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) nilDoing 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)) 10.100000000000001MHeard 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.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.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.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.Today, I played around with Matt Rickard’s ReLLM library, another take on constraining LLM output, in this case, with regex. I tried to use it to steer a language model to generate structure (JSON) from unstructured input. This exercise is sort of like parsing or validating JSON with regex – it’s not a good idea. Complicated regular expressions to describe JSON are hard to write. I do love the demo that generates acronyms though.I’ve been trying to find a simple way to host a website that formats and serves a nice looking version of a recipe written in markdown. There are a few open source projects available, but nothing that has fit the bill yet. I briefly had the idea to try out something with Next.js and mdx but I found when I scaffolded a new app that I didn’t even recognize the project structure.I did a bit more work with Clojure today. My imperative programming habits are still bleeding through. The exercise introduced cond as a sort of case statement for flow control. I wrote a simple cond statement but was getting a bizarre runtime error:
(defn my-fn [x] (cond (x < 0) "negative" (x = 0) "zero" (x > 0) "positive" ) ) user=> (my-fn 1) Execution error (ClassCastException) at user/my-fn (REPL:4). class java.