Simon Willison’s Weblog

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Saturday, 10th February 2024

(Almost) Every infrastructure decision I endorse or regret after 4 years running infrastructure at a startup (via) Absolutely fascinating post by Jack Lindamood talking about services, tools and processes used by his startup and which ones turned out to work well v.s. which ones are now regretted.

I’d love to see more companies produce lists like this.

# 5:51 am / architecture, infrastructure, startups

Reality is that LLMs are not AGI -- they're a big curve fit to a very large dataset. They work via memorization and interpolation. But that interpolative curve can be tremendously useful, if you want to automate a known task that's a match for its training data distribution.

Memorization works, as long as you don't need to adapt to novelty. You don't need intelligence to achieve usefulness across a set of known, fixed scenarios.

François Chollet

# 6:39 am / ai, generative-ai, llms, francois-chollet

Rye: Added support for marking virtualenvs ignored for cloud sync (via) A neat feature in the new Rye 0.22.0 release. It works by using an xattr Rust crate to set the attributes “com.dropbox.ignored” and “com.apple.fileprovider.ignore#P” on the folder.

# 6:50 am / python, dropbox, rust, rye