Quotations in Jan, 2023
Filters: Type: quotation × Year: 2023 × Month: Jan × Sorted by date
We’ve built many tools for publishing to the web—but I want to make the claim that we have underdeveloped the tools and platforms for publishing collections, indexes and small databases. It’s too hard to build these kinds of experiences, too hard to maintain them and a lack of collaborative tools.
— Tom Critchlow # 28th January 2023, 4:43 pm
[On SQLite for production concurrent writes] In general, WAL mode “just works” as Simon said. You just need to make sure you don’t have long running write transactions, although those are somewhat problematic in any database system. Don’t do stuff like starting a write txn and then calling a remote API and then committing. That’ll kill your write throughout.
— Ben Johnson # 26th January 2023, 7:36 pm
Large teams spend more time dealing with coordination and are more likely to reach for architecture and abstractions that they hope will reduce coordination costs, aka if I architect this well enough I don’t have to speak to my colleagues. Microservices, event buses, and schema free databases are all examples of attempts to architect our way around coordination. A decade in we’ve learned that these patterns raise the cost of reasoning about a system, during onboarding, during design, and during incidents and outages.
— Kellan Elliott-McCrea # 24th January 2023, 5:26 am
I think prompt engineering can be divided into “context engineering”, selecting and preparing relevant context for a task, and “prompt programming”, writing clear instructions. For an LLM search application like Perplexity, both matter a lot, but only the final, presentation-oriented stage of the latter is vulnerable to being echoed.
— Riley Goodside # 23rd January 2023, 11:15 pm
It is very important to bear in mind that this is what large language models really do. Suppose we give an LLM the prompt “The first person to walk on the Moon was ”, and suppose it responds with “Neil Armstrong”. What are we really asking here? In an important sense, we are not really asking who was the first person to walk on the Moon. What we are really asking the model is the following question: Given the statistical distribution of words in the vast public corpus of (English) text, what words are most likely to follow the sequence “The first person to walk on the Moon was ”? A good reply to this question is “Neil Armstrong”.
— Murray Shanahan # 23rd January 2023, 12:30 pm
Generate a comprehensive and informative answer (but no more than 80 words) for a given question solely based on the provided web Search Results (URL and Summary). You must only use information from the provided search results. Use an unbiased and journalistic tone. Use this current date and time: Wednesday, December 07, 2022 22:50:56 UTC. Combine search results together into a coherent answer. Do not repeat text. Cite search results using [${number}] notation. Only cite the most relevant results that answer the question accurately. If different results refer to different entities with the same name, write separate answers for each entity.
— Perplexity AI, via a prompt injection leak attack # 22nd January 2023, 7:47 pm
Old technologies that have stuck around are sharks, not dinosaurs. They solve problems so well that they have survived the rapid changes that occur constantly in the technology world. Don’t bet against these technologies, and replace them only if you have a very good reason. These tools won’t be flashy, and they won’t be exciting, but they will get the job done without a lot of sleepless nights.
— Justin Etheredge # 19th January 2023, 1:42 am
You will not use the Software for any act that may undermine China’s national security and national unity, harm the public interest of society, or infringe upon the rights and interests of human beings.
— The GLM-130B License # 10th January 2023, 10:45 pm