Sabrina wrote an interesting write up on solving a math problem with gpt-4o. It turned out the text-only, chain-of-thought approach was the best performing, which is not what I would have guessed. It’s was cool to see Simon dive into LLM-driven data extraction in using his project datasette in this video. Using multi-modal models for data extraction seems to bring a new level of usefulness and makes these models even more general purpose.

2024-05-15

Nostalgia: https://maggieappleton.com/teenage-desktop. I wish I had done something like this. Maybe I can find something on an old hard drive.
I’m looking into creating a Deno serve that can manage multiple websocket connections and emit to one after receiving a message from another. A simple way to implement this is to have a single server id and track all the ongoing connections to websocket clients. I’m learning more about approaches that could support a multi-server backend.

2024-05-09

I take an irrational amount of pleasure in disabling notifications for apps that use them to send me marketing.

2024-05-08

I enjoyed reading Yuxuan’s article on whether Github Copilot increased their productivity. I personally don’t love Copilot but enjoy using other AI-assisted software tools like Cursor, which allow for use of more capable models than Copilot. It’s encouraging to see more folks adopting a more unfiltered thought journal.
I read this post by Steph today and loved it. I want to try writing this concisely. I imagine it takes significant effort but the result are beautiful, satisfying and valuable. It’s a privilege to read a piece written by someone who values every word.
llama 3-400B with multimodal capabilities and long context would put the nail in the coffin for OAI — anton (@abacaj) May 6, 2024 Having gotten more into using llama 7b and 30b lately, this take seems likes it could hold water. Model inference still isn’t free when you scale a consumer app. Maybe I can use llama3 for all my personal use cases, but I still need infra to scale it.
I read Jason, Ivan and Charles’ blog post on Modal about fine tuning an embedding model. It’s a bit in the weeds of ML for me but I learn a bit more every time I read something new.
I played around with trying to run a Temporal worker on Modal. I didn’t do a ton of research upfront – I just kind of gave it a shot. I suspect this isn’t possible. Both use Python magic to do the things they do. This is what I tried. import asyncio import os import modal from temporalio import activity, workflow from temporalio.client import Client, TLSConfig from temporalio.worker import Worker @activity.defn async def my_activity(name: str) -> str: return f"Hello, {name}!
I read this interesting article by Gajus about finetuning gpt-3.5-turbo. It was quite similar to my experience fine tuning a model to play Connections. A helpful takeaway was that after finetuning the model, you shouldn’t need to include system prompt in future model inference, so you can save on token cost. I also liked the suggestion to use a database to store training data. I had also been wrangling jsonl files.