January: A Lot Of Halfbaked Stuff
New year’s resolution for me was to post something once a month. Doesn’t matter what, ideally something meaningful / useful / tangible, but whatever.
Austin Steady
Person
Latest posts
Low Tide Walking
I live by a cliffed beach, but due to erosion, it’s only rocks most of the time. At low tide though, you get a wide stretch of flat sand perfect for walking.
I Published A Book
I published a book! It’s called The Physiology of Climbing, and you can buy it on amazon or on my publisher’s website sharpendbooks.com.
Using Transformers To Search My Notes
Following up on the exploratory work I did for searching recipes with OpenAI. I quickly found this blog that benchmarked OpenAI’s results against other, open-source, alternatives. Turns out you can do this stuff for much cheaper than I’d believed.
Using Openai To Search For Recipes
I recently got access to OpenAI’s beta, and I’ve been playing around with it. It’s not perfect, and at times I wondered if I was just reinventing the wheel with the stuff I was building. But it is really cool. I do think it’ll transform our jobs quite soon.
Rsa Cryptography
The idea behind cryptographic communication is that it should be hard/impossible for eavesdroppers to decrypt the messages, but relatively easy for the intended recipient to decrypt.
Sql Performance Lessons
At a previous job, I had the pleasure of improving our web app’s performance. The motivation was that we had recently experienced a number of outages in a short timespan, after having had no outages at all in the year I had been working there at that point. We were able to observe that our database cpu utilization was maxed out. Using AWS RDS Performance Insights (PI), we were able to see that a…
Dockerizing Your Shoddy Side Project
Purpose of this post
Markov Chain Monte Carlo
The goal of this post is to learn about Markov Chain Monte Carlo. What is it, why does it exist, how do we “do it”, and how can we apply it to a real problem?
Relearning Linear Regression
I recently realized that I didn’t understand linear regression as well as I thought as I did when I came across this twitter thread.