September 2023
104 posts: 5 entries, 35 links, 5 quotes, 56 beats, 3 newsletters
Wednesday, 27th September 2023
Optimizing for Taste. David Cramer’s detailed explanation as to why his company Sentry mostly avoids A/B testing. David wrote this as an internal blog post originally, but is now sharing it with the world. I found myself nodding along vigorously as I read this—lots of astute observations here.
I particularly appreciated his closing note: “The strength of making a decision is making it. You can always make a new one later. Choose the obvious path forward, and if you don’t see one, find someone who does.”
Finding Bathroom Faucets with Embeddings. Absolutely the coolest thing I’ve seen someone build on top of my LLM tool so far: Drew Breunig is renovating a bathroom and needed a way to filter through literally thousands of options for facet taps. He scraped 20,000 images of fixtures from a plumbing supply site and used LLM to embed every one of them via CLIP... and now he can ask for “faucets that look like this one”, or even run searches for faucets that match “Gawdy” or “Bond Villain” or “Nintendo 64”. Live demo included!
Google was accidentally leaking its Bard AI chats into public search results. I’m quoted in this piece about yesterday’s Bard privacy bug: it turned out the share URL and “Let anyone with the link see what you’ve selected” feature wasn’t correctly setting a noindex parameter, and so some shared conversations were being swept up by the Google search crawlers. Thankfully this was a mistake, not a deliberate design decision, and it should be fixed by now.
Thursday, 28th September 2023
Looking at LLMs as chatbots is the same as looking at early computers as calculators. We're seeing an emergence of a whole new computing paradigm, and it is very early.
Getting started with the Datasette Cloud API. I wrote an introduction to the Datasette Cloud API for the company blog, with a tutorial showing how to use Python and GitHub Actions to import data from the Federal Register into a table in Datasette Cloud, then configure full-text search against it.
Friday, 29th September 2023
Talking Large Language Models with Rooftop Ruby
I’m on the latest episode of the Rooftop Ruby podcast with Collin Donnell and Joel Drapper, talking all things LLM.
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Draggable objects (via) Amit Patel’s detailed write-up of a small but full-featured JavaScript function for creating draggable objects, with support for both mouse and touch devices “using browser features that are widely supported since 2020”.
Saturday, 30th September 2023
Things I’ve learned about building CLI tools in Python
I build a lot of command-line tools in Python. It’s become my favorite way of quickly turning a piece of code into something I can use myself and package up for other people to use too.
[... 1,235 words]Meta in Myanmar, Part I: The Setup. The first in a series by Erin Kissane explaining in detail exactly how things went so incredibly wrong with Facebook in Myanmar, contributing to a genocide ending hundreds of thousands of lives. This is an extremely tough read.
Get Your Mac Python From Python.org. Glyph recommends the official Python installer from python.org as the best way to get started with a Python environment on macOS—with require-virtualenv = true in your ~/.pip/pip.conf to help avoid accidentally installing global packages.
