When I was in my classics MA program, I took a course on Latin prose composition. A thing to know about classics degrees is you spend a lot of your time in Latin and ancient Greek courses. You learn history and philosophy and so forth, but mostly via reading those works in their original languages. Continue reading This is a post about LLM coding agents
Once upon a time, I taught a course on AI in the Library in an iSchool. (Check out the reading list and syllabus, which are relevant context for this post.) I haven t taught it for a while I got busy with other things, and then ChatGPT dropped and immediately rendered my syllabus obsolete and Continue reading AI in the Library, round two (vs ChatGPT and the zeitgeist)
So, I wrote an alien artifact no one else on my team understood. (I know, I know.) I m not a monster it has documentation and tests, it went through code review for all that that didn t accomplish its usual knowledge-transfer goals and there were solid business reasons the alien artifact had to exist Continue reading In which we ask Copilot to do the team a solid
Someone in a Slack I m in asked for advice on how to understand classes in programming, and I wrote a mini-novel about how I understand them, so I figured it might as well be a blog post! Here we go A class is a noun. That is to say: And I make a class Continue reading how I think about classes
I m updating some old code which includes a model trained under gensim 3.8.3. (Or so I hope, based on the poetry.lock file.) Current stable is 4.3.0, so I have some updating to do. In theory I can load a 3.8.x model in 4.0.x, save it, then open that in 4.1.x, et cetera. I d rather do that Continue reading shaving yaks with gensim 3.8.3
I just had So Many job interviews, which means I had so many tech screens, all of which ran differently. I didn t know what to expect going into most of them I ve only interviewed in the library world in the past, where many organizations don t have tech screens at all, but some of these Continue reading Tech screens, how do they work
I read this article1 and was moved to furious tweetstorm and several respondents asked that I make it into a blog post. This is that post. Let s dissect this quote, “They tired of care-taking, even though this involved little more than continuing to host the project files on a server.” Firstly, it did not involve Continue reading Just a few files : technical labor, academe, and care
Once upon a time in 2017, my colleague Andy Dorner, who is awesome at devops, made a magical deploy script for HAMLET. I was like, ugh, Heroku is not a good solution, I have to AWS, I regret my life choices, and he was like, never fear! I will throw together a script which will Continue reading the great thing about deferred maintenance is everything catches fire at the same time
When last we met I was turning a perfectly innocent neural net into a terribly ineffective one, in an attempt to get it to be better at face recognition in archival photos. I was also (what cultural heritage technology experience would be complete without this?) being foiled by metadata. So, uh, I stopped using metadata. Continue reading I haven t failed, I ve tried an ML approach that *might*…
Let s blog every Friday, I thought. It ll be great. People can see what I m doing with ML, and it will be a useful practice for me! And then I went through weeks on end of feeling like I had nothing to report because I was trying approach after approach to this one problem that simply Continue reading I haven t failed, I ve just tried a lot of ML approaches that don t work