Facebook (Meta, whatever) announced Threads today to launch on July 6th. Given how much worse it feels like Twitter has become (my experience only), on one hand, I could see people migrating here because no great alternative has really emerged. On the other, Facebook has zero “public” products where the user experience is even palatable for me, personally (I use Whatsapp but it’s basically iMessage). Instagram and Facebook both rapidly became completely intolerable for me due to their content. Maybe that is a matter of curation, but I bet, at least in some part, it’s a result of how Facebook runs their business and why Twitter never made much ad revenue compared to them (and why Reddit struggles to either). If I had to make a bet, I would bet on people migrating to Threads. Personally, I won’t until they have a webapp.

A simple shell function to setup a Python project scaffold. It’s idempotent, so it won’t overwrite an existing folder or env.

pproj () {
    mkdir -p $1
    cd $1
    python -m venv env
    . env/bin/activate
}

I’ve been following Jason’s working experimenting with different abstractions for constructing prompts and structuring responses. I’ve long felt that building prompts with strings is not the type of developer experience that will win the day. On the other hand, I’m weary of the wrong abstraction that would move the developer too far away from the actual prompt, which would make it harder to construct good prompts and steer the model. I’m not sure if this is an ORM vs. SQL conversation or if there’s an abstraction that exist as a happy medium.

Did some work with Clojure destructuring.

Unpack values into specific variables.

user=> (let [[a b c] [1 2 3]] (println a b c))
1 2 3
nil

Unpack the first N items, ignoring the rest.

user=> (let [[a b] [1 2 3]] (println a b))
1 2
nil

Unpack the first N items to variables and capture the rest as an array.

user=> (let [[a b & rst] [1 2 3 4 5]] (println a b rst))
1 2 (3 4 5)
nil

Doing math with a non-big decimal number and a big decimal number can cast down.

user=> (* 0.1 101M)
10.100000000000001

user=> (bigdec (* 0.1 101M))
10.100000000000001M

Heard the phrase “if someone wins the lottery” used today to describe a teammate leaving a team. I much prefer this to the more morbid alternatives.

I tried gpt-engineer today. I liked the approach and the setup instructions are good. I think I remember needing to use Python 3.11 instead of 3.8 that I was running, but beyond that the readme instructions we on point.

Process

You start by creating a project folder with a plaintext prompt. You start the script and point it at your project folder. The program reads your prompt then uses the LM to ask clarifying questions. The clarifying questions seem pretty effective. If you answer more than of one of the predetermined questions at once, the program seems to recognizes that and removes it from the list. Finally, it creates an actual project, with source code, pretty consistently (3/3 times I tried). I used it to try and create a 1-player Scattergories CLI game or something close.

I’ve been thinking about the concept of “prompt overfitting”. In this context, there is a distinction between model overfitting and prompt overfitting. Say you want to use a large language model as a classifier. You may give it several example inputs and the expected outputs. I don’t have hard data to go by, but it feels meaningful to keep the prompt generic or abstract where possible rather than enumerating overly specific cases in a way that obfuscates the broader pattern you’re hoping to apply. I hypothesize these overly specific examples could interfere with the model output in unintended, overly restrictive ways.

Richard WM Jones booted Linux 292,612 to find a bug where it hangs on boot. I loved reading the recounting of his process to accomplish this, by bisecting through the different versions of Linux and boot each thousands of times to determine whether the version contained the bug.

Georgi Gerganov started a company, ggml.ai, to run language models on commodity hardware.

I was listening to a podcast interview of Adam Robinson and he was discussing why he believed it is important process information with your body. He gives the example that when listening to something, he stops around once every minute and sees how it feels. He later goes on to highlight the importance of recognizing when something is “weird” and paying attention to it, or trusting one’s intuition even if rationally we can’t understand why something feels unusual. He asserts that we should take action on these intuitions – “if something seems a little bit off, it’s very off”. I could see this approach contributing to more well-rounded cognition, since it can be easier to discard these “intuitions” as unsubstantiated or lacking facts to justify them. On the other hand, unless you track how often you intuition proves correct, it could be hard to know if it’s well calibrated or trustworthy in the area in which you are applying it.

I read an article today about Scripting with Elixir that caught my eye because it touches on a problem I often struggle with: how you do easily distribute a script along with its dependencies in Python? Elixir has an example of what this could look like in the form of Mix.install. This feature allows one to distribute just the source code of your script and dependency management can be done when the script runs, without needing to distribute a mix.esx or requirements.txt file (as one does in Python) along with the source.