Epistemic Technology

Projects

Wed, 09 Jul 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Epistemic Technology Projects

Projects I’ve worked on within Epistemic Technology

Epistemic Technology Website

Building and deploying the Epistemic Technology website.
Dates: January - February 2025
Technologies: Hugo, Go, HTML, CSS, JavaScript, Railway, SendGrid
GitHub: Epistemic-Technology/epistemic.technology
The Epistemic Technology website is a static website built using Hugo, a popular static site generator written in Go. It is hosted on Railway, a cloud platform for deploying and scaling web applications. The website uses SendGrid for email delivery. It has minimal JavaScript to handle form submissions and smooth scrolling. A few small backend services written in Go are used to handle functionality such as signing users up for blog subscriptions and handling contact form submissions.
I discuss this project in my blog post Building my site with Cursor.

Epistemic Technology Chatbot

Building a RAG chatbot with Go, SolidJS, Hugo, and SQLite

Mon, 31 Mar 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Last week I released a chatbot powered by retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) for the Epistemic Technology site. Along with it, I published a high-level overview of it intended for a general audience. In this post I dive more deeply into the engineering of the chatbot, for those who are pursuing similar experiments.

All of the code for the chatbot is available in the Epistemic Technology GitHub.

The big picture

About our chatbot

Mon, 24 Mar 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Joshua, named after the computer in Wargames (1983), is a chatbot interface for the Epistemic Technology site. It uses Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) to respond to user queries with answers specific to our site.

This page describes the high-level architecture and operation of the chatbot. It is meant to serve as both an explanation of this specific implementation and as an introduction to RAG in general.

RAG applications work by inserting content relevant to a user’s query into the prompt sent to an LLM so the LLM’s response can take that content into account. It is essentially the same process as copy-pasting a document into ChatGPT and asking questions about that document. The main challenge of RAG is to retrieve relevant context for the LLM based on the user’s query. Traditionally, RAG applications retrieve “chunks” of documents (such as paragraphs) based on their similarity to the query. With modern LLMs that can accept much more data in their context windows than earlier iterations, it is feasible to include entire documents, or multiple documents, rather than chunks. For the current size of the Epistemic Technology site, a simple working approach would be to just give the LLM all of the site content with each query. However, as this was partly a learning project, it follows the traditional approach and chunks documents by paragraph.

How should LLMs change software architecture?

Mon, 03 Mar 2025 00:00:00 +0000

One of my favorite thinkers on programming is Casey Muratori, a low-level programmer, educator, and occasional Youtuber. In “The Only Unbreakable Law”, he makes the argument that, inevitably, the structure of software reflects the structure of the organizations that produce it. For example, Microsoft Windows has five separate volume control widgets, not due to any design reason, but due to the organizational structure of the teams that worked on the operating system.

Building My Site with Cursor

Sun, 23 Feb 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Cursor is a code editor based on Microsoft’s Visual Studio Code. Initially released in 2023, it has become one of the leading AI-focused code editors. I’ve been using Cursor for a while now but hadn’t tried out some of its newer features like Agent Mode. So building a new site from scratch seemed like the perfect opportunity to experiment.

Initial Planning and Architecture

For any new project, coding or otherwise, my starting point is ChatGPT. You could use Cursor’s chat mode for this, but I still find OpenAI’s chat interface better for developing my initial thoughts. Here’s my initial prompt:

Why Epistemic Technology?

Wed, 12 Feb 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Over the coming decades, I expect artificial intelligence to revolutionize our work and lives. For those like me, working in software development or knowledge-based fields, it is already beginning to do so. How will our work and lives change? I don’t know and I don’t think anyone knows. But I want to do my utmost to be in a position where I can adapt to those changes, and make a positive impact on the world. Epistemic Technology is my attempt to do that.

About

Tue, 04 Feb 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Mike Thicke, Founder

Epistemic Technology was founded in 2025 by Mike Thicke. Mike is a software developer and philosopher of science. He lives in Kingston, New York with his wife and three school-age children.

Contact Us

Tue, 04 Feb 2025 00:00:00 +0000

We’d love to discuss how we might work together! Please submit a request and we should get back to you within the next business day.

Note: We will never use your email address for marketing purposes or share it with other parties. It will only be used for correspondence relating to your specific request.

Philosophy

Tue, 04 Feb 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Epistemic Technology builds knowledge-oriented software for the era of AI.

Knowledge-oriented software is aimed at empowering the production, sharing, and use of knowledge. This encompasses educational technology and research tools, but also personal knowledge management, discovery, curation, and collaboration.

Never before has humanity’s relationship with knowledge evolved so rapidly. The printing press took centuries for its full effects to be realized. The internet, decades. Chatbots powered by Large Language Models changed how we work, think, and learn almost overnight, and just two years after the release of ChatGPT to the world, everything from how we write code to how we search the web to how we research and learn has changed dramatically.

Services

Tue, 04 Feb 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Development

We can help small-to-medium engineering teams plan and implement AI-enabled features. We have experience with:

TypeScript
React
SolidJS
Go
Python
PHP (WordPress / Laravel)

In addition to standard web and application development processes and technologies including Docker, AWS, git, and ci/cd.

Consulting

We have experience helping organizatins and teams think about how to adapt to or work with AI technologies. We have:

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