March 2024

This week, I learned: sqlite-schema-diagram generates schemas for SQLite databases using Graphviz TechEmpower web server benchmarks place Rust servers on top browser.new is a good example of a browser agent. It slowly but independently does a good job of achieving the result. Example: What crew is common in Ingrid Bergman - Cary Grant films? twinny is an open source VC Code Copilot alternative. typesense supports embeddings natively. Binary embeddings are good enough. Cohere releases binary embeddings. Extract.langchain.com is a poor early interface to featurize unstructured.io Hume.ai offers voice emotion API and emotion-based conversational responses. An empathic AI. Rust is non-trivial. Inspired by We are under DDoS attack and we do nothing, I “wrote” a small binary that serves a parquet file as JSON. It failed and I couldn’t fix it. spleeter is a better alternative to demucs. Splits audio into pyannote-audio does speaker diarization uvicorn is faster than hypercorn but hypercorn supports HTTP/2 and HTTP/3. FastAPI with uvicorn is reasonably fast. Representational engineering lets you control LLM output based on preference on the fly. When I set up a training: On inviting for DuckDB workshop on Sun evening, Gramener starts accepting immediately, Straive doesn’t. Straive has high spread of joining time. When joining Gitlab Pipelines Workshop, Straive starts meeting (e.g. Premlal) many minutes early. Gramener floods in (due to alert). Straive streams in slowly. Gitlab Pipelines Workshop acceptances: Gramener 47, Straive 100

Until recently, I could code on flights. This year, I lost that ability. Again. It’s happened before. In each case, technology has solved the problem for me. Here’s the history. I need a laptop. Since 2001, I’ve never been without one on a flight. I need power. Since 2005, I use dark mode and every low power feature available. (I also became good at finding hidden power outlets.) ...

In Excel, using Visual Basic, you can change an image as you scroll. This makes it easy to look at each image and annotate it. This is how I transcribed every Calvin & Hobbes. I used this technique first when typing out the strips during my train rides from Bandra to Churchgate. I had an opportunity to re-apply it recently when we needed to tag hundreds of photographs based on a set of criteria. ...

Oh, wonderful! They’re keen to get in. Wise enough to take help. Honest enough not to be able to cover it up. Sounds like a good hire! LinkedIn

This week, I learned: Ways to expand mental models DISCOVER mental models. Review beliefs diary. DIVERSIFY. Find INFLUENTIAL (not dull) people with different backgrounds. Experiment! New environment, approach, perspective Be open. Change your mind. APPLY. Practice regularly Ways to use inversion “Pre-mortem” is an analysis at the beginning of how a project failed. Then avoid that “Red team” or “Black hat” are designated to contradict. Having a PoV IS a hypothesis. Always having a PoV allows us to detect anomalies and learn. Control vectors in real-time lets you control response in real-time OIDC is Open ID Connect. It’s like OAuth2 but more. Azure and Google support it. Planka is an open-source Trello There is a https://myapplications.microsoft.com/ that serves as a starting point. Might be helpful Instructor lets you create structured JSON output.

Every time I get annoyed at people, I remind myself to be more like ChatGPT. Specifically: Don't get annoyed. Be patient. Encourage them. Step back and show them the big picture. (Then I get annoyed at myself for getting annoyed.) Today, I analyzed how exactly ChatGPT is different from me. So, I took a pitch document I co-authored with ChatGPT. Section A: Authored by Anand WHAT DO WE NEED? ...

This week, I learned: DuckDB is 2-10 times faster than Pandas. ClickHouse is supposedly faster but doesn’t run on Windows. Claude 3 Haiku input costs is $0.25/MTok. That’s half the GPT-3.5 cost. If it’s of comparable quality, it’s worth switching. But Claude 3 Opus is comparable to GPT-4 and twice the cost, so not worth it. Tavily is a search API for LLMs Interesting model garden models There are sites you TRULY cannot scrape even in the browser because of the isTrusted read-only property of events that you can never set to true. Oracle Service Cloud checks for isTrusted in mouse actions.

This week, I learned: Mughals just replaced the top of most temples with Mosque domes as part of the conquer or die policy “Math is racist”. Because people who can’t solve it can’t because of their underprivileged background! Winners: commodity businesses, companies that own lots of data like Reddit and Stackoverflow, profitable bootstrapped businesses Making a tool more usable, e.g. a video, can have a 10-100X impact. Yet every developer thinks it’s redundant All in one podcast. Can Google save itself? the success of a developer platform is the number of people using it. But not everyone uses it equally. Some people create winning products which drives attention to the platform. Use llm proxy like that to measure weekly average users and cost saving through caching one week ago, if someone at Google stood up and said we have too many black people in our images, the responsible AI team would have shut them down calling them racist. They had too much power and it was a one-way conversation. With the backlash now, there is a lot more awareness and acceptance of the balance. Security is like that. It’s too easy to empower and shut things down until there is a backlash the lawyer’s job is to tell you what’s not possible. But like Travis, your job is to decide whether it’s worth the risk of running a taxi company without a license or not Americans pronounce Sundar pichai’s name as Sun Daar! data licensing has become a business model. Reddit, Accel springer, stack overflow and many others are licensing their content to Google and open AI for several million dollars.

A friend told me today that using #ChatGPT will make humanity dumber. “Probably. Like always, #Calvin has the best response I know to that. “I propose we leave math to the machines and go play outside.” 🙂 LinkedIn

This week, I learned: You can use slots to stream HTML out of order! Shane Parrish. Short-term patience podcast have a frame of reference to relate EVERY experience to. That helps you evaluate (measure) and learn. That’s part of what Charlie Munger’s lattice of frameworks is about when there is a very high or very low interest scenario, low interest scenario then go ultra long term. Issued hundred years when the interest rate regime was very low short term optimal is rally long term optimal. So you need to learn to take a loss and look like an idiot to play the long-term game grit is a behavior that enables long-term thinking. Short term success gives you the luxury to think about long term #IMP power is about optionality. It’s about being in a position where you have the options that can affect the positive change rather than circumstances controlling you. Read Robert greene’s book on the 48 laws of Power low leverage enables that begin with the end in mind. Always how do you think about risk? Well, things do happen. It’s as simple as that autonomy and decentralization helps derisk do more and more of what works. That’s a powerful way of compounding long-term investments are better than frequent trading because you get to reinvest the tax you otherwise would have paid. So unless the alternative is super compelling, stay invested if you need to be the person who DOES the thing, you delegate less, leverage list, compound less, because you have to DO. BE A PERSON WHO SETS THE FIELD INSTEAD. The coach, the chess master, the director, patient strategist who Waits for the good hit Being in Control motivates #Lesson. my cycle tires were flat. I thought it was someone pulling out the air and felt very demotivated. But once I carried my cycle pump, I felt so much more in control and power and felt a whole lot better SourceGraph is the default platform for private code completion & search MetaVoice 1B offers voice cloning on American & British accents with 30s training Qwen 1.5 72B appears to outperform Mistral Medium, making it one of the top non-proprietary models Llava 1.6 is a substantial improvement over Llava 1.5 and slightly better than CogVLM, Qwen-VL AI scams are growing. Deepfakes scammed $34m. But voice fake for kidnapping is scarier. Buildspace’s demo is a great demo of how voice and actions can be used effectively. demucs does an EXCELLENT job of splitting songs into drums, bass, vocals and others