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

This week, I learned: Architecture.md is an emerging standard Managing wealth requires training. htmz is a fantastic way to load HTML into elements! Suguna Poultry is Using robots to walk in their farms, use sound and bird eyes and movement to predict birth health over 1-2 weeks Light on the back of the bird’s back AND face => lays eggs in 14 days, else takes days later (girls and mobile phones?) Teknoturf is using Gen AI to Improve prompts when teaching prompt engineering. Pronounce languages better, identifying which words Tamilians and Malayalis will mis-pronounce. Explore IRBlaster. It can control AC and can automatically increase temperature at night. My view: LLMs are general purpose and more capable than SLMs. They’ll win, like CPUs won over special-purpose chips. GPUs will optimize for LLMs and as usage grows, cost will fall. Andrej Karpathy’s summary of sharp edges in tokenization uses tiktokenizer to explain: Why LLMs can’t be used for spelling Why LLMs are better at English than other languages Why LLMs are bad at math Why SolidGoldMagiKarp is a single token Why trailing spaces are bad Why YAML tokenizes more efficiently than JSON ssyoutube.com: Just add “ss” to “youtube.com” on the video and you can download YouTube videos Discussions with Sachin, AMAT Microsoft said Indigo, Air India uses LLM based bookings Meta invested $70bn in GPUs. Sam Altman is investing $7tn! NVIDIA has a price PREMIUM not discount for bulk GPUs! AMD is the next company to watch for Numenta - Subutai Ahmad - deploys AI models on CPUs #TODO Read A Thousand Brains by Subutai Ahmad Sanjeev Sharma Swaayatt Robots: Autonomous driving in India Deepeigen: Education Rohan Shravan, Bangalore. Likes sharing knowledge. Amazing teacher. IIT KGP 2008. Interested in exploring quantum computing Tresa Motors, Inkers App, The School of AI AMAT is working on photon-based computing. science research models. AI for science. Like Google: Deepmind Genome, Microsoft: Metagen quantum: AMAT is actively in into this. Nagapati Banda is driving this John Kelly is predicting a ChatGPT moment in quantum in a few years Adobe express has a forever free video to GIF converter Edge workspaces let me keep the same tabs open across laptops! Command line interface guidelines RAWGraphs has a custom charts API that is worth learning from Python fastcore has decorators like @typedispatch, Self, etc. All image-to-text models on HuggingFace wddbfs mounts SQLite as a file system. I had a bit of trouble, maybe with Python package versions. Google is using LLM powered bug identification HuggingFace Chat Assistants has open source system prompts!! OpenHermes training dataset is available. 1M prompts! Jio has made IPL free. They make money on data and ads. That’s Scale! Daniel Dennett outsources thinking to students. Reviewing his books. BUT: I don’t take feedback. When someone sends a pull requests, I ignore it.

This week, I learned: Fine tuning makes economic sense only if the input tokens SAVED is twice the output token size on each call. Docker container memory usage on WSL2 docker stats frolvlad/alpine-glibc:alpine-3.17: 540KB ubuntu: 1MB (python3: +5MB) nikolaik/python-nodejs:python3.10-nodejs18-bullseye: 1.4MB (python3: +5MB) python:3-alpine: 612KB (python3: +7.5MB) python:3: 500KB (python3: +11.2MB) continuumio/miniconda3: 7.6MB (+6.5MB) Discussion with Vinu Yamunan Databuck by FirstEigen. Autolysis plus monitoring Quality council has the data steward (maintainer of each dataset) coming together with the uses on a weekly basis to understand what quality problems to users are facing. Data owners jaundice at a lower frequency to get an understanding #TODO Automate rules for data quality in our projects and intranet Convert a config rule into business language. Explain SQL. These are good use cases for llm’s Graph DBs are powerful for flexible data structures, but query generation needs AI or expertise. Check the Neo4J language cypher Explore storing SAME data in relational DBs AND in graph DBs / document DBs for different use cases Dallas rocketry challenge. Build a rocket that can take an egg to 800 feet exactly and land without breaking it Discussion with Karthik A #TODO Ask IIT students to do internship tasks. Use advent of code is a qualifying criterion Tata motors unionized DB admins for longevity. No one can take their jobs. Hires people who LIKE their jobs Rust gives me typing. It’s very efficient. Pola.rs is interesting but Pandas as good enough. Explore alerts from CCTV feeds. Karthik sends email alerts with pictures for: “Is the machine on or off”? for productivity “Are people not wearing helmets?” for safety at Cummins #TODO Integrate with WhatsApp. Use LLMs with function calling for responses Use expiring links (to pictures or content). It increases engagement Check Deno licensing. Is there a commercial clause? #ANS No - it’s MIT license Centre or excellence for zero emission tech at IIT. Karthik is part of it Explore auth0. 7000 users are free toml is part of the Python 3.11 standard library! If copilot writes code we don’t understand we are screwed. Hence expertise matters Discussion with Vikas Kedia #TODO Plan an AMA The mind becomes lazy with financial success. Vikas is treating his podcast as a startup Hire a professional videographer for your content Financial RoI in financial markets is the highest. Programming is high too but FS is even better “Performative power” – when you’re forced to perform, you get better ideas Observable 2.0 is an open source static site generator for data Python dataclasses SORA is OpenAI’s video generation model, and is stunning! If Appa comes to Singapore even for a week, he will feel better and can boast to his friends. At over 90, it may be better to move Appa to where I am since many of his friends would be no more and shops, doctors, etc can be managed and getting an independent house nearby is not hard. There is an SEZ in Gujarat where Indians can invest like in Mauritius without forex restraint Shubha: Media sites are moving away from Vickrey auctions to first-price auctions for ads. That’s because they send the auction price forward to a search engine and the winning second-price value can lose even though the owner is willing to pay more. Second-price auctions don’t work unless ALL bidders are in the SAME auction. Ad networks are a hierarchy of auctions! Gemini 1.5 launched. Fly.io offers GPU hosting and auto stop when they have nothing to do. Embeddings in random forest are very effective at classification – much better than dot product. To deploy apps with OAuth + templating support in a small Docker container, use Caddy Deno has native TypeScript, browser APIs, and compiles to multiple OSs Ruff is a MUCH faster flake8 Two pass generation is a clever technique to get multiple SEQUENTIAL answers in a single API request. For example the schema {'code', 'optimized_code'} will generate code and then optimize it. Unions in function calling allows flexible multi-step prompts in a single API.

This week, I learned: Dockerfile can have FROM scratch and you can add specific binaries rather than an entire OS. via Fine-tuning session by Dan. Notebook Example of fine-tuning Mistral. Consumed 28 computes ($2.8) Axlotl is what the top fine-tuned LLMs are trained on Deepspeed provides distributed training Flash attention lets data stay on GPU Sample packing packs samples of different lengths into equal length tensors Visualize the RANK of a token in a generated stream instead of logprob The Knowledge Project. Tomorrow Gayner What I’d like in my obituary: Anand was happiness. A guru. Generous. To get what we seek we must deserve this. Build, measure, learn If you did the same thing daily for 50 years, would it be a great thing? If yes, do it. If not, stop. Do this in daily retrospectives My new role should be productivity through technology innovation. That may mean a CTO role. But be specific otherwise no one will understand it Hidden brain podcast. Us 2.0. Win hearts, then minds When in an interaction, ask yourself. Can I learn and change myself? Can I win their hearts, then mines, so their behavior will change. That identity will change Notice when you get emotionally triggered. That’s exactly when you should not get emotionally triggered Try model humility and moral Look for close to people’s identities in our conversations. What are things they like? What does it mean for them? Simply ask. With that understanding of identity, it becomes easier to reframe things in a way they will understand Bard can talk to Gmail and Google Drive! #PREDICTION As automation takes over these mainstream activities, people will take over the niches. Since expertise like knowledge is fractal, there will be many more segments of one in the future and it will be easier to automate clusters of similar abilities. Recommenders and brands will become even more important Stephen Osserman’s Observables have some nice notes. Visualizing partial election results D3 Force Dilemmas: Data Distortion Sandra Becker’s 30 day D3 course

For those in #Singapore and interested in #datavisualization & #llms, I’m talking about Visualizing LLM Hallucinations at SUTD on Thu 8 Feb at 7 pm SGT. This is for a non-technical audience. We’ll visualize the basics of how LLMs work, how they make mistakes, and at least one technique on how to spot these. https://www.meetup.com/data-vis-singapore/events/298902921/ LinkedIn

This week, I learned: Alzhara is one of the VFX companies that worked on Leo’s hyena scene. Their 3D modeling is incredible. Enterprise scenarios leaderboard. Mistral 7B leads. Veda Srinivasan. How does Google manage culture? AMA sessions Manager feedback. Entirely anonymous. Avoid taking feedback for teams less than 5 Workplace concerns team exists. Put managers on watch Books Mohammad Younus. Three zeroes book. Read about his social business theme Pluriverse. Anti fragile. Aurobindo Vedas. Barry Oshry. Seeing systems. Runs workshops but book is better Raghu Anantanarayana has written about Indian archetypes based on Mahabharatha India that is Bharath. Sai Deepak. Podcasts Listen to Nilesh Oak. Sugreeva’s Atlas. Pankaj Tripathi podcast on geography influences acting Areas of focus “I’m an Expert on synthesis and implementation” Intersectionality is another word for complex failures. Also for deep segmentation. Swiss cheese model. Dialogic self theory is about multiple voices in the head. How do we make meaning? Psychological rupture is when cognitive activity is maximum. At any point there are MULTIPLE voices in our heads that are sources of action. We don’t listen to them. Epistemology. Language determines thought. like the word productivity. How does appreciation of a rose become productive? Words from other languages may have incredible power. From other cultures. Paul Sloan. Lateral thinking podcasts from multiple sources Deliberately engage with topics randomly. Deliberately engage with random people Read a random book from the library Watch a random film in a different language Consciously where the six thinking hats or look hard for the silent voices in your head and express them Ask children. They tend to think of more creative and childlike solutions He converted a hiring process into a contest Constantly ask yourself. What if every assumption I’m making about this is wrong? Scenario planning is really about this. List a few scenarios. They’d have high impact or high probability. What happens in this scenario? Ideate You can @mention GPTs to ask a specific GPT a question in ChatGPT. This is really powerful. Hidden brain podcast. Making the most of your mistakes FIX every small mistake. You never know how they might line up in the future You also never know how small little things done well might line up to give you a boost in the future The Toyota cord does not actually stop the production line. It brings a team lead over who quickly diagnoses the problem with you. The responsiveness of the league is a critical factor and so is encouragement That isn’t always a single bottleneck to stop that is the case of a simple failure. There can be a series of holes that happen to align perfectly. These are events that lead to catastrophic failures or successes Do as little as possible, waste as little as possible, until you know that the outcome is worthwhile. Figure out what is the value of the outcome and the most important piece of information you need to discover that Do full research before you try and fail. The aim of failure is learning at the least possible cost How I write podcast. 2023 summary Ask for feedback from friends in a specific way. What 20% should I retain no matter what? What 20% should I cut? This allows them to compliment while providing genuine feedback Hire lawyer interns to proofread. They are the ones that find fault the best Be in a segment of one. Where there is zero competition. Something only you can do Don’t try to do stuff faster. Try to do stuff you don’t want to stop doing Read books older than 50 years Read Michael Collins book on things that sustain Temp service make sure he has some energy to spare. Cuz Riley does the opposite. She waits till she can’t stand it anymore and then writes like crazy until she drops dead. The former leads to thoughtful writing. The latter is emotionally powerful. Be able to do that Vanna is a SQL generation LLM. An alternative to SQLCoder. This thread has a detailed discussion on SQL generation and BI Intel developer cloud has a liberal GPU in the free tier. OpenAI releases text-embedding-3-large which can be truncated. The embedding values have descending importance, so picking the first n is a good approximation. Also, gpt-3.5-turbo-0125 is 50% cheaper. AppAgent is an LLM that can navigate mobile / web apps Retrieval Centric Generation is an emerging alternative to RAG, where the LLM is explicitly built to leverage external knowledge. SimplyRetrieve is an early implementation. Big Code Models Leaderboard is a leaderboard for open source code models.

text-embedding-ada-002 used to give high cosine similarity between texts. I used to consider 85% a reasonable threshold for similarity. I almost never got a similarity less than 50%. text-embedding-3-small and text-embedding-3-large give much lower cosine similarities between texts. For example, take these 5 words: “apple”, “orange”, “Facebook”, “Jamaica”, “Australia”. Here is the similarity between every pair of words across the 3 models: For our words, new text-embedding-3-* models have an average similarity of ~43% while the older text-embedding-ada-002 model had ~85%. ...

This week, I learned: ⭐ OpenAI’s prompt engineering strategies are an excellent start for prompt engineering. A few lessons: Use detailed system prompts, often containing the entire instruction set, if it won’t change over the course of a conversation. “… summary of the prior conversation could be included as part of the system message” is an interesting history compression tactic. OpenAI summarizes books by recursively summarizing sections and maintaining a running commentary of the summary so far. Dan sends Google documents with essays instead of emails. This allows people to comment on it. But commenting is a culture and not many people do it. Adriano does it a lot and we’ll. Dan and Adriano actively converse on GitHub issues llm-guard is an LLM content validation tool.

I was crossing a not-too-busy street on a not-too-busy day in Chennai. I was having a voice conversation with ChatGPT (about the log probabilities of tokens on LLMs, if you're curious) when I was rudely interrupted by an auto rikshaw rapidly honking at me. "Honk honk honk honk honk" in rapid succession. Not unusual. Mildly annoying. The street was empty. The auto was empty. The traffic policeman was visible. I gave way and carried on. ...

This week, I learned: When comparing Mistral with 4b quantization vs unquantized: 2 responses were significantly shorter and fairly different 1 was identical 1 was almost identical but shorter by a few words 1 was slightly longer and fairly different #PREDICTION As humans have more conversations with LLMs, they will replace video watching and interactive gaming with conversation based role play. New game genres will evolve Lilac is an LLM-based data curation tool. Use it to search by concept (e.g. PII, duplicates, etc.) and then drop/update the results. Lungs have a Hausdorff dimension of 2.97 – giving them one of the highest surface area to volume ratio. Brains are 2.8. Sierpinski Pyramid is exactly 2 – which is weird. To solid-paint twice the size, you need 4 times as much paint. How I write podcast. Tim Ferriss High bars are constraints. I set the strongest constraints against the scarcest resources. Like reputation Being a category of one is more defensible than a competitive advantage Content always beats presentation. When in doubt, push for more interesting content Regular publishing improves thinking To build a habit, do less than you think you can do. That makes it easier to build momentum on the habit and sustain during crunch times There is a lot of mediocrity in the world. If you’re doing something (in a winner take all ecosystem), be the best. Top lawyers are exceptional proofreaders. They are able to see what is unclair, and what is redundant, and what has loop holes very quickly. Forcing yourself to cut down from a thousand words to 200 to a paragraph to a sentence takes you through a phase transition where you discover something unexpected The more outrageous the question, the more likely it is to be useful in generating a new perspective Eleven-labs speech synthesis with voice cloning is at the uncanny valley. With two 5-minute samples, my voice sounds a fair bit like my voice but is very clearly not my voice. I find stability ~ 30%, similarity ~ 80% and style ~50% gives a reasonable outcome. But the default voices (e.g. Joseph, George, Charlie) are excellent. Practical AI podcast: AI predictions for AI by API is the norm today and will grow Just having AI is no longer a differentiator AI is part of life, not just work #TODO Explore quickdrop from Stability for Maruti #TODO Explore Codium VS Code plugin and Continue.dev Hybrid systems that combine stats, ML, DL and AI models will grow AGI and AutoGPT resurgence RAG will continue to be a focus GPT4 will be beaten by open source models. Special purpose models beat it already Self hosted and cloud hosted models will grow for security Small language models will grow Productivity will be enhanced rather than replaced Multi modal models will grow Cost efficiency will grow in focus GPT Builder help explains how the GPT Builder updates GPTs - including some very interesting prompts

I looked at how Gramener uses ChatGPT Plus by evaluating 600+ chats asked over 3 months from Oct 2023 to Jan 2024. The team asks 6 questions a day. We don't track who or how many actively use ChatGPT Plus. This also excludes personal ChatGPT accounts. Still, 6/day is low for an entire team put together. The questions fall into 8 categories. Category%Excel, data exploration & analysis25%Text extraction and summarization13%HTML, CSS, or JavaScript code13%Python code13%LLMs, AI and use cases9%OCR and image analysis9%Generate images, logos, and designs7%General knowledge, policy & environment5%Audio and translation5% Here are some questions from each category - to give you an idea of emergent ChatGPT Plus usage. ...