This week, I learned:

  • GPT For Work has a set of useful spreadsheet LLM functions
  • Xata offers a free PostgreSQL tier with REST API
  • Mamba now uses mambaforge as the default installation, i.e. conda-forge is the default and only channel!
    • Update: 6 Jun 2025. Mambaforge is sunset as of 29 Jul 2024. Conda-forge now uses Miniforge as the standard installer Ref conda-forge.org. Users should switch to Miniforge instead.
  • nginx supports a load-balancing method least_conn which is far better than the default round-robin.
  • #IMPOSSIBLE LLMs cannot provide a bounding box of objects in images. (Maybe Florence 2 can). Update: Mar 2025. Gemini has good timestamps and bounding boxes
  • Models gently grow in capability. It helps to maintain an impossibility list that steadily gets invalidated. Ref
  • Github Copilot internals walks through how Copilot constructs its prompts