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Top Journaling Apps with AI Integrations In an era where technology continues to evolve, journaling has taken a digital leap with the integration of artificial intelligence. AI journaling apps offer a novel way to document your thoughts, reflections, and memories while leveraging the power of AI to enhance your journaling experience and reflection. I’ve checked out the landscape to help you find the best AI-powered journaling apps. There are quite a few, and each has its own unique value proposition. Let’s dive in 😎 ...

Blogging is a hundred billion dollar industry (1). The time and energy invested in blogging is immense, even though only a small fraction is captured in monetary transactions. I’m curious how LLM’s will effect this massive industry. At the market level, there are two possibilities — LLMs may tend to increase or decrease the industry growth rate. It seems unlikely to have a neutral effect. In this article I’d like to consider the each possibility and some implications that come to mind. ...

Amazon Web Services provides a multitude of tools for developers to build robust and scalable cloud applications. In this article, I’ll guide you through publishing to a Simple Notification Service (SNS) topic from a Lambda function through a VPC Endpoint. We’ll encode this architecture using the AWS Serverless Application Model (SAM) toolset. This setup is part of a Pub/Sub architecture which offers several benefits: Better Security: Placing the Lambda function within a Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) through a VPC Endpoint ensures that the communication between the Lambda function and SNS topic remains private, isolated from the public internet, and protected from unauthorized access. Performance Improvement: Directly accessing SNS through a VPC Endpoint often results in lower latencies since the communication stays within the AWS network infrastructure. Also, in general, the Pub/Sub architecture enables untethers the function from downstream side-effects. This relieves the function from the latency and error handling responsibility for these side effects which directly improves the user experience. Scalability and Flexibility: The pub-sub architecture scales to varying workloads effectively. SNS can handle thousands of messages being published concurrently and the downstream Lambda consumers scale automatically. In this tutorial, we will discuss Briefly what AWS Lambda, SNS, and VPC endpoints are. How to configure a VPC endpoint. How to publish messages to SNS from Lambda using the configured VPC endpoint. Code snippets of AWS SAM templates. What Are AWS Lambda, SNS, and VPC endpoints? Before diving into the practical aspect of this article, let’s briefly review the building blocks we’ll be using: ...

This article briefly covers the period, people, and ideas that led up to the Italian Renaissance. In Florence, a hot spot of commercial activity and feuding families — the Renaissance sprang to life under the patronage of the ruling Medici family. The Renaissance is still felt today From the Renaissance to modern times, we’ve seen a general decline in religious influence and an increase in individualistic lifestyles. The Renaissance was, in part, the antithesis of the Dark Ages. The Dark Ages were ushered in after the collapse of Rome. Feudalism developed as landowners took up the necessity of protecting their land and local peasants. Religion thrived in this atmosphere of uncertainty. Individualism was snuffed out as people relied on each other to survive. ...

The benefits of daily introspective journaling are immense. This article explores how Large Language Models (LLMs) can enhance the benefits of journaling. If you are not familiar with daily journaling, see this short guide and definition: Daily Introspective Journaling : A daily journaling ritual in which one writes in a stream of consciousness for a set number or pages or duration. Typically, journaling is done at the same time each day, in order to ingrain the practice as a habit. ...

After talking to hundreds of people about journaling I began to realise there are two broad categories. Most people think of journaling in terms of one or the other. Introspective Journaling The first category is introspective journaling which is inward focused. It is generally retrospective. It is characterised by flow — that is, writing continuously without a filter. Just getting the naturally occurring thoughts onto the page. The purpose is to increase clarity by untangling thought and emotions. This approach is fundamentally meditative in that it externalises mental activity. ...

Journaling is a powerful tool for processing emotions, reflecting on experiences, and organizing your thoughts. Here are five benefits of making journaling a part of your daily routine. Journaling is cathartic As a kid I remember complaining about my sister. I was pouting. No one wanted to hear my complaints of course, but I was feeling very angry. So I wrote it down. I remember plastering my journaling with “Do Not Read” stickers and hiding it. A journal is a place for overflow. It’s a method of processing thoughts and feelings that are better kept private. It’s a place to fume. ...

I keep hearing the same thing. The new Large Language Models (like GPT-4) cause anxiety because Fear of job being replaced by LLM’s Fear of AI taking over the world and maybe killing us I don’t think that’s it. I think the anxiety is deeper. It’s existential. Consider, humanity has always been unique in its ability to wield the tool of language. This is our first great invention. This is what’s enabled everything we’ve achieved. Language has been uniquely ours. ...

This article contains some tips and code to help with adding Serverless Backend Integration tests to GitHub Actions. Integrating tests into the CI pipeline improves confidence that existing behavior has not been broken by changes. Typically a production code base will have tests integrated into the CI, and any merge request must pass the tests before being merged and deployed to production. Regarding the local implementation of AWS SAM backend integration tests, have a look at this article. ...

Healthy software requires testing. Today, testing is inseparable from the development cycle because it improves reliability and eases refactoring which speeds up features development. This article covers common testing strategies used in chess engine development. These strategies follow tech industry best practices and can be applied to any software project. Component Testing A chess engine requires a move generation function to calculate legal moves. This is a foundational component of the chess engine’s overall quality. ...