Laugh with me, smile with me, disagree with me
Today, I want to talk about the role of LLMs in the software industry. First, let me start by saying that the magic of LLMs is real; they really do help with writing all kinds of software and with software-related tasks. But I’m not here to predict the end of programming. The other day, I thought about using generative AI to write some music for me. See, as a child, I wrote a couple of songs whose…
I’ve been wanting to get back into technical writing, and something has been bouncing around in my head lately: the perennial discussion of top-down versus bottom-up programming approaches. Let me define my terms, at least for this discussion. I see the top-down approach as emphasizing upfront planning, designing systems based on anticipated user needs and abstract structures. Conversely, I view…
I am tired of Americanism: consuming in the Anglosphere sometimes makes me feel like all movies are the same. America is a great country for allowing a massive quantity of various productions to flourish however due to commercialisation pressures some creativity is stiffled. Growing up I enjoyed some Soviet cinema. Most of it was boring however some films I loved and kept rewatching. However these…
I spent last 6 days creating Thoughtful3 . It’s basically Twitter but it is hosted on Ethereum blockchain and thus is very expensive. Like $8 per Tweet that you have to pay the crypto miners to embed your thoughts into the blockchain. I think it’s a feature actually: with such high prices no problem with spam accounts. Why? I like the idea of embedding your thoughts into Ethereum forever. Whatever…
I am on my summer break and it didn’t take me long to get to Lisbon, Portugal. I flew from Canary Islands and did not know what to expect. I’ve only been here 3.5 days but slowly I am forming a picture. Approaching Lisbon I saw red-bricked roofs of the houses and many hills and it instantly reminded me of Vilnius, Lithuania. However right at the airport waiting for the taxi pick-up I noticed multi…
Back in the day when I was teaching myself how to program land a programming job, I’d spend quite some time learning basic data structures such as queues, stacks, heaps, linked lists, etc. To my disappointment though, now that I am employed in tech I almost never get a chance to implement these anymore. Reasons are: I can often use a library or I simply don’t need these ingredients as they are too…
Lately I have been learning music playing around with computers & maths under the pretence of learning music. I am particularly interested in breaking down melodies into individual notes. However since actually training my musical ear is hard work, I am going to use basic signal processing in order to achieve my goal. Let's start with this 1 second music audio: Your browser does not support the…
In this blog post I would like to introduce readers into Elliptic Curve Cryptography and use this knowledge to construct an Ethereum address. Part 1: Elliptic Curves An Elliptic Curve is a curve define by the equation \[y^2 = x^3 + ax +b,\] The curve has a number of nice properties, and one of them is that if take two points on the curve and draw a line through them, the line will intersect the…
The other day I presented a t-SNE plot to a software engineer. “But what is it”, I was asked. Good question, I thought to myself. Introduction t-distributed Stochastic Neighbor Embedding (t-SNE) is a technique of dimensionality reduction. Data that has more than 3 dimensions is extremely common but is impossible to visualise. t-SNE is often used to reduce the data to 2 or 3 dimensions to produce…
Recently I tested shap feature importances. SHAP is a novel way of computing which features contributed the most towards the prediction. Whereas the method itself can be generalised to any classifier, it is especially well-suited for tree-based models. In this blog post I will try to explain what SHAP values are and why I find them very compelling. Following Feynman’s “what I cannot create, I do…