Testing SMTP connections

I just had the pleasure (cough) to connect an MSSQL database to a Laravel application at work. Because the process was super tedious, I wanted to quickly jot this down so I will never have to go through this again. Our setup We're building a Laravel application with DDEV. DDEV essentially moves all development tools into Docker containers and...

The term "AI Slop" is currently on the rise. It describes all the AI generated images and texts we see on the internet. I'd like to propose a term that basically describes the opposite of AI Slop: Mental AI Fog. Instead of consuming too much AI generated content (which also applies), AI Fog describes the inability to produce content without the...

I just rewrote parts of my Positive Hacker News RSS Feed project to use an ML model to filter out any negative news from the Hacker News timeline. This method is far more reliable than the previous method of using a rule-based sentiment analyzer through NLTK. I'm using the model cardiffnlp/twitter-roberta-base-sentiment-latest, which was trained...

Embedding models have long been a daunting concept for me. But what are they? And why are they so useful? Let's break it down in simple terms. What's an embedding? An embedding is basically a numerical representation of a piece of information - it could be text, audio, an image, or even a video. Think of it as a way to capture the essence or...

The more I'm getting into large language models (LLMs), the more I'm fascinated about what you can do with them. To "digest" my reading list of cool articles and projects regarding LLMs, I assembled the following list. If you're also interested but haven't started your journey into this neverending rabbit hole, these may contain some good...