matrix
- a fix for Euclidean distance, which wasn't calculated properly

Next tasks on the list:

- add the option to download embeddings
- add a few loading spinners
- extend test coverage

Play with Embeddings here:
https://embeddings.svana.name/

#ai #embeddings #nlp #datascience #ml #transformers #openai

"Gone is any hint of talk about design, problem-solving, making, or creating. It’s all about how to shunt things off onto the 'robot'."

https://www.baldurbjarnason.com/2025/challenging-fate/

During the last week, I changed a few things in my Embeddings Playground:

- Added a unique color for each text
- When comparing multiple models, embeddings are now in a single plot, but each model uses a different symbol
- Added a similarity matrix
- Removed a reference text selector for calculating distance/similarity.

Try the Embeddings playground now: https://embeddings.svana.name/

Next, I'll do some code cleanup and improve error handling.

#ai #nlp #ml #machinelearning #llm