📖 The Token Saving Series (4 parts): Part 1: Why your AI gets dumber the more you chat · Part 2: If an abacus works, don’t boot up a supercomputer · Part 3 (This post) · Part 4: I built a budget dashboard for my AI The first two posts were still at the “everyone can use this” level. Starting with this one, I’ll show you the setup on my computer that I’ve endlessly tinkered with. ...
📖 Token Saving Series (4 parts in total): Part 1 (this post) · Part 2: If an Abacus Works, Don’t Boot Up a Supercomputer · Part 3: Organizing a Clean Desk for AI · Part 4: I Installed a Budget Dashboard for AI You’ve definitely had this experience: you chat with ChatGPT or Claude for an afternoon, and the longer it goes, the more sluggish it gets. It replies slower, suddenly “forgets” what you said earlier, or even starts talking in circles. ...
Lately I’ve been relying more and more on Claude Code to manage my digital life. From organizing my Obsidian notes to maintaining a bunch of self-hosted services at home (OpenWrt router, AdGuard Home, Synology NAS, Oracle cloud instance, Home Assistant), down to the various automations running themselves in the middle of the night, I hand almost everything over to it. He can do more and more, and I seriously thought about something the other day that I hadn’t thought through before: I’ve given an AI assistant that can read files on my computer, execute commands, and connect to the internet such vast permissions. If something goes wrong one day, how wrong could it go? ...
Background: What I was already using When studying for the board examination, I set up a RAG (Retrieval Augmented Generation) pipeline for myself. Using semantic search to look at similarity, I turned hundreds of physical medicine and rehabilitation (PM&R) textbooks and my own notes into something I could search and query. I use it for reading in Obsidian, while also letting Claude find what I need via MCP. Its weakest point right now is connecting knowledge across different documents. So a few days ago, when I saw someone share a newly published paper, SAG (SQL-Retrieval Augmented Generation), claiming that adding SQL and graph concepts on top of semantic search makes cross-document search easier—with effects similar to GraphRAG but easier to build and maintain—my eyes lit up. ...
I finished the board examination last weekend, and I’m finally going to be a PM&R attending physician! After more than a decade in Hualien, taking the train back and forth to Taipei for classes so many times, I made myself a Taiwan Railways gold member early on. Recently, while preparing for a hospital promotion, I asked Claude to scrape and organize all the PM&R courses I’ve taken over the years. Adding up the online and offline ones, I found out the total broke 150! I never expected to have racked up so much tuition expense without even realizing it 🤣 ...