Life tends to simplify around the holidays. That is, hobbies take a back seat to family time and going out to enjoy the sights and sounds of the season.

This week, I've gone days where I haven't touched my computer - quite the astonishing feat! So my list of things I've consumed is sparse, limited to:

• Watching my final David Lynch film "Inland Empire", for which I was absolutely not in the correct state of mind to watch but seem to have soaked up reasonably well anyways,
• Watching John Singleton's remarkable first film "Boyz n the Hood", gripping as always,
• Reading a post (more of a well-read and considered rant?) by Dan Luu about how modern business & social systems & cultures make it so hard to judge and purchase quality items & services on the market,
• And finally, reading Anthropic's great post laying out some basic definitions & principles for implementing AI agents & agentic systems.

My lone side project this week (to be revealed in a future post, perhaps?) now involves going over and analyzing hundreds of podcast transcripts - a great reason to experiment with LLM's!

I expect one of my posts next week will go into depth about this project. This week's work has involved lots of time-consuming reading and trial-and-error, and I'm about to scrap my current approach altogether and go with a different tech stack. If you'd like to improve your LLM prompting skills, OpenAI's best practices page for Prompt engineering is a great place to start.