Notes

Fuck You Show Me the Prompt

Hamel dives deep into how LLM frameworks like langchain , instructor , and guidance perform tasks like formatting the response in a valid JSON output. He intercepts the API calls from these Python libraries to shed some light on how many API calls (to OpenAI’s GPT services) they make and what prompt they use. I’ve always been skeptic of the usefulness of many of the LLM “wrapper” libraries, specially for larger and more serious projects, as they are fine for quick prototypes....

GROUP BY ALL in Bigquery

I came across this Linkedin post from a Google engineer, on a new (in preview) and very interesting BigQuery syntax: GROUP BY ALL. This will save time when writing and specially modifying complex SQL queries on BigQuery. The GROUP BY ALL clause groups rows by inferring grouping keys from the SELECT items. It will exclude expressions with aggregate and window functions, constants, and query parameters for a smart GROUP BY. So instead of GROUP BY name, city, device, browser, date or GROUP BY 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 you would use GROUP BY ALL....

Classless Css Libraries

For small web projects that you don’t want to get large CSS frameworks like Tailwind to be involved, the classless CSS libraries can be very handy. You just 1-2 lines into the head of the html and get beautifully styled pages. Here are a few classless CSS libraries you can use: concrete.css water.css pico css simple css classless.de mvp.css NES.css drop-in minimal css Usage example To use water.css , just paste this into the <head> of your HTML:...

Color Palette Generators

I stumbled upon a hackernews thread where people have recommended many interesting tools to help with generating color palettes for various use cases. I’m creating this list for my future self, and will add other options whenever I come across one. uicolors.app : I’ve used this one when working on redesigning the user interface for my latest side project. The nice feature of uicolors.app is its Tailwind export functionality which allows you to quickly export the color palette as a Tailwind config code snippet....

There Is a Huge Gap in Generative Ai

There is a huge gap in generative AI between the quality you observe when you’re playing with it open endedly, and the quality you observe when you try to use it for a task where you have a specific end goal in mind. This is I think where most of the hype/reality mismatch occurs. This accurately sums up my experience using generating AI in a daily base and building products with this technology....

Office Politics

If you need another reason to hate office politics, Dave Anderson shares some awful advice on how to join office politics, one of them is: Slow down other teams If other teams move quickly, your team can become a bottleneck. That never looks good. When a wild animal is chasing you, you need to not be the slowest. Slow down your peer teams by asking for info, or starting processes. As a bonus, you look as if you’re holding a high bar....

A Rant on Arc Search

Manu writes about apps and businesses who claim to replace search engines by feeding the web page content to a language model and returning the response to the user: Firstly, without a search engine in the mix, the AI has no way to search for anything. So if the goal is to replace the traditional search engine then we’re already failing. Because we’re not replacing anything, we’re just hiding it behind some AI tool....

Spot the Difference

Herbert Lui writes about his experience getting writing feedback from editors: My editors were giving me comments and suggestions on all of these posts, but I noticed a tension: as I accepted these changes and resolved comments, they would effectively disappear into a basement-equivalent dropdown menu, never to see the light of day again. I would lose the majority of the feedback that I received. But it’s difficult to learn from your mistakes if you don’t reflect on them....