Nine things, Space, Rust, Pi? Oh my!
Asked about backlash to AI, Superhuman Mail CEO Rahul Vohra — whose company makes an AI-powered email assistant — seemed unfamiliar with the premise of the question. After hearing about poor polling around AI, he responded: “We don’t really see that.”
Keep in mind that AI has not increased the number of people who need software, or the number of maintainers who can review it. It has mostly increased the amount of code and the number of projects competing for attention. Some of that is healthy, but a lot of it fragments effort that should be shared.
Replacing a 3 GB SQLite db with a 10 MB FST
I do wish to point out, of course, that the whole reason it was possible to experiment cheaply and come across this serendipity was because 9 months ago, faced with the choice to either do the bad easy thing or the good nothing, I chose to do the bad easy thing.5
Ask an Astronaut: 333 hours of Q&A footage with astronauts : I’m at a loss for words, just see it for yourself. Saving it for Lin Lin and myself.
Watch a neural net learn to play Snake : Mesmerising to watch, it does seem to abruptly stop occasionally. Refresh the page if it does.
Our final finding is straightforward but important: training on a broad set of safety-relevant environments improves alignment generalization. Capabilities-focused distributions of RL environment mixes are changing and increasing rapidly; it is not sufficient to assume that standard RLHF datasets will continue to generalize as well as they had in the past.
Idempotency is easy until the second request is different
Leave Me Behind : Adam McNeilly’s quiet end-of-an-era post ruminating about the good old days. While I understand their sentiments, and the human mentorship angle, I don’t agree with the overall negativity. You can certainly leverage AI tools to fast-track your learnings. Not everyone had access to great seniors and mentors. The job was never solely about writing code, although that was the allure. We were paid to collaborate and build to generate value for our users and employers. The need for that collaboration and thus human touch, has not gone away.
Torrix, self hosted LLM observability, no Postgres, no Redis