39/Whither ChatGPT?

Monday, 2024-03-04 to Sunday, 2024-03-17

Created: by Pradeep Gowda Updated: Mar 04, 2024 Tagged: weekly

GenAI / LLM

Anthropic

Started playing with Anthropic’s LLM using their $5 credit and using simonw’s instructions #

Update 2023-03-07: I bought the subscription to Claude Pro at $20/mo. With this, I now have subscriptions to Anthropic $20, Gemini $20, Github Copilot $10. #

Anthropic presents a “workbench” at https://console.anthropic.com which allows you to iteratively work with the LLM. Eg: your prompt results in a response on the right hand side. You can “add to conversation” the response from LLM, and edit it. This edited version is used in subsequent conversations.

DSPY

DSPy from stanford nlp is a framework for algorithmically optimizing LM prompts and weights, especially when LMs are used one or more times within a pipeline.

Fructose

bananaml/fructose is a python package to create a dependable, strongly-typed interface around an LLM call. Just slap the @ai decorator on a type-annotated function and call it as you would a function. It’s lightweight, syntactic sugar.

–

I see my self doing lot more work with LLMs in coming days for Ollyver.

Databases

How Figma’s Databases Team Lived to Tell the Scale

 horizontally shard Figma’s Postgres stack, and the key to unlocking (nearly) infinite scalability.  

Pandoc

I often felt the default Table of Contents (TOC) rendered by Pandoc takes up too much valuable real estate “above the fold”, and there needs to be a way to render/style it so that it is a) off to the side b) can be hidden/unhidden easily. I found cysouw/toc-css to be one such project. An example of using toc-css Pandoc filter can be seen here.

So far I have not been able to use it successfully, but this is a great starting point, and the pandoc filter code is a good study in how to use filters. I found the use of lua table.insert to inject raw HTML to be very useful.

function addScript (doc)
  -- add javascript to the end of the document
  table.insert(doc.blocks, pandoc.RawBlock("html", script) )
  return(doc)
end

Site Notes

Started putting para-permalinks at the end of the paras like simonw. I feel it reads better than putting pilcrows at the beginning of the line.

Update Speaking of Simon, he apparently let his domain expire!. It can happen to the best, be on the lookout.

From around the web

Recalling Plums from the Wild - Arnold Arboretum via @pythonrocksnake – Fascinating history of the rise and fall of native plum cultivation.

This blog post Do It Now – Steve Pavlina (2005), showed up on HN recently. Steve Pavlina is one of the most popular blogs from the “golden era” of personal blogs, and I clearly remember this blog post. He was an entertaining read, but then he went down rabbit holes like polyphasic sleep, etc.. which is when I lost interest.