Data Science: Querying DnD Session Notes with Vector Databases and AI

Last week, we had some guests at work and one of them presented a multi-agent model for creating database queries with some clever documentation retrievals. It was very exciting and something I've wanted to do, so I decided to take some steps and familiarize myself with some of the concepts. I learn best by practicing, though, so I set out to do a simple hack day project: a way to create a retrieval augmented generation (RAG) application that would take some notes I have from our multi-year Dungeons and Dragons (DnD) campaign and generate appropriate responses when passed through an AI large language model (LLM). 

Let's go through what I ended up building.
You can also follow along by looking through the GitHub repo for it: https://github.com/dr-rodriguez/ollama-ttrpg-query

Data Science: An Update on my Goodreads Reviews as of 2020

A few years ago, in 2016, I wrote a brief post on statistics when looking at my Goodreads reviews. A friend's comment recently reminded me of this work and I decided to update it with information all the way up to the present day. Unfortunately, a big limitation has been that, as of earlier this month, Goodreads discontinued their API. I had a lot of code written to access it and generate the plots and had to spend some time rewriting it to use a CSV export of my library. It's not the same, but I was able to reconstruct most of the information. So without further ado, let's look at what we can discover.

Advent of Code 2015

Over the past month, I've been slowly working on the Advent of Code programming puzzles. I was alerted to this by a colleague at work and decided to give them a try. You get one puzzle each day, with two parts, and solving them gives you a star to light up the Christmas tree (since this was in December and holiday-themed). I decided to use Python to solve these as it's one of the programming languages I know best, but any language would have worked.

Below, I describe a few of my favorite puzzles, the hardest ones I found, and things I learned from this.