I'm kickstarting a technical book club! It's going to be based around a mailing list with one thread per week discussing the scope covered that week. I have some ideas for what to read, but …
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A non-review of half of Designing Data-Intensive Applications
I read the first seven chapters of "Designing Data-Intensive Applications" before deciding to stop. It's about half of this hefty book. In the spirit of learning in public through this blog, I'll reflect on what …
Anthropic is onto something interesting with Artifacts
A few weeks ago, Anthropic released a new feature to their Claude chatbot — Artifacts. It was announced together with Claude 3.5 Sonnet. You can find more details in the section about the feature. It's …
In-browser LLM on Chrome Canary
The nightly version of Google Chrome ships with an on-device LLM. The model it runs is Gemini Nano. Some documentation about this can be found here.
It's not surprising to be honest, that tiny LLMs …
The Pragmatic Programmer Review
The Pragmatic Programmer 20th Anniversary Edition, by David Thomas and Andrew Hunt, offers high-level, actionable advice for software engineers. Unlike many technical books that focus on specific coding practices or languages, it focuses on cultivating …
Thoughts about Anthropic / OpenAI work on interpretability in LLMs
A few weeks ago, Anthropic came out with this paper, showing how they found interpretable features in one of their models. This means that they could see which features activate when the LLM generates, and …
Mozilla is experimenting with local alt text generation in Firefox
As the title suggests, Mozilla is experimenting with using on-device Generative AI to generate alt text. Here are some meandering thoughts.
This raises the question whether it makes sense to invest in AI generated alt-text …
Docker, compose, secrets, and environment variables
A dockerised app I'm working on needs some secrets at build time. In my case, it needs to pip install from a private repository. Note that this is a generic problem, luckily with quite an …
LLM synthetic data in bash
The llm command line tool by Simon Willison lets you interact with LLMs from the command line. I've been using it recently, and while it's nice and convenient, I wasn't doing anythin I couldn't do …
Andrew Ng's advice for iteratively writing LLM prompts
When building complex workflows, I see developers getting good results with this process:
- Write quick, simple prompts and see how it does.
- Based on where the output falls short, flesh out the prompt iteratively. This …