Principles of Making

by Dineth Mendis

Category: LinkOffs

  • Bluesky seems cool

    I gave up on most things “social media” years ago, resorting to just messaging friends. However, I was fascinated by the idea of Bluesky. AT Protocol seems very interesting. So does its idea of applying composable moderation and selecting an algorithm to augment your personal experience instead of deciding a one-size-first-all approach. Perhaps the best…

  • How neural networks and LLMs work?

    How neural networks and LLMs work?

    If you are looking to dive into machine learning, how neural networks and LLMs work underneath, this is a really good YouTube course to watch. Really good chapters list: But what is a neural network? Gradient descent, how neural networks learn What is backpropagation really doing? Backpropagation calculus How large language models work, a visual…

  • Investing to catchup vs leapfrog

    Investing to catchup vs leapfrog

    It helps to find your own path to success. Good read about investing on catchup vs investing to leapfrog. …if your competitor’s boat gets ahead of you at the starting line, the instinct is to chase it. To tack where it tacks on the same path. But if you do, you will always be behind,…

  • Can AI make art?

    Can AI make art?

    Fantastic article on The New Yorker on “Why AI Isn’t Going to Make Art“. Thought provoking and plenty of good threads to reflect on. Article dives into the need to make so many little decisions in order to create something of value. With a prompt, the amount of decisions made are minuscule. Even with code…

  • What kind of principal engineer are you?

    What kind of principal engineer are you?

    What kind of principal / staff engineer are you? This is a really good guide around what each type of role entails. One of the reasons why a single levelling guideline for an IC is really tough. https://staffeng.com/guides/staff-archetypes The four common archetypes of Staff-plus roles I encountered are: ❶ The Tech Lead guides the approach…

  • Great read: the man who killed Google Search

    Great read: the man who killed Google Search

    …Google’s response to the Code Yellow was to roll back changes that were made to maintain the quality of search results. Yikes. It is yet another story about corporate greed destroying a great products. Passionate write up, well worth the read: https://www.wheresyoured.at/the-men-who-killed-google/ Thanks @Rob for the share. Coverage of Boeing troubles by John Olivier was…

  • Euclidean distance vs Cosine Similarity for text searches

    Good article on the topic: https://cmry.github.io/notes/euclidean-v-cosine

  • Barry to Google on “increasingly aggressive Google”

    Barry to Google on “increasingly aggressive Google”

    Worth the read (images in the post). Having been at Expedia, this issue is all too familiar. I hope someone does something. Google should profit share for the data they use to run their business, much like OpenAI should for its data for LLMs. Twitter link Barry Diller emails Google exec December 12, 2019 pic.twitter.com/UjyoDjQei4…

  • Anticipatory Failure Determination

    Anticipatory Failure Determination

    [AFD] has the objective of identifying and mitigating failures. Rather than asking developers to look for a cause of a failure mode, it reverses the problem by asking developers to view the failure of interest as the intended consequence and try to devise ways to assure that the failure always happens reliably Interesting way to…

  • Love the new Mini’s digital dashboard

    Love the new Mini’s digital dashboard

    …and there are physical buttons! Tesla’s dashboard definitely looks dated next to this.