u/tlack

how did you encode the image data when passing it to Laya?

Do you want to use an LLM? You could setup something Openrouter and use an inexpensive vision language model to describe the contents of each image. It can easily OCR the content and produce a text description, keywords, sort into categories, etc. The code to run this task is easy to write in Python and Claude could help you figure it out.

Another option, which you could run totally locally, is to use a vision-aware embedding model like CLIP or ViT to generate an "embedding vector" for each image; you can then easily find similar images, or search by semantic meaning, but your options are a bit more limited.

I feel like you guys put so much work and features into each release. Kudos!

Really neat. I have had thoughts about doing something similar. Can you share a photo of how you setup the steering servo on the transom? That bit seems fiddly to me when I think about a build like this.

They're kinda weird about phone calls (dont publish inbound phone numbers) so I tend to book via the website.

I've never tried booking in person but the staff has encouraged me to do that a few times. Worth a shot!

Downtown staff are all nice/cool people. North Miami team a little more aloof but competent.

Have you tried Sixt? If you book during the week they've been having $25/day specials on smaller cars. Reputable company and always been fair to me. The tolls and insurance push that price much higher, but if you want to risk it, it's a good option.

There's a convenient location in the Intercontinental downtown and a North Miami location as well.

Fantastic pics. A lot of people have suggested that Pace's Dike and that surrounding area is relatively devoid of animal life. Any observations on that topic?

I totally agree. And I think you're missing the really explosive part of this pattern:

A lot of small business owners -- ones who would never seek $5 mil in venture capital to build out their really good wild idea -- will get a competent first version using AI, get some money, users, traction, and then encounter the collapse.

That's when the seasoned developer armed with AI becomes really in demand.

The reason that developers don't get paid more is that there aren't enough customers! Very few companies can afford to hire 5 developers to build something out, which is what it used to take to build a real product. I think now we'll see a lot of 1-2 person dev teams working on new, unique ideas, and getting paid fairly for it.

Apologies for late response. You might be thinking of "Liquor Lounge" at 1560 Collins Ave, which had its main entrance on the 16th street side. It was kind of raucous in those days and it's close enough to Club Madonna that I could imagine a staffer there making it their go to bar. Apparently still open which is surprising to me.

I'm going next week. How were the bugs?

I find it fascinating that people still maintain and use these properties, mostly unbeknownst to the rest of Miami's residents.

I'm interested in leasing or buying a dry land camp like this; if anyone knows of anything (aside from Popenhager and Steve's place) send me a PM.

I disagree with my co-commentors about Miami's techno scene.

Zooming into the current moment: the economy here is stagnant (or worse - poisoned), and venues have been forced to make some tricky decisions to stay afloat (if they even can). Ok, that sucks.

But more broadly and historically, Miami has one of America's deepest and most diverse electronic music cultures (or collection of subcultures, really), and has a legendary reputation as a sorta open, anything-goes creative space built in the blast crater of a transient, nouveau riche, sardonic, and superficial populace.

I say: why not? Wait til you find the right opportunity -- with the right space, the right people, the right reasons -- and give it a shot.

That is annoying, but I don't think it's intentional. They've been floating around without their own serious venue for a year or two now. And talent is fickle. They'll be in their Forever Home soon and I think the bookings will be more reliable and enjoyable then.

I am a much bleaker and more depressed person after reading it. And I was already bleak and depressed when I started it!

I'm LOLing

I'm not exactly sure but I think he drives a black BMW with a Heat license plate

Blood Meridian by Cormac McCarthy

Great book, and good for understanding Miami

Try my friend Laz. I've had him work on my Humvee with its 6.2L diesel relic a couple times. He seems to really know his stuff and is fearless about trying to get things running. I believe his new shop is by Bird Road. Give him a call/text at 305-741-1782

With ChromaDB you can use Ollama as am embedder: https://docs.trychroma.com/integrations/embedding-models/ollama and it's really trivial to do the retrieval part using Chroma's built in functions: https://docs.trychroma.com/docs/querying-collections/query-and-get

Then just talk to your LLM using LiteLLM and either give it tools to search your ChromaDB collection or do the search when the user enters their prompt and embed matches in the prompt context directly.

Simple!

If you carefully study some Unsloth finetuning example notebooks [1] you'll notice that they loop over some custom data and transform it into an OpenAI-style message list:

def generate_conversation(examples):
    problems  = examples["problem"]
    solutions = examples["generated_solution"]
    conversations = []
    for problem, solution in zip(problems, solutions):
        conversations.append([
            {"role" : "user",      "content" : problem},
            {"role" : "assistant", "content" : solution},
        ])
    return { "conversations": conversations, }

So your challenge then is just to prepare the dataset in some sort of format you can easily load, and then convert it to that form.

[1] https://colab.research.google.com/github/unslothai/notebooks/blob/main/nb/Qwen3\_(14B)-Reasoning-Conversational.ipynb#scrollTo=LjY75GoYUCB8

Have you tried Fancyfeast / FPGAMiner's "Joycaption"? Does a good job describing anatomy of all kinds, reasoning not so great (in my experience)
https://huggingface.co/fancyfeast/llama-joycaption-beta-one-hf-llava

You are on a tricky path and I sympathize with the challenges you're facing defining all these different angles of the problem and figuring out how much it will cost.

When tackling a project like this, I usually try to think about it in terms of multiple steps or stages toward your goal. Each step should be understandable and measurable.

The first might be to get your document archive online and searchable in a convenient way, using exact terms as found in the text. That's a whole lot of data, so while document search systems are commonplace now, you may still face some difficulties due to the scale of it.

Then, with this document archive available, add software that extracts key individuals names, addresses, etc. from those documents and builds an index. This piece could be written to be somewhat immune to slight differences in naming and useful in your day to day work as you operate the company "pre-AI"

Then, using those two pieces, you can write more software that scans for breaks in ownership chains, mistakes in the documents, etc.

Finally you can use those three parts and extracted data to build a machine learning model that predicts risk. This is the most specialized, hard-to-hire-for task in your list.

There can be so much variation in the execution of these goals that asking for a cost up front would be like saying "how much does a house cost?" For instance, if your data is in great shape and easily consumed, you'll have a much simpler/cheaper build than if you need to do a ton of work to get it to a usable point.

To find the right party, I'd try to find consultants locally who have done similar work in the past. Most of your challenge here isn't really cutting edge AI stuff which means you may be able to find someone to help a little more easily than if it was sciencey stuff.

Being local makes it easier for you to do a gut check on their progress, meet periodically to discuss goals, and take them to your office to explain how your business works as needed.

You may be able to find a consultant with testimonials or success stories from clients in similar situations, and hopefully by meeting a few people and discussing your goals, one of them will clearly seem more trustworthy and knowledgeable than the others.

Cost wise you're looking at $50 - $200/hr for consultants, so it's important to establish a detailed project plan, and check progress frequently, while keeping an eye on their billing sheets.

You will receive offers from very inexpensive offshore individuals who will offer you magical results fast. Though some are quite talented and inexpensive, because you aren't 100% versed in these areas, you may have trouble identifying the right team, guiding them in the right direction, and evaluating their progress. So I'd avoid it until you have more expertise in these areas.

I feel like my little rant here will never end, so feel free to private message me if you have more questions.

An accident on Loop Road at 1am sounds stressful! Praying for you and the little bud.

I've made one with Smolagents that answers complex questions over a fairly large dataset. I think Smolagents is good if you want something a little hands on but easy to work around, and if you think your task is the sorta thing that multistep Python might be good at answering.

Agno has a lot of bells and whistles built in, but the way they go together specifically may be a bit hard to discern from the docs. The tutorials work nicely, but in my experience you eventually need to get more under the hood to really understand how it all comes together. But it's well built and if you read the source it's pretty well organized and carefully planned.

Just my opinions of course, everyone is different. SmolAgents is probably the easier of the two if you already know Python and can write simple functions; Agno may give you more immediate pleasure with less custom code.

I'm not sure how coding-friendly you are, but you could just write one! Using Smolagents or Agno you can have something searching your docs and summarizing the web with just a little code. Then you would 100% understand what its doing and could add on anything specific to your life that us other nerds haven't thought of yet. You could make a wee website to use it, or hook it up to a Telegram or WhatsApp bot, or a phone number with Trello. Let me know if you need more pointers.