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You Should Probably Pay Attention to Tokenizers

Last week I was helping a friend of mine to get one of his new apps off the ground. I can’t speak much about it at the moment,
other than like most apps nowadays it has some AI sprinkled over it. Ok, maybe a bit maybe more just a bit – depends on
the way you look at it, I suppose. 
 There is a Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) hiding somewhere in most of the AI apps. RAG…

Some Notes on Adversarial Attacks on LLMs

Intro 
 Last week I was catching up with one of my best mates after a long while. He is a well-recognised industry expert
who also runs a successful cybersecurity consultancy .
Though we had a lot of other things to catch up on, inevitably, our conversation led to AI, LLMs and their (cyber)security implications. 
 I’ve spent the last couple of months working for early-stage…

My Three Favorite Scenes From The Bear

I heard about The Bear TV show from my brother a few times over the past couple of years but I never
really felt like watching it. A TV show about a frantic family-run bistro in Chicago? Color me sceptical. Don’t get me wrong, I’ve got
nothing against the catering or hospitality industry! My brother is a restaurant manager and I spent a fair amount of my youth
cleaning…

Using Cuelang With Go for LLM Data Extraction

I have been aware of Cuelang (CUE) pretty much since the early stages of its development.
It always seemed to me the language had the potential to solve a lot of problems in the ocean of YAML which we found ourselves drowning
in the Cloud Native ecosystem. 
 CUE excels in validating data against strictly defined schemas and is equally capable of generating code for data models from…

Go or Rust? Just Listen to the Bots

It all started as a joke. I was in a group chat with a few of my friends and we were talking about football
(soccer for the American readers). I entered the chat during a mildly heated discussion about the manager
of a team one of my friends supports. It was going on for a bit while with seemingly no end in sight when
it occurred to me that I could just as well clone my friends’ voices…

Builders Are Happier But What Happens When AI Takes Over

I have been busy hacking since I got back from my long holidays. I didn’t miss computers while travelling around the world.
Not for a second. When you hike up a volcano and engorge yourself in the beautiful views only this planet can reward you with
it’s hard to think of computers let alone hacking. 
 But now that I’m back and re-engaged my hacking mode I’ve gained a whole new…

Rust tokio task cancellation patterns

Update: 19/04/2024 : read at the end of the post for more info. 
 I have been trying to pick up Rust again recently. It’s been a bit of a slow burn at the beginning but I think I’m
finally starting to feel the compounding effects kicking in. Maybe it’s just my brain playing a trick on me, but
I’m feeling at much more ease when writing Rust now than I was a few…

Circular Buffer Performance Trick

Update 12/04/2024: Read at the end of the post for more info. 
 I have been hacking on AI agents recently for both fun and profit as part of the work I’m doing for one of my clients. 
 They’re mostly text-to-speech (TTS) agents leveraging LLMs for generating text which is then turned into voice by a trained TTS model. 
 As you [probably] know, maintaining conversation with…

A Small Tool for Exploring Text Embeddings

Last year I wrote about the superpowers text embeddings can give you and how I tried using them to compare the song lyrics of
some music artists . Though the results failed to paint the picture
I hoped for – this was due to the methodology, or rather lack thereof – it made me
appreciate the importance of simple open source tools (OSS) in the currently booming AI/LLM space.…

On The Importance of Getting The Foundations Right

Throughout my career, I’ve learnt, usually the hard way, the importance of getting the foundations of whatever I was working on right. Or at least as right as possible.
I learnt how fundamental it is for setting your project — and by proxy, your team — up for success. I’d argue it’s one of the most important things you should pay attention to.
Getting the basics right is notoriously hard…

Fun With AI Embeddings in Go

Update 9th January, 2024: Changed the title to “Fun With AI Embeddings in Go” 
 Before the end of last year, I visited San Francisco (SF) for a few weeks. It felt great meeting some old friends and ex-colleagues face-to-face after a long hiatus. There is something incredibly refreshing about being in the same room with the folks you’ve spent chatting to so much time over the…

Some [career] advice for engineers

This blog post is a collection of advice or rules I’ve learnt to live by as a software engineer. 
 It’s an accumulation of experiences I’ve gained through working for software organizations of various sizes. 
 Most of the advice in this post is aimed at software engineers, but some may be applicable to other roles and industries. 
 Understand the problems you are…

A Few Counterintuitive Ideas

UPDATE: 4th January, The way out of burnout 
 The beginning of 2021 marked the point when some of us were bracing with hope for the year that lied ahead. The year that we hoped to be “better” than the one that we were leaving behind. Little did we know we should have braced for impact instead. 
 For me personally, if 2020 was bad enough then 2021 wiped the last shreds of whatever mental…

Getting Started With LDAP in Go

Recently I had to write a fair amount of Go code which interacts with Active Directory (AD) for one of my clients. AD uses Lightweight Directory Access Protocol (LDAP) [1] for client-server communication. LDAP is a very mature and powerful protocol to interact with directory services, though some of my friends argue that it’s a bit of a relic of past at this point. I disagree with this…

Build a Graph of Kubernetes API Objects in Go

Over the past few months, I have been rekindling my interest in graph theory . I’m not quite sure what has caused this shift in my mind as I didn’t play with graphs too much since I graduated many moons ago, besides the occasional interview preparation. Maybe it was my reading about all the new graph databases that have come to existence over the past few years, or maybe it was my…

Happy 5th Birthday Kubernetes London

On 26th March Kubernetes London Meetup planned to host another event. It was supposed to be our 5th birthday so we had worked hard to make the event, to quote Kelsey Hightower , “Dope” . Unfortunately, it wasn’t to be as the coronavirus disrupted all levels of public life in a way our generation never experienced before. 
 This blog post is the long version of the short talk…

Swift ARKit Sun iPhone App for Londoners

If you happen to be one of the lucky people living in London you couldn’t miss we’ve had a bit of a sunlight crisis [not just recently]. Instead of the usual vitamin D deficiency which we are used to being brought to our attention during regular health checks things have been a little bit worse than that. First we got a visit by storm Ciara which was then shortly followed by storm Dennis .…

Breadth-first search using Go standard library

Just like many Go developers out there, I’m a big fan of Go standard library. Over the past few years I’ve been hacking on Go, I’ve discovered some real gems that not only made my life as a developer easier (no need to maintain unnecessary code), but they also made my code considerably more readable for others to follow. The last time I blogged I talked about how you can leverage…

WASM: Universal Application Runtime

WASM: universal application runtime 
 Last summer, fresh off my last freelance gig, I was catching up with my friend Asim , the founder of the widely popular microservices company, Micro at one of our favourite coffee shops in London . We would end up meeting almost every week talking about the presence and the future of technology. But that day our conversation turned into something that we…

Weighted Random Draws in Go

When working on my last project I needed to find a way to draw a random number from a list based on some weight assigned to it i.e. given a list of numbers each of which has a weight assigned to it, I had to find a way to draw a number from the list based on the weight. The numbers which have higher weight assigned to them should be more likely to be drawn than the numbers with lower weights.

Apollo program, Kalman Filter and Go

Before the end of the last year I went to see a movie made by one of my favourite movie directors, Damien Chazelle . The movie is called First Man and it tells the story of the journey of the first man on the Moon. I am also a bit of a space nerd, so my expectations were sky high. I was happy to find out the movie delivered on its promise. 
 What I liked about it the most was that it showed…

Edge computing with Go and Intel Movidius Neural Compute Stick

This summer I spent quite a bit of time speaking to various people about “intelligent” Edge computing . I put double quotes around the word intelligent to avoid the wrath of the thought leaders on the internet as they fight each other over what intelligence is and what is not. 
 The more I talked to people the more I was realizing the possibilities and opportunities the edge…

Tensorflow conditionals and while loops

Tensorflow conditionals and while loops 
 Recntly I found myself needing to implement more advanced control flow in some models I have been hacking on in my free time. In past I never really needed any graph conditionals or loops or any combinations thereof, so I had to dive into documentation and read up on them. 
 This blog post covers tf.cond and tf.while_loop control flow operations…

Hopfield networks in Go

As I continue to explore the realm of Artificial Neural Networks (ANN) I keep learning about some really cool types of neural networks which don’t get much attention these days. Many of these networks have not found much practical use in the “real world” for various reasons. Nevertheless, I find learning about them in my free time somewhat stimulating as they often make me think…

Kubernetes services and ingress under X-ray

I haven’t blogged here for over 2 years. It’s not that I had nothing to say, but every time I started writing a new post I never pushed myself into finishing it. So, most of the drafts ended up rotting in my private Github gists. Although my interests have expanded way beyond the Linux container space, my professional life remained tied to it. 
 Over the past two years I have been…

Self-organizing Maps in Go

Couple of months ago I came across a type of Artificial Neural Network I knew very little about: Self-organizing map (SOM). I vaguely remembered the term from my university studies. We scratched upon it when we were learning about data clustering algorithms. So when I re-discovered it again, my knowledge of it was very basic, almost non-existent. It felt like a great opportunity to learn something…

Fun with neural networks in Go

My rekindled interest in Machine Learning turned my attention to Neural Networks or more precisely Artificial Neural Networks (ANN). I started tinkering with ANN by building simple prototypes in R . However, my basic knowledge of the topic only got me so far. I struggled to understand why certain parameters work better than others. I wanted to understand the inner workings of ANN learning better.…

Principal Component Analysis - Part 2

This is the second post of the series about Principal Component Analysis (PCA). Whilst the first post provided a theoretical background, this post will discuss the actual implementation of the PCA algorithm and its results when applied to some example data. 
 Theory Recap 
 In the first post we learnt that PCA looks for a vector basis that can express the analysed data in a better (less…

Principal Component Analysis - Part 1

This is the first of the two post series about Principal Component Analysis (PCA). This post lays down important knowledge bricks that are needed to understand the core principles of the PCA algorithm. The second post will discuss the actual implementation and its results by applying it to various data sets. 
 Motivation 
 The world is becoming more data driven than ever before. We collect…

Docker vs Rocket gimme a break

Alert! This is another rant blog post! I promise the next one will be more technical :-) 
 Rocket launch me some opinions 
 Past few days I’ve been playing around with Rocket , the new container runtime by CoreOS . Quite a few people have asked for my opinion so I figured I would put it into a blog post. I haven’t planned on publishing it any time soon, but few blog posts I have come…

Future of Docker networking

Disclaimer: I do not work for Docker nor for any company whose business is tied to Docker in any way 
 Recently there has been a lot of discussions about the future of Docker networking in various communication channels. It is due to hugely increased Docker usage over the past year. Users are now realising Docker’s networking limitations which are becoming more apparent. The truth is,…

Tenus Golang Powered Linux Networking

2014-07-30 22:35 Update: I’ve updated the post with the link to netlink RFC. I’ve also replaced references to golang with Go programming language on majority of mentions in the article. I do agree with the people in discussions on the topic of Go/golang, but I’ve adpoted golang in my vocabulary as that’s my standard search term on Google for the information about Go…

Exploring LXC Networking

Daily Dilemma 
 Recently I’ve been finding myself in various conversations about Docker and Linux Containers (LXC) . Most of the time the conversations eventually end up with one and the same question and that is whether we should run containers in production. Initially this post had a few paragraphs where I philosophised about readiness of the technology, but I’ve deleted those…

About me

My name is Milos. I’m a software engineer currently living in London, UK. I graduated from Czech Technical University in Prague
with Masters degree in Technical Cybernetincs , which is a fancy word that encompasses machine learning ,
 control engineering and artificial intelligence . 
 I’m one of the authors of a small book about Docker .
I started Kubernetes London…

Let's Work Together

I am always open to new interesting opportunities. 
 My current areas of interest are Go, AI agents and recently Rust. I enjoy all aspects of backend engineering and I’m no stranger to frontend either. 
 If you work on anything interesting in these areas we should work together! Drop me an email to my GitHub email address . 
 You can read about me here and find out about my OSS…

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