I suspect, but don’t have proof that: Frontier model progress will slow as we exhaust training data and known scaling methods. Gains will be incremental, not fundamental. Performance gains will come from harness / software architecture changes (eg. MoE, internal “agents” within models, various methods for effort/thinking within the …
Many (myself included) claim AI driven (or in my case, assisted ) development is resulting in massive productivity acceleration and gains. But there is some obvious and troubling evidence to the contrary. The frontier AI labs, OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, etc, are the leaders in the creation and adoption of tooling and …
Or: Vibecoding versus LAD Software development with the assistance of coding agents is incredibly more productive than without - it’s the difference between building a house brick by brick yourself versus having a crew of expert tradespeople helping you. However, vibecoding isn’t quite the right approach – that’s akin …
The above question from my friend James (hi James!) surprised me, even though it's an obvious and excellent question. What Does Hallucination Mean Here? Sometimes ChatGPT and other Large Language Models (LLMs) make things up. They will state, with apparent confidence, things that are made up or not true. My …
This is part two of the non-technical explanation of ChatGPT series, please read that first. It's also helpful to read the non-technical explanation of AI so you have some background on how deep learning is used here. Creating CatGPT Convinced that Markov's method is a good path forward, you decide …
Continuing the series of non-technical explainers, let's figure out how ChatGPT (and in general Large Language Models, or LLMs) work. This is part one of the ChatGPT explainer, with part two coming soon. It's helpful but not necessary to read the non-technical explanation of AI first, if you feel like …
One of my undergrad physics professors gave notoriously difficult exams, including an extra-point question that was truly challenging. A brainiac friend of mine managed to get the extra-point question completely correct. Almost. He screwed up the decimal point, incorrectly putting it two places to the right. The professor gave him …
Overview This document will explain what neural networks are and how they work, which will help you understand how AI and machine learning work. In the scenario below you'll play the part of the neural network. Day One First day of your new job as a "classifier" your boss walks …
Polars is a "lightning-fast DataFrame library for Rust and Python" - if you're familiar with Pandas , Polars is quite similar but significantly faster and with a cleaner API. This post is a brief tour of how to set up and use Polars, working through a pragmatic example of the things you …
Overview I'm using Pelican as the static website creation framework. I created the theme myself, I can open sores it if anyone is interested. It uses tailwind, which is mostly quite good, but a pain when it comes to integration with Pelican: tailwind wants classes added to html, but the …
Author: Daniel Nayeri Quite good, nostalgic, I immediately decided to look for other books by the author.
Post-apocalyptic non-sci-fi book. Entertaining, not a bad read, not amazing. Verdict: Maybe Read It
Verdict: See it Entertaining, quite funny, unexpected turn.
itertools.groupby allows you to group a sorted list (or any sorted iterable) by some key, giving you the grouping key and the list of items grouped by that key. For example, say you have a Django the model: class Item ( models . Model ): user = models . ForeignKey ( User , verbose_name = "User" , db_index …
Note to self: I quite stupidly merged and committed an unwanted branch into master. Took a surprisingly long time to figure out how to get rid of it: git reset --hard HEAD^ Which means reset git to one commit before the current head, effectively getting rid of the last commit …
I needed to efficiently find large images (those with dimensions greater than x). Here's what I came up with: First, find images whose file size is greater than 3M: find . -name '*jpg' -size 3M > /tmp/big-receipts.txt Now, get the dimensions of each of those images using imagemagick's identify command …
Over the weekend I attended the Blackberry hackathon with the hopes of creating an Xpenser blackberry app. The RIM folks were nice enough to give away a Playbook to everyone who presented, so I ended up with one. I was skeptical, to say the least. I expected a sluggish, ugly …
This page is helpful. Specifying port: sftp - v - oPort = 6636 - o IdentityFile = keys / my - key . ssh [[ email protected ]]( / web / 20120914064722 / http : //cloudflare.com/email-protection.html)
If you know me you know I'm a huge fan of entrepreneurship - instead of renting yourself out to someone else, start a business that scales. Be your own pimp. I gave a guest lecture at UCSD recently espousing this viewpoint. You are cheap right now, I told them, so take …
Here's how you import a python module dynamically: say your module is called "mysettings" and it's in the directory "config". Make sure you have a __init__.py in your "config" directory and use: mysettings = __import__("config.mysettings", fromlist=["config"]) This is equivalent to from config import mysetings
My new printer has a document feeder which makes scanning of multiple pages easy, but I didn't know how to kick off the scan on OS X. Turns out it's quite easy: Open the OS X Preview app Go to the File menu and select Import From Scanner Select your …
Apparently with Titanium Studio it's not possible to see log messages in the Titanium console. Here's how you see your log messages: adb logcat | grep "TiAPI" adb is in the tools directory of your Android sdk.
Here's an easy way to see the cookies for the current site in Chrome: javascript : void ( document . cookie = prompt ( document . cookie , document . cookie )); Via stackoveflow .
I went to a school that required uniforms (private school in England). We were forced to be uniform. This afternoon driving by the high school near my house I was amused to see uniforms everywhere - here a patch of girls all wearing the same types of shorts, with hair pulled …
My friend Paul Kedrosky's post on one of his main investment theses , the application of currently consumer oriented technologies to business (DropBox, Twitter, FaceBook, Yelp, …), got me thinking about how the future of work will look. I've made a career of working far from where I live. I've generally considered …
Note to self, for future reference. Markdown reference Generating static html: import markdown2 file ( 'classification.html' , 'w' ) . write ( markdown2 . markdown_path ( 'classification.md' , extras = [ "code-friendly" ]) )
Retention bonuses don't work because they only motivate presence, not contribution.
The lovely folks at mo.com recently asked me about my experiences at Yahoo, the background and business model for Xpenser, and thoughts on funding and raising VC money. The interview has been published here , drop by and take a gander.
Here's a handy way of running a command on multiple boxes. In this case I wanted to check disk space on a series of machines. Assuming you're using bash as your shell, the following will list the hostname and run df on machines racb13 through racb28 and spit out the …
I don't know why but I'm seriously in love with this drawing from the six year old; it seems to have a real style. Better than anything I could draw, methinks.
Mark Suster and Fred Wilson have both posted on the topic of being a good panelist. I'll throw in the best advice I ever got on the topic (from Alex , who got it from someone else): Disagree with other panelists. A panel of people agreeing with each other is generally …
I was surprised at how little information I found on making use of Django's permission system. Here are some quick notes on one way to use it: Groups are groups of users. For example, you could define a group of users who have premium accounts, or have been verified in …
I remarked to a friend that Mark Suster 's entrepreneurial roots show in his approach to being a VC - he's come out of nowhere and in short order aggressively pushed himself into being one of the most relevant voices out there. He seems to be working a lot harder than …
django-mptt is a library for storing tree oriented data using the Django ORM. It allows you to place your model instances into a tree structure and efficiently query for ancestors and children. Here's a brief tutorial on how to use it: After installing, you'll need to modify your model to …
I'm a big fan of Fantastic Mr. Fox . We just watched it again and it was a hit with everyone from the 2 year old to grandma. The dialog an voice acting are excellent, and the animation is really refreshing. The story is smart and is different enough from your …
I was doing some log analysis this morning and was struck by the variety of user agents accessing Xpenser . Quite a bit of mobile access with quite a variety of different browsers, as well as some more exotic items (various tablet PCs I don't recognize, etc). Then there's the API …
Here's a little script for finding files modified more than 7 days ago and moving them to another directory: find . - type f - mtime + 7 - print > / tmp / old_files . txt cat / tmp / old_files . txt | while read line ; do mv "$line" .. / old_files ; done
dpkg -L package-name
Note to self, as I seem to need to do this on every new install: Ubuntu ships with vim-tiny, which doesn't support syntax highlighting. Do this: sudo apt-get remove vim-tiny sudo apt-get install vim sudo vi /etc/vim/vimrc ( Remove the quote mark from the "syntax on" line, uncommenting it …
Impressive Ted Talk by Chimamanda Adichie on how stories, and in particular "single stories", shape our views of cultures. Many parallels with how people typically see Iran. A great quote from the talk: " The problem with stereotypes is not that they are untrue - it is that they are incomplete ".
I used to be a vi guy who finally made the move to graphical editors. I looked for the simplest, lightest possible solutions, using ConTEXT for quite a while. Some years ago I was forced into using Eclipse for reasons I can't quite recall; probably Java development. I didn't like …
I'm noticing how much the practice of finding a candidate and interviewing them has changed over the years. First step is to look up the person on the web. Since I'm looking for a technical person I'm expecting a blog, contributions to open source projects, a twitter presence, etc. If …
I still have a big soft spot in my heart for Yahoo, but Yahoo mail, WTF? Of the entire screen only the area I've highlighted in orange is dedicated to the contents of the message. And this is with the app maximized to full screen. The interface is unusable as …
I was thinking about what book to read next and it occurred to me to ask you nice people. I'm in the mood for something factual but interesting - something like The Prize , if you're familiar with that. I was intrigued by Fiasco but I haven't looked into it. So what …
Looks like I've finally converted Alex to Python as well. "This is actually shorter than perl and still makes sense". Be forewarned - if you code with me, you'll be doing Python in no time.
Due to aforementioned OS X stupidity with the Home and End keys, my new favorite Eclipse hotkey is Ctrl-Q. It takes you to the location of your last edit. So next time you hit the End key to go to the end of the line but end up at the …
The title pretty much says it; I'm planning an SJC/SF trip next week, if you want to meet or chat drop me a line - Darugar at gmail.
Nice and detailed article from Jesse Noller on concurrency, threads, the GIL, and Python . Worth a read; I learned a lot from it. For the record I'm one of the people who doesn't think threads are not the true solution to the concurrency problem.
Wikihow's How To Stop Accumulating Books has been making the rounds in blogs and delicious popular. Reminds me of the ultimate book non-accumulator, a good friend of my dad's. This particular friend of my dad's would always bring me books when he came to visit. I was a voracious reader …
Yet another Scoble post on a facebook accounts being closed , this time with the iFart app author. Facebook is like Disney Land. It's a nice and enjoyable place, but it has its own special governance. It can decide when to let you in and when to throw you out. It's …