Increasingly, I use coding agents instead of writing software. For example, I built a Blog UMAP. Then, I built Calvin UMAP. And more. But instead of building re-usable software, I just ran Claude with prior context. Increasingly, I use coding agents to run software. For example, I use Codex to classify my expense receipts. It writes re-usable code, but I run it using Codex, and it updates the code with new/edge cases. ...
Software naming has power. I first became aware of this when a friend commented how much he enjoyed starting Windows 3. “Win,” he said. “I just love typing that!” I felt this this again recently with just. just lint Can you feel it? just build Actually, I just like to say “Just…” just test
Since WEBM compresses videos very efficiently, I’ve started using videos more often. For example, in Prototyping the prototypes and in Using game-playing agents to teach. I use a fish script to compress screencasts like this: # Increase quality with lower crf= (55 is default, 45 is better/larger) # and higher fps= (5 is default, 10 is better/larger). screencastcompress --crf 45 --fps 10 a.webm b.webm ... To record the screencasts, I prefer slightly automated approaches for ease and quality. ...
Alibaba released an open-source coding model (qwen-coder) and tool (qwen-code). qwen-code + qwen-coder cost 8 cents and made 3 mistakes. https://lnkd.in/gguSGdv6 qwen-code + claude-sonnet-4 cost 104 cents and made no mistakes. https://lnkd.in/gEPnVS-F claude-code cost 29 cents and made no mistakes. https://lnkd.in/gyCVeAr4 There’s no reason to shift yet, but it’s a good step in the development of open code models & tools. LinkedIn
This week, I learned: Connected Papers shows papers similar to each other based on co-citation and bibliographic coupling for ~50,000 papers. Notes from a fireside chat with Prashanth Chandrasekar, CEO, StackOverflow, and the StackOverflow team There’s a signal that software demand is growing in 2024. Many more students took the StackOverflow survey in 2024. So more students (or other professionals) are shifting into / starting to learn software development. The AI Index is a good resource for AI trends. Experts are better able to use AI for writing code. Less experienced developers are more likely to use AI for code reviews, project planning, etc. There’s a 5% decline in favorability for AI tools compared to 2023, maybe due to disappointing results. Pilot groups working on AI are 25-30% more productive. They’re the most enthusiastic. For the rest of the company, it drops off to 5-10% #LEARNING Benefit comes from NEW people becoming programmers, not existing ones getting more effective? StackOverflow wants to be where the developer is. The programmer workflow was: Google -> StackOverflow -> GitHub. Now it’s changing to ChatGPT / Cursor -> GitHub. StackOverflow has a partnership with OpenAI and working on a plugin. Same with Google’s Duet AI, GitHub Copilot, many others. They’ll link to StackOverflow. StackOverflow is driving integration actively through an enterprise Overflow API Q: What tech have you seen blaze through the ranks? Prashanth: Abstraction wins. Stuff that abstracts away things well and more wins. This includes Gen AI. Erin Yepis: Rust (from 3% to 12%). AWS has steady growth. Erin Yapis: I have a time series spreadsheet that I’ll publish. Q: What technologies are unusually tightly coupled? Prashanth: AWS & Google Cloud are tightly coupled. Q: We have an engagement problem. Might be India-specific. What are low-effort high-return mechanisms to increase engagement. Eric Woodring: Rather than a static web page, integrate it using the API. #TODO Ben Marconi: Use LLMs to write post mortems and push to StackOverflow. #TODO Eric Woodring: “Hydrating” the community helps. We take repeat questions on Teams / Slack and seed them using LLMs. We integrate with the API to auto-add Q&A. Transform documentation into Q&A. Potentially UPDATE existing Q&A if it’s wrong. Q: What unexpected lessons about developer behavior have you learned while running StackOverflow? Prashanth: We didn’t expect developers moving away from Google. Now it moved to the IDE. Q: What are you learning about developer learning behavior? Ben Marconi: Generating LLM-based onboarding documents. Using StackOverflow for Teams to identify who the experts are to contact for specific topics. Q: Are you thinking about leveraging Stack Overflow’s knowledge base for personalized or interactive learning experiences? How? Prashanth: Traditionally, people use StackOveflow for productivity, learning, and flexibility (i.e. to ask/answer questions asynchronously without breaking their flow). So yeah, learning is important for us. (Duh!) Q: Could Stack Overflow’s interactions help evaluate the accuracy and relevance of LLM-generated code? Or provide potential metrics on quality? Prashanth: LLM accuracy improves by ~30%. Upvotes / downvotes are reinforcement learning (RL) in steroids, so that helps. Q: What are your thoughts on reliance on LLMs potentially deskill-ing developers? Prashanth: A real issue for junior developers, not for senior ones. They’ll come across as knowledgeable. Make internal evaluations and interviews more rigorous. Anand’s requests for action: Could I get a copy of Erin’s spreadsheet? Vivek Narayanan will follow-up. Could you help me learn more about hydration? Nick Madison will set up a meeting with customer success group. I switched to fish shell mainly because: Autocomplete and tab completion works perfectly, out-of-box. Syntax highlighting is beautiful Great multi-line editing To format with VS Code Ruff, you need to point the ruff.interpreter setting to a Python interpreter. You can’t run the ruff server without Python, even though ruff itself doesn’t need Python. cd checks all paths specified in CDPATH for the directory name and changes to the first match. That’s pretty convenient! Flipper Zero is now on my list of “To Buy” tools. It has a variety of hardware devices including NFC, RFID, Bluetooth, Infrared, etc. and is great to reverse engineer or hack devices.
This year, I created a series of tests for my course at IITM and to recruit for Gramener. The tests had 2 interesting features. One question required them to hack the page Write the body of the request to an OpenAI chat completion call that: Uses model gpt-4o-mini Has a system message: Respond in JSON Has a user message: Generate 10 random addresses in the US Uses structured outputs to respond with an object addresses which is an array of objects with required fields: street (string) city (string) apartment (string) . Sets additionalProperties to false to prevent additional properties. What is the JSON body we should send to https://api.openai.com/v1/chat/completions for this? (No need to run it or to use an API key. Just write the body of the request below.) ...
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.
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: DPO is a simpler alternative to RLHF for fine-tuning. Several HuggingFace models use DPO for training Name2Vec is a potential embedding for names. Google Knowledge Graph ID powers the Knowledge Graph. If it begins with /m/ it’s the same as the FreeBase ID. This is now available as WikiData. e.g https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Property:P2671 I tried running Mixtral-8x7b locally (via Llamafile) and on together.ai. It’s good, but far from GPT 4. Generic computate-intensive algorithms eventually beat domain-specific tuning, because of Moore’s law. Ref The hidden brain podcast. the mystery of beauty Evolution drove us to beauty as an efficient survival mechanism. Understanding the world is one such mechanism. Hence we enjoy maths and chess ⭐ This leaderboard included paid models like GPT4 and Claude and compared them with open models on HUMAN + system benchmarks Lez Friedman Podcast: Jeff Bezos Build stuff that is is ubiquitous that other people take it for granted. The initial idea needs to be that obvious and easy. Like one click purchase or customer reviews Build stuff that other people can build on. Internet makes startups possible. Infrastructure is about enabling others at scale Decision making approaches: single person decides on two way doors. Deliberate as a team on one way doors Conflict resolution: disagree and COMMIT. NO sniping, I told you so, malicious compliance. Avoid compromise. Avoid decision by attrition (most persistent wins). People are inherently biased towards hierarchy. So the senior most person should speak last We have a happiness bias. Contracted by choosing the unhappier options first The map is not the territory. The metric is not the objective. We need metrics. But make sure you know why See the world through the eyes of the customer. Use your own product. It’s living their lives that makes customer obsession real. Jeff Bezos called their own customer care to see how long the actual wait time was. It was much longer than the metric reported How to prioritize. whatever problems customers will still face in 10 years are the big problems. These are worth putting time into because they are stable in time People working on big problems will never get down to the small problems. So have a dedicated team that works only on the paper cuts. It should be a dedicated team We co evolve with our tools. We build tools and then our tools change us. It reprograms our brains Cut out 10 minutes to the beginning of each meeting for people to read the material. They never reread anyway. This makes the meetings more productive Powerpoint is designed for persuasion, not truth seeking. It is also easier for the author than for the reader. Prefer narratives that are focused on finding the truth and are easier for the audience though tougher for the author ⭐ whisper-standalone-win provides a Windows binary for Faster-Whisper. It just needs CUDA and cuDNN installed. Then whisper-faster.exe video.mkv --language=English --model=medium generates the transcript. LLM use cases by Benedict Evans “Every text box on the internet will get an LLM” “Infinite interns” “Every UNIX function has become a company.” “Every ChatGPT suggestion…” llm360 publishes models along with training datasets. In The Age of AI has begun, Mar 2023, Bill Gates says, “In my lifetime, I’ve seen two demonstrations of technology that struck me as revolutionary.” The GUI (1980) and ChatGPT (2022). Rubeus is a HTTP proxy for multiple LLMs with load-balancing, fallbacks and retries. GPTRouter is a Python interface for multiple LLMs with fallbacks and retries. ⭐ Token Tally has an LLM Cost Tool that estimates GPU memory required and token cost across cloud providers.
In reality, a colour is a combination of light waves with frequencies between 400-700THz, just like sound is a combination of sound waves with frequencies from 20-20000Hz. Just like mixing various pure notes produces a new sound, mixing various pure colours (like from a rainbow) produces new colours (like white, which isn’t on the rainbow.) Our eyes aren’t like our ears, though. They have 3 sensors that are triggered differently by different frequencies. The sensors roughly peak around red, green and blue. Roughly. ...
I’m quite busy on a project right now, and don’t get time to write long articles. So for a while, I’m going to stick to short notes on interesting stuff. Peter Bregman has a very interesting piece on Why You Should Encourage Weakness. It boils down to a choice: do you focus on on improving strengths or minimising weaknesses? Conventional performance evaluations focus on the latter. I very strongly support Bregman’s view on this. The weakness isn’t why you hired the person! Unless it’s killing the organisation, just leave them to focus on their strengths. Google Analytics has a fairly interesting API that I hadn’t explored until recently. Picked up [Advanced Web Metrics with Google Analytics](http://www.s-anand.net/amazon-browser.html#advanced web metrics with google analytics) and learnt that you can track outbound clicks, page load times, Javascript events and error logs, almost anything at all using Google Analytics. You can also mirror the logging on your local server using pageTracker._setLocalRemoteServerMode() The whole concept of a Sandbox environment seems to be picking up within Google. There’s a Checkout sandbox, an AJAX API playground, an AdWords sandbox, an AdSense API sandbox, the Mapstraction API sandbox, even an event called Developer Sandbox. (After saying Sandbox 6 times, I feel a bit like Hobbes.)
I went to the Google Chrome site. Clicking on the “Accept and Install” button… … automatically launched the downloader in Firefox… … and (after a fairly short while) started installing the application directly. This may be the most painless install I’ve done in a while. I clicked on “Customise the settings” This is what it looks like. And that’s it! It installs, and launches in just a few seconds. First impressions: the startup and rendering are really fast. ...
Krugle is a code search engine. Comments sheikh 14 Dec 2006 3:08 pm: Thank you anand, It was very useful
BBC seems to be doing good work for developers at BBC Backstage. Tom Coates and Matt Biddulph are among those involved.
code.google.com Comments ritzkini 24 Mar 2005 5:18 am: google rocks !!
A cool combination of the Amazon and Google APIs to BookWatch. (Incidentally, I downloaded the Amazon and Google APIs.)
Google has released a Beta API. Programmers, please do something with it. I honestly wish I had the time to use it, too!