Things I Learned - 03 Nov 2024

This week, I learned:

• Indian companies with 30+ employees MUST have 2.5%-15% of their employees as apprentices. Ref
• Textnow and TextFree provides a free phone number (like a virtual SIM). (But TextFree has more ads.) Keep using to avoid deactivation. No guarantee of retaining the number.
  • Some banks don’t accept TextNow for verification SMS. But voice call is OK.
  • Tello, Red pocket are cheap MVNOs with $5/month voice plans.
  • Metro by T-Mobile and Cricket are other MVNOs.
  • MintMobile and US Mobile have $15/month and $8/month data plans.
• The scientific discoveries that might have remained undiscovered for long if not for their discoverers Ref
  • Newton’s discovery of the universal law of gravitation
  • Einstein’s discovery of General Relativity
  • McClintock’s discovery of Transposable Elements: genes that can turn physical characteristics on and off
  • Mullis’ invention of the PCR that makes billions of DNA copies rapidly
• VibeCheck can predict a model based on its vibes 80% of the time.
• /llms.txt is a proposal to standardize /llms.txt files as a way to share LLM prompts.
  • Jina AI Meta Prompt is an example
  • Remotion system prompt is an example
  • https://docs.fastht.ml/llms-ctx.txt
  • https://docs.fastht.ml/llms-ctx-full.txt
• structuredClone deep clones objects in JS
• F5-TTS clones voices with just 15-second samples.
• Rust has crazy low memory usage too. Spawning thousands of child processes is common and OK these days. Ref
• SetInterval is a good idea in cyborg scraping. Ref
• GH CLI is quite good for deployment too, like Wrangler CLI. Enabling pages, setting secrets, etc.
• Restic is a CLI backup tool. Just like git. Works well with rclone.
• NotebookLlama is an open source podcast generator like NotebookLM
• Pragmatic Podcast (I forgot which one)
  • Automate changelogs for your codebases. Convert past commits into attractive release notes automatically
  • AI is going to be the consumer of many tools and logs. Build converters for these
  • Speed of validation such as linting, testing, etc. will allow LLMs to iterate faster and WILL become more important
• Via Soumya Ranjan
  • Vision embedding is useful in agile modeling
  • Vision embedding models with SAM, Grounding Dino by meta, Alibaba does good stuff
  • Vision embedding is more useful in batch than real time
  • Embedding subtraction with vision embedding models like Dino
• AI code editors are not good with large code bases today. Keep the refactoring exercises to below 1000 lines. Also evaluate the ease of setting it up locally
• Deepseek Janus is a 1.3b model that can generate both text AND images (and also supports vision)
• Cohere Multimodal Embed v3 is available on Azure.
• Elevenlabs lets you create voices with a prompt. No need to even clone one!
• Runway Act One creates expressive character performances