This week, I learned: httpretty can mock ALL Python HTTP libraries Japanese pray to dead parents instead of gods. The dead are preserved in plates by priests. Japanese are generally non religious Looks like GPT-4o is using CNNs to create vector embeddings of images, with images gridded into a 1x1, 2x2, etc. PLUS OCR. Ref The sum of a sinusoidal series is like a spirogram. Spinning circle linked to another and so on https://www.andreinc.net/2024/04/24/from-the-circle-to-epicycles

This week, I learned: Modal.com seems of offer reasonably priced GPUs Combining vector search and keyword search with reciprocal rank fusion seems to work well for RAG. Ref Knowledge Project podcast. Morgan Housel Differences of opinion exist because of different stories arising from origins and experiences. We are not debating facts. We are debating life lessons! Solution: hear their anecdotes. The stories that taught them their lessons. AI reporting templates are a trend. Domain expertise comes in via structuring the report template and associated prompts. Some audio embedding models: unoti/voice-embeddings, retkowsky/audio_embeddings, pyannote/embedding (for speaker similarity), and more. Hidden Brain podcast: Innovation 2.0: The power of less Subtraction is hard because we are biologically and economically wired against it. It’s also hard because there are fewer markers of subtraction. Additions are natural markers / triggers. Marie Kondo suggests keeping only what sparks joy #POST I tried Undermind.ai - an agent that researches for you. It guides you to ask a detailed question, spends 2-3 minutes finding the answer, and provides detailed results. But it’s worth the wait. It’s a good alternative to quick validations on SciSpace. For popular results, search actually makes results worse! When not to trust language models Perception of fluency and usefulness are NEGATIVELY correlated in LLM! Evaluating Verifiability in Generative Search Engines GPTs are now available to non paying users. Apparently for a few weeks! Everyone also has limited access to GPT-4o. Discussion with Anand Explore BBC Microbit Everyone should get a Raspberry Pi! Watch 2 minutes paper on YouTube More LLM routers: LiteLLM: Open source, OpenAI compatible, 100+ LLMs RouteLLM: Open source, OpenAI compatible, automatically routes based on cost OpenRouter: OpenAI compatible API, several models Unify: Supports many models Portkey: Supports popular providers Martian: Limited set of models d-id and Heygen can modify videos of a person.

This week, I learned: My home WiFi is on WiFi 6. This supports beam-forming which increases range by “focusing” on devices! Predibase lets you run fine-tuned models at the same price, on a per-token basis. 25c/MTok up to 21B models. That’s sames as Claude 3 Haiku, but with fine-tuning. RunPod’s vLLM endpoint lets you run any HuggingFace LLM with an OpenAI API priced on usage (serverless) not on idle time. “Autoscaling to 0”. Portkey is an LLM router

This week, I learned: In Scandinavia, Århus comes after Zürich because Å is a different letter. It was added by the Dutch after WW2 to distance themselves from the Germans. via Zalgo text is where we combine multiple Unicode combining characters Artificial Analysis benchmarks LLM APIs on speed, cost, and quality.

This week, I learned: Radio free Xp podcast. Nudge 61 always announce first before doing. Give people time to plan comment and react. That gets you alignment without sacrificing freedom. give information, not orders. When someone is parking a car, tell them how much space they have, don’t tell them to start stop or how much to turn left it’s almost impossible to change the culture if you’re not the boss

There are 4 frontier #LLMs today. No other (popular) model beats them on BOTH cost and quality. llama-3-8b-instruct claude-3-haiku-20240307 llama-3-70b-instruct gpt-4o-2024-05-13 This list changes rapidly. But in practice, it means there’s little reason to use any other LLM. They beat every other model on cost and quality (measured by the LMSYS Arena ELO score.) I opened Straive + Gramener’s keynote yesterday at marcus evans Group’s Digitech forum with this. Strange that this is not well known. Especially as switching from GPT-4 to Claude 3 Haiku can shrink a $1.2 million Gen AI budget to just $10K. ...

250 BC is when I’d pick to time-travel to. Ashoka was turning into one of the most famous emperors of India and Archimedes was growing into one of the greatest mathematicians of all time. Parallel Lives is a beautiful visualization by Jan Willem Tulp that shows who lived when, showing overlaps, and sized by their prevalence on Wikipedia. I’m a history fan and have spent several hours scrolling through the site: ...

This week, I learned: Hidden brain podcast. Innovation 2.0 solve your own problem. Don’t solve other people’s problems. This helps you pick what you’re good at affordable losses. Make sure you survive borrow others’ spares. spare time, scrap data, anything others don’t use. If you can monetize it, you can pay them back focus on the controllable. Ignore what’s outside your control don’t even waste time on it curl supports globbing, emails Beetrove is a ranking of the popularit of OpenAI GPTs Gemini Prompt Guide has detailed examples of how each role can use Gemini ESLint’s new flat configuration does not support package.json

This week, I learned: Tough prompt to test: Gr brx vshdn Fdhvdu flskhu? is a quick way to assess LLM capability. Ref Cheap cloud GPU services thread on Twitter lists: Runpod (17) Vast.ai (17) Modal Labs (8) fly.io (4) LightningAI (4) Colab (4) AkashNet (4) Lambda Labs (4) ShadeFormAI (3) Mac Mini (3) Tensor Dock (2) Hetzner (2) BrevDev (2) JSR lets you publish Deno packages that can be imported by npm via. It also auto-evaluates documentation and scores it! via Snowflake Arctic Cookbook explains how mixture of experts models work A long list of LLM courses online Embeddings can be averaged. So, to embed large documents, average the embeddings of their chunks! OpenAI suggests this.

Simon Willison initiated this very interesting Twitter thread that asks, “What prompt can instantly tell us how good an LLM model is?” The Sally-Anne Test is a popular test that asks: Sally hides a marble in her basket and leaves the room. While she is away, Anne moves the marble from Sally’s basket to her own box. When Sally returns, where will she look for her marble?" ...

This week, I learned: Effort engine introduces “effort” as a parametrizable way to speed up LLMs with a quality trade-off. Works on Mistral for now. Many arts demand devotion. Devoting unrestricted time is part of that. 16 hours of practice a day is not uncommon. Sessions don’t start and end on time. Instruments take a lot longer to learn than vocal music. The instrument needs to become an extension of you. Tests and homework have a purpose. It helps people figure out whether they’ve learnt. So: Write tests that make people think! Like DuckDB workshop Share a list of exercises that people can explore People need to explicitly be INVITED, and potentially IN PERSON, before they will engage with something new. For example, no one posted to [email protected] until the VIA Talks session where we got them to post. For example, having one day at IITM mandatory (especially early in the course) gets online students familiar with TAs. They understand that TAs actually help, at high quality. That they can use Discord. What makes Delhi students more assertive? How can we inculcate that in others? jsr-io/migrations is a great example of database migrations. Shape Detection API in the browser detects QR codes, face bounding boxes, Browsers also natively support blurring and face tracking. via Lessons after half a billion GPT tokens for GPT-4: Vague instructions are better than over-specifying Avoid libraries like Langchain. APIs are stabler 1 token = 3 characters is good enough GPT4 doesn’t hallucinate much, except it does a poor job of saying “I don’t know” or “There’s no such data” (the null hypothesis) Keep the output down to 10 items or so if you’re listing. For longer lists, have it explicitly enumerate Don’t worry about niches. Just wait for GPT5 #WRITE GPT clearly prefers 42 as a random number. #WRITE fal.ai “animates” pictures, creating videos. It made one from my talk. I morphed into various somewhat similar people rapidly in a 2-second span. Very promising, and far from good. llmsherpa extracts PDFs using LLMs. It has errors but it preserves hierarchy, extracts tables well, and retains image coordinates. Via +91 90031 35354 ~Vetrivel PS www.web.sp.am is a content farm that’s getting hit by OpenAI. Highlights how easy it is to create content farms, and therefore “easy” it can be to introduce bias into LLMs. OpenAI supports batching requests. Didn’t know that. Marvin provides Python decorators to create AI functions. Pretty intuitive! Outlines generates structured test with LLMs. It uses the ⭐ logit_bias trick to limit choices in output. See get_choice() Lemur from Assembly.ai does real time call transcription and summary W3C is exploring ways to allow web pages to train LLMs, to flag content as AI generated, etc. Data Provenance Explorer lists open datasets used to train LLMs. Summarize.tech summarizes YouTube videos. #WRITE Stable Audio 2.0 generates 3 min of music from a prompt. I tried Bollywood Tamil film background music. Dark, soulful and Horror movie background. Drums starts darkly. Build up to a crescendo of intense chaos.. Great that it managed, but not great music. Somewhat stereotyped. I need to learn how to prompt better. BTW, Udio is another such. Harpa.ai is a well designed Chrome extension / plugin that can chat with or automate any page. Due to in-context learning, giving 100s of examples in the prompt can teach LLMs to jailbreak. Ref With RAG on search becoming big, search APIs are growing. serper.dev, you.com, searxng being examples.

When picking a number between 1-100, do #LLMs pick randomly? Or pick like a human? Leniolabs_ found #ChatGPT prefers 42. Gramener re-ran the experiment. Things have changed a bit. Now, 47 is the new favorite. But Claude 3 Haiku latched on to 42 as its favorite. Gemini’s favorite is 72. See https://sanand0.github.io/llmrandom/ They all avoid multiples of 10 (10, 20, …), repeated digits (11, 22, …), single digits (1, 2, …) and prefer 7-endings (27, 37, …). These are clearly human #biases – avoiding regular / round numbers and seeking 7 as “random”. ...

This week, I learned: Prashant Pandey: we need to prepare before every meeting. Something to teach VS Code Select any code and command Explain this to understand the code %something in command bar searches ACROSS files for a term. Exactly like Ctrl+Shift+F Copilot has an Inline Chat: Start in Terminal (that needed me to unbind Ctrl+I in bash to work) Ctrl+2 opens a second window on the side. Ctrl+1 goes back to the first window Terminal: Open Detected Link lets you scroll through detected (file) links in terminal Terminal sticky scroll is transparent. (But Terminal stick scroll isn’t working for me.) Copilot uses last 10 commit messages, Jupyter notebook kernel state (variables) as additional context 1.88: supports locked scrolling to sync scrolling of side-by-side windows fsspec is used by csvbase, Pandas, etc. to implement file system protocols like s3fs, gcfs, etc. SQLime is a SQLite client / playground on the browser! Do nothing. Then do less Humans have a bias against inaction. Hence a strategic advantage. What can you cancel today? Humans have a bias against subtraction or removal. That too is a strategic advantage. What can you remove today? Humans have a bias against constraints. That’s a strategic advantage. What constraint can you embrace? No Yay! When declining something, add it your calendar so that when the time comes you can say yeah I got this time back

This week, I learned: CSS nesting is now available in browsers Cold starts in AWS Lambda: serverless functions stay alive for 5-7 min. All languages are fast but Docker is slow. More npm packages slow start dramatically. WiFi only works when it’s raining because a tree was obstructing the signal but was weighed down when raining! Good reasons why finding a technical co-founder won’t work. You want a unicorn to passionately trust YOUR idea after 2 meetings. Why should THEY risk money for YOUR idea? You’re the money guy. RAISE the money for YOUR idea! How passionate are you about software? And you want to build one now? This is a subtle vulnerability. ChatGPT hallucinated pip install huggingface-cli. Sosomeone created the package and got 30,000 downloads! Video-Llava is a video LLM MusicCNN-embeddings provides embeddings for music genre classification How I write podcast. Paul Graham essays Write simply. It helps communicate. (Don’t concise if communication worsens.). It forces you to make the idea better Do lame stuff. Else you won’t start. Low standards drive creativity The more to delete, the better your writing. Read your piece. Highlight what feels poor. Fix it. Ask friends to highlight what’s BORING? UNCONVINCING? Delete the first, brainstorm the second. Or ask, what’s the 10% to cut and 10% to keep. Write about stuff you don’t know above the. Writing GENERATES ideas Write about what’s BUS. GENERAL and SURPRISING. (Laughter is a sign of comprehension.) Do HARD things to cultivate taste. Spend more time with people who generate ideas in you. Ravi chithappa. Ram. Ankor. Ganes. Books! Build taste. I have a taste for picking technologies. Data visualization. Retrospect. Write down what you like and dislike. Copy what you REALLY like. Guilty pleasures. A benefit of lower standards is that it let’s you pick the path less travelled. ITERATE. Discuss ideas. Iterate. Acknowledge. ITERATE.

This is the coolest data visualization I’ve seen in a long time. It makes you think about human behaviour. Please try and GUESS why the AirBnB occupancy rates shoot up in the red areas on Apr 7 before you read the comments! LinkedIn

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.