The Human Constant The technology is neutral, and any prediction of either utopia or oblivion is vastly oversimplified. — Nathaniel S. Borenstein The Spirit of a Cyborg opens with Nathaniel Borenstein listing the contrasts that fit inside a single lifetime, his own. …
I don’t think people gave much thought to the environment when they invented ships. Sailing boats are one thing. They are carried along by the wind, which is a perfectly respectable arrangement. But anything that propels itself by kicking and pushing against the very thing …
I have a lot of information sitting in text files on disk, including Markdown notes, text files, source code, PDFs, Word documents, notebooks, and various other formats spread across local and external drives. Finding a file by name is easy. Finding a file because you remember …
Most software consultancies bill, one way or another, for the work of building software. AI now does a growing share of that building, 1, which raises an interesting question for anyone who charges by the hour: if a tool absorbs much of the construction, what is the client still …
Preamble This conversation tracks an engineer who started professional software development in October 2022 - two months before ChatGPT shipped. He arrived from outside the field with a music bachelor’s and a few years as a working classical guitarist. Four years on, he …
Illustration: Milla Jovovich engineering in a sea of documents A short case study in AI systems engineering: Hollywood actress Milla Jovovich released an AI memory system with 12k+ stars on GitHub. MemPalace - A short case study in AI engineering and marketing. Yes, that Milla …
From Single-Core Limits to Multi-Agent Systems Moore’s Law [1] fueled decades of computing progress by predicting the doubling of transistor density approximately every two years. For a long time, this translated into rapid gains in CPU speed-until thermal limits and the …
Introduction Large language models (LLMs) map sequences of text to other sequences of text. Given an input string, an LLM predicts the most probable continuation based on the statistical patterns it has learned during its training process. What makes LLMs remarkable is not merely …
There exist a broad selection of package managers that manage virtual environments and packages for us. Some of the most popular ones are conda, pip and virtualenv or virtualenvwrapper. They can almost all do the same things: Install packages Resolve dependencies Managing package …
Introduction During my time as a lead data engineer to build a predictive maintenance platform I came across the concept of the default heuristic. One of my tasks was to identify platform components that would allow us to scale storage and retrieval of time series sensory data to …
Introduction Large language models (LLMs) can behave very differently depending on how they were trained. BaseLLMs are trained purely on next-token prediction over a large corpus of text. Instruction-tuned LLMs, by contrast, are further trained to follow prompts in a more helpful …
Preamble In this insightful interview, Paul Bütow, a Principal Site Reliability Engineer at Mimecast, shares over a decade of experience in the field. Paul highlights the role of an Embedded SRE, emphasizing the importance of automation, observability, and effective incident …