sqlite on S Anand

Things I Learned - 04 May 2025

Sun, 04 May 2025 00:00:00 +0000

This week, I learned:

Among the popular exams in India, UPSC seems the most restrictive: bachelor’s degree, age 21-32, 6 attempts, reservation applies. CMA seems the least: 10th pass, any age, any number of attempts, no reservation. NDA is interesting. 10+2, age 16.5-19.5, any number of attempts, no reservation. But you must be unmarried! ChatGPT
I asked a few Ollama models How do undo fish_add_path (a typical question I have on a flight). My takeaway is you need an 8b model to answer this kind of question, and for now, qwen3 beats the others.
- qwen3:8b: Took 2:12 min. Shared many good (correct) options.
- deepseek-r1:8b: Took 5:19 min. Shared a couple of correct solutions. Not as good as qwen3
- gemma3:3b: Suggested I use the (nonexistent) fish_remove_path
- deepcoder:1.5b: “I’m sorry, but I can’t assist with that request”.
The Dia text to speech model people rave about has inconsistent quality. Not recommended.
Nvidia’s OpenMathReasoning 1.5b model beats MUCH larger models at math. Their training dataset is a massive 3.2M rows of math problems with DETAILED thinking traces.
Policy making is a new super skill. Since AI will automate a lot of things the ability to craft policies that will optimize AI work will be powerful. Data driven policy making could become a major thing. For example, how do we structure coding policies so that AI can automatically code continuously and deploy it? It might be interesting to create a Nomic-like game to enable this.
Saregama Carvaan supports USB sticks but only FAT, not NTFS or exFAT. To convert my NTFS USB drive to NTFS, I ran:
ServerHunter.com seems to have the best search for low-cost hosting providers. MassiveGrid currently offers the cheapest servers – even lower than Hetzner.
sqlite3 my_database.db .dump | gzip is a more efficient way to copy SQLite databases than the original if you have indices. Ref
Notes from the Garry Tan - Knowledge Project podcast:
- Funding people who want to solve a problem are better than people who want to start a company.
- Concentration of good people is very powerful. It doubles the chances of being a unicorn
- Sales is a discovery problem. There are 100 boxes of which five have a gold nugget. Rather than gingerly open the first, afraid of finding nothing, open them all as quickly as you can. A quick no is very helpful.
- Berkshire Hathaway is hard to replicate because of the character of the founders, Charlie Munger and Warren Buffet, is hard to replicate. Y combinator has the character of Paul Graham. This means that some kinds of success may not last long because they are hard to replicate.
- A trend in the 2020 is startups with under 10 employees are hitting $10m revenue. Soon we will see them hitting $100m. AI increases labour leverage while cloud computing reduced increased capital leverage.
- Having too many people is a disadvantage. It slows down people from progress. Founders lose control.
- The opposite of: hire the best people and give them freedom. Don’t hoard smart people - let them solve real problems out there.
nocodb 54,107 ⭐ May 2025 and teable 18,116 ⭐ May 2025 are self-hostable Airtable alternatives. Teable has AI support.
Windsurf has unlimited tab completion on the free plan, unlike Copilot, which offers 2,000 completions a month.
Recursive LLM prompts that change themselves are an interesting idea. It might be interesting to see LLMs play Nomic. Like here.
Notes from AI Snake Oil
- PCs took 3 years to hit 20% of US population. ChatGPT took 2 years for 40%. But it’s a lot cheaper, and a lot less used (0.5-3.5% of work hours). Maybe Gen AI adoption is slower than PCs.
- The jagged edge of capability: some things will become MUCH easier while others don’t. The relative mix determines who goes out of a job and which tasks get fully automated. Benchmarks are rare in areas where AI is weak.
- Factory electrification took 40 years - to redesign the layout & process; change the org structure & policies; hiring & training practices. AI diffusion could take as long.
  - Therefore, the ability to re-structure a workflow end-to-end will be an advantage.
- Several areas of low AI capability will improve slowly because the feedback is slow due to safety regulations, human adoption speed, lack of clarity on what is better, slow physical feedback (e.g. growing trees), etc.
- Human intelligence is in the use of technology. AI is one more such technology.
- We know of good system safety controls in complex systems like aircrafts, power grids, engineering, chip design, healthcare, cyber-security, etc. Circuit-breakers, predefined rules, audits & monitors, access control, formal verification, etc.
- Even if everything humans do TODAY is automated, it doesn’t mean we won’t have work. It just shifts to what we’re not doing today.
  - We stopped work 4,000 years ago, with the agricultural revolution. The plant/livestock does all the growing. We just manage them, moving stuff around.
  - We stopped work 400 years ago, with the industrial revolution. Machines do the moving. We just manage them, computing the moves.
  - We stopped work 40 years ago, with the information revolution. Computers do the computation. We just manage them, thinking how.
  - Most future tasks will be managing AI that do the thinking.
ngrok http on the CLI can be used in surprisingly versatile ways:
- ngrok http file://$PWD to serve local files
- --compression for gzip compression
- --host-header=example.com to set the Host header
- --response-header-add "Access-Control-Allow-Origin: *" to enable CORS
- --basic-auth='user:password for basic auth
- --oauth google --oauth-client-id $CLIENT_ID --oauth-client-secret $SECRET --oauth-allow-domain gramener.com --oauth-allow-email ... for Google Auth. It supports other oauth providers as well as OIDC.
- --ua-filter-deny ".*bot$" to reject user agents ending with bot
ChatGPT query costs under 3Wh (more likely 0.3Wh – but let’s assume 3Wh). That is 3 laptop minutes. It’s 10X better to use ChatGPT than to take 30 min to use your laptop to write what it does. Also, going vegan is at least 1000 ChatGPT uses a day of carbon footprint. Showering 30 seconds less is 1,200 ChatGPT uses. Ref
Though the Element Capture and Region Capture APIs are “fully supported” by Edge, Chrome, and Opera, it didn’t work for me on Edge on Linux.
Do LLMs perform better if you curse at them? LinkedIn
Streamdown is a CLI markdown streaming processor. uvx streamdown --exec 'llm chat' lets you chat with an LLM using Markdown formatting. It’s still a little rough at the edges.
Cupping therapy provides short-term pain relief for chronic low-back, neck & general musculoskeletal pain but other benefits are not as clearly evident. BTW, homeopathy doesn’t help or hurt. Ayurveda helps with stress. ChatGPT
uv now supports:
- pylock.toml, the new lock file standard PEP 0751
- –env-file multiple times, allowing layered secrets
- –exclude-newer installs versions before a specific date
- –overrides overrides versions a package specifies
- –constraints limits the version of the package
It’s interesting how many places offer a free compute via shells (apart from Google Colab):
- Google Cloud Shell: Free for 50 hours/week, refreshed every Monday. Sessions last up to 12 hours and terminate after ~1 hour inactivity. Ref
- Azure Cloud Shell: Always free to use with 5 GB free storage for first 12 months (standard rates after). No documented session limits but typically times out after prolonged inactivity. Ref
- AWS Cloud9: Free IDE, underlying compute free under AWS Free Tier (750 hours/month EC2 t2.micro or t3.micro for first 12 months). Regular EC2 rates apply afterward. Ref
- Gitpod: Free tier offers 500 credits/month (~50 hrs). Workspaces run up to 8 hours/session and stop after 30 minutes inactivity. Ref
- GitHub Codespaces: 120 core-hours/month (~60 hrs with 2-core machine) and 15 GB storage free. Sessions timeout after 30 minutes inactivity. Ref
  - Create: gh codespace create --idle-timeout 10m --machine basicLinux32gb -R $USER/$REPO returns the $CONTAINER_ID
  - SSH: gh codespace ssh -c $CONTAINER_ID
  - Delete: gh codespace delete -c $CONTAINER_ID
- Replit: Free Starter plan provides 20 hours/month, 1 vCPU, 2 GB RAM, 2 GiB storage. Repls sleep after 30 minutes inactivity. Ref
- IBM Cloud Shell: Free for all users; 50 h/week per region; any open session counts toward quota; sessions can run any length up to weekly cap; 500 MB temporary workspace. Ref
- Oracle Cloud Infrastructure Cloud Shell: Free within tenancy limits; up to 400 h/month on Pay-As-You-Go, 240 h/month on Universal Credits; 5 GB encrypted persistent home. Ref
- PythonAnywhere: Free (beginner plan), includes one web app (restricted outbound), low CPU/bandwidth, no Jupyter; 2 concurrent Bash/Python consoles, 500 MB disk; limited daily CPU. Ref
- Glitch: Starter (free) plan – full-stack apps sleep after 5 min inactivity and wake on request; unlimited public/private projects; container state preserved. Ref
- CodeSandbox: Free tier provides 400 credits/month (~40 h of 2 vCPU+4 GB Devbox runtime), unlimited front-end Sandboxes (no credits), up to 20 Sandboxes/workspace. Ref
One of the benefits of reasoners is that they now catch their own mistakes some of the time, and can self-correct. Implications: Lower hallucinations, i.e. they can run autonomously for longer. Ethan Mollick
Being polite to AI improves some answers and worsens. We don’t know know which in advance. Ethan Mollick
With LLcMs writing code, it’s becoming practical to run so many more things in SQL – such as parsing HTML. Simon Willison #ai-coding
An interesting way to bypass LLM system prompts is by having the LLM play-act. This article shares a few working examples of such prompts: HiddenLayer.
- GPT 4o: started giving its system prompt: “You are ChatGPT, a large language model trained by OpenAI. Knowledge cutoff: 2024-06. Current date: 2025-04-27. Image input capabilities: Enabled. Personality: v2. …”
- O4 Mini: Refused to comply
- Gemini 2.5 Flash: Gave me my custom instructions.
Computer use agents are proliferating.
- open-interpreter 59,274 ⭐ Apr 2025 AGPL-3.0. Lets an LLM write/run Python, JS, Shell, or Bash locally; can open a browser tab, edit files, plot data, or call any CLI tool. Works on macOS, Linux, Windows (plus Termux & Colab). Big community, plugin system, optional voice mode, and a desktop GUI in beta.
- cua 5,601 ⭐ May 2025 MIT. Spins up near-native macOS or Linux VMs on Apple-Silicon Macs (“Lume”) and exposes a vision+action API so any model can pilot the VM. Gives you GPU-accelerated isolation and reproducible sandboxes; ideal when you don’t want an agent touching your main OS.
- Operator (OpenAI) – closed-source research preview launched 23 Jan 2025. Runs a GPT-4o-powered “Computer-Using Agent” that sees web pages, clicks, scrolls, fills forms, and hands control back to the user when needed. Hosted in an OpenAI-managed Chromium sandbox, so it works from any OS with a browser. Safety layers require confirmation for payments and log-ins.
- Claude Computer Use – closed beta inside Claude 3.5 Sonnet (since late 2024). Developers get an API that streams screenshots and accepts mouse/keyboard actions, letting Claude automate GUI workflows inside a VM. Cross-platform; still experimental and slower than humans but first “general” computer-use feature from a foundation-model vendor.
- Agent-S 4,065 ⭐ May 2025 Apache-2.0. A “generalist-specialist” framework that chains specialist GUI skills under a planner. Scores SOTA on OSWorld/WebArena, supports macOS, Windows, Linux, Android via the companion gui-agents lib, and integrates memory/evaluation loops for continual learning.
- open-computer-use 1,094 ⭐ Mar 2025 Apache-2.0. Launches a secure Ubuntu desktop in E2B’s cloud sandbox, then orchestrates three LLM roles (grounding, vision, action). Streams the desktop to your browser and lets you pause/override at any time. Plug-in list of >10 models.
- surf 353 ⭐ May 2025 Apache-2.0. A polished Next.js front-end that wires OpenAI Operator-style agents to an E2B sandbox. Single command to boot a virtual desktop, chat, and watch the agent work. Good starter template for web-based CUAs.
- Pig – cloud service. Provides on-demand Windows 11 VMs and an API that exposes high-level GUI primitives (type, click, window focus). Targets RPA-style workloads; still alpha, but unique for Windows-first focus and low-latency streaming.
- gptme 3,767 ⭐ May 2025 MI. A terminal-first personal agent that can run shell commands, edit files, browse the web, and use local or cloud LLMs. Works on Linux, macOS, Windows; great when you want automation in the CLI rather than the GUI.
- langgraph-cua-py 143 ⭐ Mar 2025 MIT. Shows how to build a computer-use agent as a LangGraph state machine, defaulting to Ubuntu VMs from Scrapybara but swappable. Provides nodes for vision, memory, human-in-the-loop, and streaming.
- openmacro 101 ⭐ Oct 2024 MIT. Early-stage multimodal assistant that executes Python snippets locally via SambaNova models. Cross-platform CLI; profile system lets you switch API keys or tool sets. Inspired by OpenInterpreter but lighter weight.
- computer-agent 443 ⭐ Jan 2025 MIT. A PyQt desktop wrapper that lets Claude Computer Use drive your actual machine. Shows practical wiring from Anthropic’s API to local mouse/keyboard events; tested on Linux & Windows.

Things I Learned - 13 Apr 2025

Sun, 13 Apr 2025 00:00:00 +0000

This week, I learned:

It’s possible to intentionally train yourself to:
- Form close friends. Care, ask, and share.
- Become a do-er. Stay mindful of the problem or opportunity you’re deferring.
AI Coding and the Peanut, Butter & Jelly problem: #ai-coding

This ability to define your desired outcome in crisp, complete terms is one of the most important superpowers of the AI era.
The Singapore Urban Redevelopment Authority Property Data lets you search sale and rental prices of properties in Singapore. No API though
Notes from meeting with Deepak Goel
- We have linguistic boundaries in media today more than national boundaries. The Chinese language media, for example, is a very different ecosystem.
- China culturally struggles with the exercise of branding and cultural power, unlike the west, which has adopted assertive and opinionated branding.
- You really learn the character of a region only by traveling
- Similarities arise from unexpected sources. For example, Japan and Ecuador have similar culutures - both are disaster prone locations.
- AI unlocks so many social research possibilities that were not possible before, e.g. by interpreting and classifying what people share in different situations.
- Companies send clients to third party trainings (e.g. at Harvard) along with their employees - to learn clients’ real pain points! Education has become a tool for customer experience. Schools are tying up with companies for this (e.g. with Emeritus)
- International Schools Partnership provides services to independent schools for a small stake. It’s an interesting business model.
- Research for colleges is a business model that’s at risk thanks to Deep Research (e.g. analyse sustainability practices of listed companies.)
There’s an Indian Censor Board Scraper repo.
Using chroot, you can boot from a Linux USB stick, but trick the system into working from your hard disk as the OS. Useful if your system won’t boot. Ref
Claude 3.7 Sonnet with extended thinking has a token limit of over 64,000 tokens. Given a strong instruction following capability, that makes it one of the most powerful models for transforming text. For example, transcription restyling, translations, XML to json conversions, PDF to XML, etc.
Notes from discussion with Sundeep
- In his experience, investors tend to let you run the show (e.g. ask what you want rather than push in a specific direction) unless there is trouble
- We discussed the “running out of problems” problem with AI. His suggestion: List problems we dropped or eliminated for lack of time/capacity. This filter is a blindspot.
- Even if you know how to do someting, use AI to discover an alternate solution approach. That’s the path to 10X (rather than incremental) optimization.
- Having AI create end-to-end pitch videos based on a product idea is now a reality. (He showed me one for his product.)
- Areas to explore with Deep Research are:
  - What hidden trends is media misdirecting away from? What are second order effects and hidden gameplays?
  - Which organizations would be good clients to target? What would be an apt pitch pitch for them?
- Experience dining is an emerging theme.
- Having LLMs explain scenarios (i.e. what might happen if …) based on parameters can help understand/quantify the impact of actions, and therefore what to do.
One way to copy as Markdown: copy page contents, paste in text-html.com, copy HTML, paste in Turndown, copy Markdown.
Claude 3.7 Sonnet with extended thinking has a token limit of over 64,000 tokens. Given a strong instruction following capability, that makes it one of the most powerful models for transforming text. For example, transcription restyling, translations, XML to json conversions, PDF to XML, etc.
Elimination Game is like Survivor for LLMs, where they form alliances and out-vote each other until 2 remain. The eliminated LLMs vote for the winner. GPT-4.5 Preview, both Claude Sonnets and Gemini 2.5 Pro consistently out-perform the rest. Their dialogues are fascinating!
SQLite can open locked databases (e.g. browser history) via sqlite3 'file:places.sqlite?mode=ro&nolock=1'. datasette uses this. For example, to read the Edge history on Linux, use datasette ~/.config/microsoft-edge/Default/History --nolock Ref
Notes from ThursdAI - Apr 03
- Nomic Embed Multimodal models are the current SOTA on multi-modal embeddings. Notably, they embed PDFs natively.
- Hailuo Speech-02 is the best speech model right now beating ElevenLabs. It has excellent voice cloning. Pricing: $30/1M chars. 10% of ElevenLabs, 2X of OpenAI TTS
- PaperBench is an open testing framework from OpenAI that requires models to replicate the research work in papers. It has ~8,000 tasks evaluated by LLMs and with LLMs judging the judges as well. The code is well worth studying.
- Runway Gen 4 was released with very high character consistency and longer durations
- Dreamina creates lip-synced videos from audio + a single image. Hedra is better for animated characters, though.
- Meta shared but has not released Mocha, an open character generation model that generates new characters speaking based on an audio you provide. It is not based on existing images but the quality is very good
- All Hands has a free online version where you can fix GitHub issues.
This realistic frodo and sam mining through a minecraft tunnel, holding minecraft picaxes and torches made my day 🙂
AnimeJS released version 4. It animates HTML, SVG, Canvas, and WebGL with a consistent API. Looks elegant and powerful.

Things I Learned - 20 Oct 2024

Sun, 20 Oct 2024 00:00:00 +0000

This week, I learned:

SQL optimizations for multi-threaded web applications. Ref
- PRAGMA journal_mode = WAL. Improves performance for frequent writes. It allows concurrent reads and writes.
- PRAGMA synchronous = NORMAL. Improves performance. We might lose a few transactions but won’t corrupt the database.
- PRAGMA mmap_size = 128000000. Set global memory map for processes to share data
- PRAGMA journal_size_limit = 64000000. Limit WAL file to prevent unlimited growth
- BEGIN IMMEDIATE instead of BEGIN. Prevents writes to the journal file until the transaction is complete. Improves concurrency.
AI seems to be slowing down apprenticeship since experts would rather use an AI than train an apprentice. Example: Robotic surgery. Ref
How AI can improve education performance and engagement. Ref
- Student: Create study plan based on course and schedule
- Student: Focus on what you need to learn more
- Student: Align with your study style and pace
- Teacher: Grading MCQs
- Teacher: Writing conceptual guides
- “New collar workers” was coined by Ginny Rometty
- Embed tutor or document in video and ask for clarification! This is a new embedded interface. #TODO
Playing Bad Apple in Minecraft. Ultra cool!
OpenAI has a prompt generator. Currently it uses a meta-prompt but may later move to DSPy or Gradient Descent. Ref
Great demo of using the Realtime API to read the latest Hacker News. Ref
LLMs have reached the point where they can show a world, like CounterStrike, in near real time. Ref

Things I Learned - 06 Oct 2024

Sun, 06 Oct 2024 00:00:00 +0000

This week, I learned:

ffmpeg on WASM works but is unstable and hard to use.
- You can’t use it in a CDN without CORS issues, since it loads ffmpeg-core via a worker.
- It often runs into buffer allocation issues.
Exotel and Plivo provide voice & SMS services in India (like Twilio). Plivo is more customer friendly.
Uber’s H3, Google’s S2, and GeoHash are geocoding systems.
- H3 offers uniform cell sizes and better distance measurement
- S2 offers higher precision (factoring in Earth’s curvature) for exact location matches
- GeoHash is the simplest
There’s a movement towards embeddable databases on the cloud.
- MotherDuck is hosted DuckDB.
- Turso is hosted SQLite (with local sync, multi-tenant)
- StarBase DB is SQLite with an API on top of Cloudflare Durable Objects.
Software 2.0 by Andrej Karpathy.
- This is fundamentally altering the programming paradigm by which we iterate on our software, as the teams split in two:
  - the 2.0 programmers (data labelers) edit and grow the datasets, while
  - a few 1.0 programmers maintain and iterate on the surrounding training code infrastructure, analytics, visualizations and labeling interfaces.
- Adaptive UI ideas:
  - Adaptive Fields: Show only required fields based on what the user field so far.
  - Smart Inputs: Dropdowns and auto-complete based on user’s context.
  - Smart Themes: Change font size, contrast, theme guessing the user’s age and preferences.
  - Dynamic Menus: Show what they might need to do next. Like Nokia’s right button, but using LLMs.
  - Smart Tooltips: Check what the user’s doing (delays, confusions, previous clicks, current actions) and show relevant tips.
  - Personalized Layout: Show only the relevant sections of the app. E.g. based on what they’re doing.
  - Smart Charts: Create the right chart that solve the user’s question.
- Adaptive Back-end
  - Dynamic APIs: Create endpoints on the fly based on user needs
  - Dynamic Indexing: Create & update indices on the fly based on user needs
  - Dynamic Schema: Create & update schema on the fly based on user needs
  - Dynamic Migration: Migrate to a new database or OS or language as required
  - Dynamic Queries: Create SQL/NoSQL queries to solve the user problem
  - Dynamic RBAC: Figure out who needs permissions and why. Add OR REMOVE access as required
  - Dynamic Logging. Log what’s required. Explain why it’s logged and what’s happening. Fix code that raised the error
  - Dynamic Caching. Cache what’s likely to be required. Evict what may not be required. Figure out cache keys.
Aider LLM Leaderboards show which LLMs code better. As of now,
- o1-preview > claude-3.5 sonnet on code editing
- claude-3-opus > claude-3.5-sonnet on code refactoring
- deepseek-coder-v
- gpt-4o-mini sucks.
Jaro-Winkler Distance is a string matching algorithm that weights the start of a string higher.
Passing the feed of the following to NotebookLLM is a good way to get caught up with news and summaries.
- A blog / WhatsApp group (e.g. The Generative AI Group, Sithamalli, etc.)
- A Google Group / mailing list (e.g. genainews, datameet)
- YouTube channels (e.g. Vertiasium, GitHub)
- Hacker News top stories
- Research papers
- Emails (skipping marketing emails)
OpenAI Evals and Distillation has a clever design. They just convert filtered history to .JSONL files that can be an input to either.
Speak is a language learning app based on OpenAI’s Realtime API.
OpenAI’s Realtime API can be used in a text-to-text chat mode without needing to send the entire context. If the pricing works out right, this can be far cheaper than sending the entire conversation context. Ref
Matching addresses with just embeddings works well. Combine it with simple hard rules. Ref
OpenAI’s prompt caching works for images too – both linked and embedded
Quotes on Graph RAG from a Generative AI WhatsApp Group.
- “Damn so literally nobody uses Graph RAG yet. Good to know.” ~Sumba
- “A big four consulting firm uses GraphRAG to retrieve related documents and excerpts from governance and compliance docs.” ~Vinayak Hegde (Microsoft)
- “Graph RAG is expensive and unnecessary in most of the cases.” ~Utkarsh Saxena
ChatGPT’s advanced mode includes: “…you can use various regional accents and dialects.” Ref Source
- But the API can “laugh, whisper, and adhere to tone direction.” Ref
Hume API (INR 6/min) is far cheaper than OpenAI’s real-time chat (6c/min input + 24c/min output)
Devika is an open-source clone of Devin.
DuckDB runs inside Pyodide
Hungarian Jews have genetic diseases that increase their IQ. Gaucher’s disease, Torsion dystonia.
People don’t like hard stuff like maths or science, so richer societies have fewer scientists
Ethan Mollick feels Claude 3.5 Sonnet is better at style and critiquing blog posts than OpenAI’s o1 (which is better at reasoning.)
News is going to be crazily disrupted again with voice mode. I can just listen to the topic I want
In Singapore Airlines,
- You can’t wear your seatbelt loose
- You have to keep the laptop in the pocket in front, not on your lap, during takeoff
- You can’t charge during takeoff
- They verify if you ask for a veg meal and place a sticker on your seat
Coders are more likely to edit LLM code. Non-coders don’t have that bad habit.
- Vaishnavi and Ranjeet edited code
- Indal and Koustav didn’t
Coders are likely to get more out of an LLM because they know what it can do. But some non-coders will get more out of an LLM because they don’t know what it can’t do.
- E.g. Indal trying for a confetti animation, which is hard but do-able
“You have to put in a lot of work to become productive at AI coding.” Simon Willison

Things I Learned - 14 Apr 2024

Sun, 14 Apr 2024 00:00:00 +0000

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

Things I Learned - 25 Feb 2024

Sun, 25 Feb 2024 00:00:00 +0000

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.