Introduction to VLSI Systems (Mead & Conway, 1978)

An early textbook on building semiconductor systems. A key learning was the scaling law: "as transistors grow entirely new classes of computation become feasible".

ApplicationData versus LocalApplicationData

Both refer to app-specific storage locations in Windows.

• ApplicationData - roaming profile data
• LocalApplicationData - local, machine-specific data

Data in ApplicationData is not automatically cleaned up - and is treated as "important to the user". Data in LocalApplicationData is generally persistent - but Storage Sense can purge temporary files.

The Powerful System.Environment

System.Environment is an all-powerful class.  

It allows interaction with the current environment and platform. It is something to revere when developing intelligent agents that need to navigate the user's environment.

System.Environment.SpecialFolder is a well-known enum.  

It contains the CSIDLs (these are not .NET "things", they are Windows "things"). 

CSIDL = Constant Special Item ID List.  Here are some of the popular values.

Desktop 0  (logical desktop rather than physical file system location)

ApplicationData 26

LocalApplicationData 28

System 37

ProgamFiles 38

A full rundown of CSIDLs is here.

Codex for Windows

Codex is a programming model from OpenAI. It has a Windows desktop application (633 MB download).

Codex is adept at using PowerShell to build software. An example could be the following:

powershell -ExecutionPolicy ByPass -File .\build.ps1

It will also create a Markdown file (README.md) giving a summary of the software including build instructions and behavior (reflecting the instructions/intent expressed by the user in the Codex console).

LiteLLM - Gateway to 100+ LLMs

LiteLLM is an open source library that lets you call into over 100 LLMs.

One aspect of calling into lots of LLMs is you have lots of API keys. These are stored in environment variables like OPENAI_API_KEY, ANTHROPIC_API_KEY - you can also feed these as direct arguments in code to LiteLLM.

You can also integrate a secrets manager like AWS Secrets Manager, Azure Key Vault and Google Secret Manager.

Cut and Paste Metadata in Word

This metadata can conflict with the document's own metadata - creating inconsistent results for example in spell checking, within the same document.

Windows Voice Control

 Some options:

• Cortana (deprecated, memory heavy)
• Voice Access (struggles to isolate the "command voice" when there is background noise)

So no infallible options (yet) for Windows Voice Control.