#+title: tag slop
#+title_extra:
#+pubdate: <2025-07-25>
#+rss_title:
#+filetags:

I hate tagging content. It occurs to me for a series, but never ahead of time,
and they are nice to have for browsing. Let's add slop to the web by tagging
posts here with [[https://ollama.com/][ollama]]!

We can create a model derived from an existing one with a [[https://github.com/ollama/ollama/blob/main/docs/modelfile.md][ModelFile]]:

#+begin_src dockerfile :tangle ../extra/modelfile.txt
FROM gemma3:12b

# setting a seed makes it deterministic
PARAMETER seed 1337

# set temperature [higher is more creative, lower is more coherent]
# PARAMETER temperature 0.1
PARAMETER temperature 1

# allow looking back further, at the cost of more memory
PARAMETER num_ctx 20000
# PARAMETER num_ctx 4096

SYSTEM """You are a content tagger for text. Your will take in an article and return a terse set of tags.

A tag is a single word.
Tags should not be plural.
Tags should be relevant to the article contents.

Only respond with a single line comma-separated list of tags, such as:
emacs,bspwm,colors,music,hallucination
"""

# give it an example of expected conversation:
MESSAGE user tag this text: Cake is nice. I love cats and lately I've been thinking about the rain
MESSAGE assistant cake,cats,rain
#+end_src

We'll name it "tagger":

#+begin_src sh
ollama create ns/tagger -f ../extra/modelfile.txt;
#+end_src

#+RESULTS:

And we're off!:

#+begin_src sh
$ cat On-Emacs.org | ollama run ns/tagger "tag this text: \n"
emacs,programming,text-editor,lisp,customization
#+end_src

I'm not much of a prompt engineer, but it's been fun (and infuriating) to see
how little shifts in the system prompt affect the quality of the tagging.

-----

Much more interesting has been HOWTO display the tags around the site. Showing
generated tags on every header would get noisy fast - I've decided that what
makes tags meaningful is there being multiple posts with a tag (it's annoying to
click a tag link and find out you are on the only relevant post already). You
can see the tag cloud over at [[./tags.org][tag links]], but for now only tags that have
multiple posts are shown at the top of post pages.