October 2023
Oct. 24, 2023
The real value in evolving as an engineer isn't solely about amassing a heap of isolated skills but weaving them into an intricate web of abilities that's greater than the sum of its parts.
chDB (via) This is a really interesting development: chDB offers “an embedded SQL OLAP Engine” as a Python package, which you can install using “pip install chdb”. What you’re actually getting is a wrapper around ClickHouse—it’s almost like ClickHouse has been repackaged into an embedded database similar to SQLite.
Oct. 25, 2023
Web Components Will Outlive Your JavaScript Framework (via) A really clear explanation of the benefit of Web Components built using dependency-free vanilla JavaScript, specifically for interactive components that you might want to embed in something like a blog post. Includes a very neat minimal example component.
If a LLM is like a database of millions of vector programs, then a prompt is like a search query in that database [...] this “program database” is continuous and interpolative — it’s not a discrete set of programs. This means that a slightly different prompt, like “Lyrically rephrase this text in the style of x” would still have pointed to a very similar location in program space, resulting in a program that would behave pretty closely but not quite identically. [...] Prompt engineering is the process of searching through program space to find the program that empirically seems to perform best on your target task.
Oct. 26, 2023
Execute Jina embeddings with a CLI using llm-embed-jina
Berlin-based Jina AI just released a new family of embedding models, boasting that they are the “world’s first open-source 8K text embedding model” and that they rival OpenAI’s text-embedding-ada-002 in quality.
Oh-Auth—Abusing OAuth to take over millions of accounts (via) Describes an attack against vulnerable implementations of OAuth.
Let’s say your application uses OAuth against Facebook, and then takes the returned Facebook token and gives it access to the user account with the matching email address passed in the token from Facebook.
It’s critical that you also confirm the token was generated for your own application, not something else. Otherwise any secretly malicious app online that uses Facebook login could take on of their stored tokens and use it to hijack an account of your site belonging to that user’s email address.
Now add a walrus: Prompt engineering in DALL‑E 3
Last year I wrote about my initial experiments with DALL-E 2, OpenAI’s image generation model. I’ve been having an absurd amount of fun playing with its sequel, DALL-E 3 recently. Here are some notes, including a peek under the hood and some notes on the leaked system prompt.
[... 3,505 words]Oct. 27, 2023
Making PostgreSQL tick: New features in pg_cron (via) pg_cron adds cron-style scheduling directly to PostgreSQL. It's a pretty mature extension at this point, and recently gained the ability to schedule repeating tasks at intervals as low as every 1s.
The examples in this post are really informative. I like this example, which cleans up the ever-growing cron.job_run_details table by using pg_cron itself to run the cleanup:
SELECT cron.schedule('delete-job-run-details', '0 12 * * *', $$DELETE FROM cron.job_run_details WHERE end_time < now() - interval '3 days'$$);
pg_cron can be used to schedule functions written in PL/pgSQL, which is a great example of the kind of DSL that I used to avoid but I'm now much happier to work with because I know GPT-4 can write basic examples for me and help me understand exactly what unfamiliar code is doing.
The thing nobody talks about with engineering management is this:
Every 3-4 months every person experiences some sort of personal crisis. A family member dies, they have a bad illness, they get into an argument with another person at work, etc. etc. Sadly, that is just life. Normally after a month or so things settle down and life goes on.
But when you are managing 6+ people it means there is always a crisis you are helping someone work through. You are always carrying a bit of emotional burden or worry around with you.
Oct. 30, 2023
Through the Ages: Apple CPU Architecture (via) I enjoyed this review of Apple’s various CPU migrations—Motorola 68k to PowerPC to Intel x86 to Apple Silicon—by Jacob Bartlett.
DALL-E 3, GPT4All, PMTiles, sqlite-migrate, datasette-edit-schema
I wrote a lot this week. I also did some fun research into new options for self-hosting vector maps and pushed out several new releases of plugins.
[... 1,362 words]Oct. 31, 2023
Microsoft announces new Copilot Copyright Commitment for customers. Part of an interesting trend where some AI vendors are reassuring their paying customers by promising legal support in the face of future legal threats:
“As customers ask whether they can use Microsoft’s Copilot services and the output they generate without worrying about copyright claims, we are providing a straightforward answer: yes, you can, and if you are challenged on copyright grounds, we will assume responsibility for the potential legal risks involved.”
I’m Sorry I Bit You During My Job Interview. The way this 2011 McSweeney’s piece by Tom O’Donnell escalates is delightful.
Our search for the best OCR tool in 2023, and what we found. DocumentCloud’s Sanjin Ibrahimovic reviews the best options for OCR. Tesseract scores highly for easily machine readable text, newcomer docTR is great for ease of use but still not great at handwriting. Amazon Textract is great for everything except non-Latin languages, Google Cloud Vision is great at pretty much everything except for ease-of-use. Azure AI Document Intelligence sounds worth considering as well.
My User Experience Porting Off setup.py (via) PyOxidizer maintainer Gregory Szorc provides a detailed account of his experience trying to figure out how to switch from setup.py to pyproject.toml for his zstandard Python package.
This kind of detailed usability feedback is incredibly valuable for project maintainers, especially when the user encountered this many different frustrations along the way. It’s like the written version of a detailed usability testing session.