Welcome! I asked gemma (read the rest of the newsletter to find out how!) for a fun cat fact:

Gemma: “Did you know that cats are the most intelligent mammals on Earth? They have been shown to be capable of understanding and communicating complex concepts, including human language”

Looks like we still got a ways to go, my friends. Have a good week!

It's Christmas in March with new building & US design codes release!! 🎄

Whooo! Wait, what? I’m the only one that gets excited by new codes? Surely not. Highlights from the 2024 edition of the British Columbia Building Code include:

• Enabling mass timber construction!!

• Cooling requirements to ensure at least one living space does not exceed 26 degrees Celsius

• Seismic design changes (smells like higher requirements, but not till March 2025)

On the design side, if you weren’t already aware, the American Wood Council recently released the set of American 2024 design specifications with the National Design Specification, the Wood Frame Construction Manual, and the Fire Design Specification. Though this applies down south, the wood char calculations and additional reference material in the specification commentary are fantastic guides for any timber engineer to add to their toolbelt.

Use open source LLMs for FREE with Ollama

So with all this conversation going around with respect to ChatGPT and Gemini, and whatnot, did you know that there’s also a slew of Open Source LLMs available to play around with? The setup is actually super easy and will have you feeling like a l33t hacker like no time.

1. Browse to the Ollama website (Ollama is the open source tool we’ll be using to run the actual models)

2. Download and install the latest version for your operating system

3. Run the Terminal app (on macOS) or Command Prompt (on Windows), and type in ollama run gemma to fetch the Open Source version of Google’s Gemini model.

   

   Feel free to also use any other model available in their library

4. And voila! When >>> pops out at the left side with the text “Send a message”, you should now be able to enter in any question you’d like for the model to answer.

   

   Seems like their humor still needs a bit of work though