2 years of self-learning

Just a few markers, before my memory is corrupted by new experiences. I started programming from scratch in August 2022. The very first steps were with Scratch (a tool mainly for children developed by MIT), and then C. The jump from Scratch to C was huge. C is a compiled language, and with the School 42 curriculum a lot of hard work was required to make even the simplest thing (e.

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PromptBros: plan for a minimal legal chatbot

To tease out PromptBro’s capacity to help users create unique LLM experiences, I decided on a new side-project: creating a minimal legal chatbot. By now (August 2024), the risks of using LLMs for legal research are well known. The tale of the American lawyer who submitted hallucinated cases to Court has become part of legal folklore. On the other end of the spectrum, there are already a number of dedicated startups in the crowded LegalTech eco-system surrounding the use of LLMs.

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PromptBros: plea in mitigation and two judgments

Following my previous blogpost, I have made a chat agent on PromptBros to illustrate the input of advocates in crafting a plea in mitigation. As a student, I was sometimes quite puzzled about the value the advocate adds when conducting a plea in mitigation. In some cases, the value is clear: where there is sentencing guidelines from the legislation or the Court of Appeal, or when a case is an excepted offence for which suspended sentence is available.

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Tic-tac-toe: first draft

After feeding my previous blogpost into my PromptPros account, my Llama Sonar Chat agent quickly generated a passable first draft HTML file to work on. The only slight issue I encountered was that the return value of a spliced array is another array: so to get the number out I have to do let move = emptySpacesArray.splice(index, 1)[0] The first draft is now at this commit. Directions for next steps:

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Tic-tac-toe: reflections on a classic programming challenge

Coding up a game such as Tic-tac-toe is a classic programming challenge, but one which I never took much more than passing interest. I mean: I can see it is a good quick-start tutorial to a language/tool (e.g. React quick start). I also really enjoyed it when I did it for the first time. But after the first time, why do it again and again and again? But recently I changed my mind.

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