Beating BERT? Small LLMs vs Fine-Tuned Encoders for Classification
I ran 32 experiments comparing small LLMs to BERT on classification tasks. Turns out 2018-era BERT is still really good at what it does.
Alex Jacobs
Recent content on Alex Jacobs
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The Case Against pgvector
The real limitations of pgvector in production: index choice between IVFFlat and HNSW, why real-time search is hard, pre- vs post-filtering pain, how performance degrades at scale, and when a dedicated vector database is the better call.
A Production Framework for LLM Feature Evaluation
An empirical analysis of LLM application patterns that successfully scale in production systems, focusing on extraction, generation, and classification use cases
A Computer Made This
OpenAI's 4o image generation is a step change in AI capabilities. A look at what reasoning in pixel space means for creative work.
RAG: From Context Injection to Knowledge Integration
A technical dive into the limitations of current RAG approaches, examining architectural challenges and exploring pathways to more integrated knowledge-aware LLM architectures.
Python Async Programming: A Deep Dive into async/await and the Event Loop
How async Python actually works: what async def and await do, how the asyncio event loop schedules coroutines, tasks and futures explained, and when to use async instead of threads or processes.
Integration Testing FastAPI: Mocking Auth, MongoDB, S3, and External APIs
A practical guide to FastAPI integration tests with pytest: mocking JWT authentication and the TestClient, patching external API calls, and faking MongoDB and S3 with mongomock and moto.
CheeseGPT
A (Very) Simple RAG Tutorial
Effective Error Handling
A simple an effective approach for handling end users who struggle with errors
Running Jupyter Lab Behind NGINX: Authentication and Securing the Proxy (Part 2)
Part 2 of the Jupyter Lab NGINX reverse proxy setup: configuring Jupyter authentication behind NGINX, handling token-based auth bypass, and locking down the proxy on EC2.
Running Jupyter Lab Behind NGINX: Reverse Proxy Setup with Docker (Part 1)
Jupyter Lab and NGINX aren't alternatives — NGINX sits in front of Jupyter as a reverse proxy. Part 1 covers containerizing Jupyter Lab and wiring it to NGINX with a sidecar pattern on EC2.
Splitting SRA into FASTQ with SRAToolkit, Python, and Docker
A simple example using Python and Docker to split an SRA file into Fastq