wasm 4

This week, I learned: WebApps are a depreciated store of value. Earlier, a web-app would have impressed me because the capability to create it is rare, and the effort to create it is high. Today, when I see a “localhost:3000” or a “replit.app” domain, I mentally discount the effort behind it and ask: How rare is the capability to create this with a coding agent and how much effort is it. THAT determines the value of what I see. Part of the value is “Look ma, no hands!” and it’s delightful they’ve learnt. Part of the value is “There’s gold in them thar hills!” and use-case discovery is important. WaveCity is a WASM build of Audacity, i.e. Audacity running in the browser! Audiomass is a similar but simpler audio editor - again, WASM-based. Gemini

This week, I learned: The Disconnected Git Workflow explains how to use the git send-email workflow. That’s like using email instead of GitHub as the collaboration mechanism - decentralizing and reducing dependencies. Grok throws a HTTP 431 when you pass it a query over 6,890 characters in the URL. Here’s an example with 6,900 characters. As of now, there’s no way to tell uv to use the cache and install only missing repos (#15454). But this is Deno’s default behavior, making Deno a slightly better choice in this regard. Shelling Out Sucks shares common pitfalls when calling the shell from programs. Suggestion: Shell-escape ALL inputs. Use set -o pipefail to detect failures in the middle of a pipe chain. Explicitly check the error code, not just stderr. dax, which is based on zx, is a simpler Deno-based alternative to shell scripts. See examples. ChatGPT. However, scripting language matters more when humans maintain shell scripts. Since I’m using AI, it’s easier to use bash scripts and let it handle any complexities. git push --force-with-lease is like git push --force but won’t overwrite if others have pushed in the meantime. Default to this instead of --force – it’s safer. Microsoft’s docfind generates a WASM search index for documents, building a dependency free browser based compact and fast search. diffs seems a promising library for rendering diffs in the browser. Genie 3 seems pretty good. We should expect to see World Models becoming usable in a few months.

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

This week, I learned: Transparent LED screens will be useful in windshieds to display maps as we drive. Marimo is a reactive alternative to Jupyter notebooks that saves files as pure Python. To run an org-specific chatbot on your own LLM: (via awesome-chatgpt) opengpts - but it doesn’t support auth chatbot-ui - but Supabase is hard to install anse - but it doesn’t support auth ChatGPT-Next-Web - but it doesn’t support auth Python 3.13 gets a store and copy JIT If an npm package adds another package as a dependency with version “*”, target package cannot unpublish ANY version! So this is a way of freezing EVERY repo and preventing unpublishing of EVERY version – an unintentional flaw in the npm design. via Quantization is better than fewer parameters. So prefer high parameters (e.g. 70b) and quantize to 4-bit. In-browser playgrounds has compiled WASM versions of Python, PHP, SQLite. Happiness Lab podcast. Happiness lessons of the ancients Talking to strangers makes us happy Giving money makes us happy Free time makes us happier than working hard Tangi Domain-specific models being beaten by general purpose models is a phase. It will reverse towards domain. AI will potentially help build and understand domain-specific models Models are evolving so rapidly that humans cannot interpret models. We need a process to interpret models! xAI, Responsible AI, Physics-guided or Knowledge-guided models (called grey box models) are therefore a trend CS papers Don’t review other papers, certainly not other fields. Disregard measurement errors. When CS papers get applied to climate, manufacturing or biology, we’ll worry about Interpretability Domain-specific mechanics. (Introduce that into the training as a constraint.) Many domain experts are using AI to UNDERSTAND their process. Need to explore Uncertainty IB adds context to make learning applicable. But that distracts from the core learning, and if there’s a gap it widens Most data science courses teach “Python science”, not data science. They teach a bunch of models. They don’t teach how even one kind of model e.g. LSTM works. Most coaching programs today teach FAMILIARITY with problems, not critical thinking Most of current education will become redundant thanks to LLMs. For students AND teachers Coding will become irrelevant Cognitive thinking, reasoning, human relations, systems thinking will become more relevant Troubleshooting will become more important. AI is not self-diagnosing. I would hire someone who can figure out something is going wrong, diagnose what’s going wrong, and fix it #TODO Hire for troubleshooting ability. Give a Q, an A, and ask them to figure out if it’s wrong, why, and fix it All my exams and quizzes are open book, open ChatGPT. Onus is on me to give a problem that forces you to think. #TODO Write a question paper that is ChatGPT proof. Exploring AI could be a ToK subject. “How to interact with an AI?” We need a manual on how to use AI. Like Simon Willison says Content doesn’t suffice. You need pedegogy. What to serve you at what time, how, how to assess. Lots of businesses are filling this gap Students get great confidence when a teacher points to online content and says, I"ll tell you WHAT to see" and COMPLEMENTS that in their class “The map is not the territory.” Most people confuse sample mean for the actual. #ASK Parameter estimation -> Signal estimation -> State estimation Stats vs DL differ in that There is no notion of a defined “truth”. Hence reliability is not measurable Parameters have no value. Hence interpretability is ignored. #TODO Read 2020 National Education Policy. It’s quite modern. We need a manual on self-learning too Listening is not learning. You know only if you implement. Levels for students: I can solve it. I can explain why it works. I can find alternatives. I can apply it to a new area, reformulating (requires imagination.) For teachers, you also need: Responsible learning (extra careful about what to teach and how to teach, to exceite them, to teach at THEIR level). Show the universality and connecting to other concepts. E.g. noise reduction with FT is like using water to remove dirt. Transform to water domain, remove dirt, transform back to air domain. It’s better than dusting clothes to remove clothes. Washing machine programs are just different models of removing noise in the water domain. Teach people who WANT to learn AND who will APPLY it long-term. That’s what maximizes impact Grad students are more satisfying that way. Else, it is WASTED effort. (Not that it’s a bad thing for the student, but the effort IS wasted for the teacher) Therefore, I believe students should have general engineering first, and let students pick specialization later. Some universitie are doing that. #THINK Students remember my philosophy more than my content. We impart character, not just knowledge. Astrology and horoscopes serve a different function. They provide explainability, not predictive ability. As the world becomes less explainable, the need for astrology will grow. Explainability is about creating STORIES that fits data plausibly. It has nothing to do with data or truth. Explainability and predictive ability and reproducibility are all different. Maybe, Science is about the latter two, less about explainability. Astrology is a model. The map is not the territory. It’s an explanatory, not a predictive model. #THINK Therefore, my lessons are just explanations. Stats about experiments are STILL explanations. They are NOT reproducible or predictive. Hence not yet science The meaning of our life is the transformation we undergo in our lives #TODO Read “The Journey of Souls” by Michael Newton. A hypnotherapist #TODO Try regression therapy / hypnosis. Record it and listen to it. Just for fun! Rohini Deshpande Slam book was the Facebook of the 1900s Prepared mind is an extremely powerful tool for learning. Practice prepared mind When women drop out of education or career, that is also a waste from the teacher and system perspective The time for career growth is the same as child bearing time for women. That’s not true for men. But child rearing can be done by either. That’s not recognised. It’s 0K for a man to raise the child and make the home and 0K to treat that as the default Since men are more senior, it’s usually logical for them to stay in their jobs. That’s a systematic bias. When seniors advise women to step back. they respect it. That widens the barrier. Why not eliminate that situation? Be proud of the working women in the family Stats are just a symptom. They don’t explain the cause. (Map is not the territory.) Explanations are what really helps us fix the cause. Hence stories are important. Read Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy RV Athimber health tips: Eat foods with low glycemic index Eliminate free salt completely Voyage AI Embeddings have a higher quality, similar price compared to OpenAI embeddings. There’s a clear benefit to replacing text-embedding-3-large with voyage-3-lite. There’s a 200 MTok free tier currently. mixtral-offloading cleverly loads only the model layer required at any point, letting you run Mixtral 8x7b on Colab Free and on 16GB GPUs. This notebook runs on Colab Free too. CodeGPT is an alternative to Github Copilot that can use any LLM.