June 2024 Vancouver Hack Day Recap
Recap of the June 23rd Vancouver Hack Day, hosted by David Luecke and Boris Mann.
On Sunday June 23rd we met for the second DWeb Vancouver Hack Day, a one day event to learn about new-to-you tech, spend some time coding, and finishing off by sharing what you've learned, hacked, or built during the day. You can read about the previous hack day in the April 2024 Vancouver Hack Day recap.
Many thanks again to Z-Space for hosting and to everybody who came hacked or shared what they were working on. This time there wasn't any official presentations and we just did demos over lunchtime - sandwiches brought by Caterdash and Boris' spaghetti - as well as wrap up demos at the end of the day.
Self-contained RAG+local LLM
RAG (retrieval augmented generation) is used to turn an existing website or knowledge base into searchable vectors to quickly retrieve information as the context for an LLM (large language model) request.
NLP/AI old guy DrDub showed his project that uses local RAG with textualization/semantic-search and a fully open source (including training data) LLM to generate responses to queries. It ran fairly fast even on a lower end laptop.
Awesome OSS mentors
Charlie showed the Awesome List of OSS mentors project, a curated list of awesome OSS mentors who are happy to help newcomers with their first pull requests. Check out the demo app here and at the GitHub repository.
Daylight computer
Boris briefly stepped out to another meetup but it is worth mentioning here. daylight.computer is a new distraction free tablet with impressive full-speed e-paper technology.
Local first chat and AI assistant
At the previous hack day David showed a first version of a local-first chat with user logins. It is real-time, works offline and loads faster than any server could render it. Using Svelte he built another version of a fully functioning chat with user logins in less than 250 total lines of HTML and JavaScript code. You can find the repository at featherscloud/chat.
Since local-first AI ended up being a topic that day, David also showed an old project of an open source browser based AI assistant he built 8 years ago:
This Hack Day was a good start in updating the project with all the new things that have happened since then, all with a focus on running your AI locally.
mysamaiCode was written
Peter Van Garderen was working on the Logos Network "Hello World" and you can find his general notes on the hack day here.
Overall, it was a great day with some serious code written (see proof below provided by Qard) and interesting ideas shared!
Upcoming event: Tools-for-thought workshop #2
Our next DWebYVR event will be on July 11 from 5:30-7:30pm for our second tools-for-thought workshop hosted by Wesley at Z-Space. Register on Luma below:
Join us for LOCALHOST July 28th
The next Vancouver Hack Day will be a larger event, ending the LOCALHOST week.
We've partnered with Our Networks to book 312 Main for 2 days, Saturday, July 27th for Our Networks, and Sunday, July 28th for Vancouver Hack Day. Use code VANHACKDAY for $5 off any ticket type.
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