Greater sequence lengths will set us free

[Read time: 6 minutes] GPT-4 represents the latest leap in LLM sequence length. Doubling down on longterm dependencies might be the advance we need for real business value and machines that operate closer to humans.

- March 20, 2023
On learning to ski

[Read time: 8 minutes] I learned how to ski this year, which was the first new sport I've picked up in at least a decade. Some thoughts on learning new things with a slight snowy twist.

- March 8, 2023
Using grpc with node and typescript

[Read time: 3 minutes] A quick tutorial on integrating grpc with node.

- February 16, 2023
Opportunity years

[Read time: 3 minutes] People in tech are more optimistic than the media might lead you to believe.

- February 15, 2023
Buzzword peaks and valleys

[Read time: 3 minutes] Thanks to ChatGPT, AI and Blockchain have swapped their cultural prominence. It sometimes feels like we're back in 2017.

- February 14, 2023
Network routing interaction on MacOS

[Read time: 2 minutes] Notes on the different routing utilities supported on OSX.

- January 2, 2023
The provenance of copy and paste

[Read time: 9 minutes] A thought experiment for a copy and paste implementation that retains a history chain going back to the original source.

- December 19, 2022
Debugging tips for neural network training

[Read time: 10 minutes] Miscelaneous notes for debugging more complicated training pipelines and model architectures.

- December 16, 2022
Search systems are struggling for qualitative searches

[Read time: 5 minutes] Content spam is crowding the web and with generative models it might be about to get much worse. But some search areas appear largely immune in my own browsing and still deliver great results.

- December 14, 2022
AWS vs GCP - GPU Availability V2

[Read time: 7 minutes] A revised comparison between GPU availability for AWS and GCP. Includes some internal strategies for GCP request allocation. Updated benchmarking numbers.

- November 14, 2022
Independent work: October recap

[Read time: 4 minutes] Progress update on the first month of going independent. Finished a first launch of GrooveProxy with some progress on Popdown.

- November 5, 2022
Relationship modeling

[Read time: 3 minutes] Relationships appear along a spectrum from romantic to pure friendship. But some elements stay the same. Why do we spend so much time talking about the past or trying to predict the future?

- October 25, 2022
The power of status updates

[Read time: 3 minutes] There's a reason why dashboards have become increasingly common over the last decade (and why Atlassian's acquisition of StatusPage proved rather prescient). Hearing from people with more context can immediately dissolve fears. In that way trains have a lot to do with status pages.

- October 19, 2022
A new chapter

[Read time: 4 minutes] I left my job after five years on their engineering team. I've been putting a lot of thought into what I want to focus on next. Here's my current list.

- October 13, 2022
Give my library a coffee shop

[Read time: 6 minutes] Libraries might be one of the greatest assets in modern America. They're free, have an extensive selection, provide technological support, dot cities and rural counties alike, and are often beautifully architected. Their physical spaces are also increasingly underutilized.

- September 28, 2022
AWS vs GCP reliability is wildly different

[Read time: 4 minutes] Cloud compute is backed by physical servers. And with the chip shortage of CPUs and GPUs those resources are more limited than ever. After encountering some reliability issues with on-demand provisioning of GPU resources on Google Cloud, I put together a benchmarking harness to test AWS vs. GCP availability.

- September 21, 2022
Headfull browsers beat headless

[Read time: 4 minutes] Building a headfull browser container to more easily deploy and debug Chromium in a remote cluster.

- September 7, 2022
Webcrawling tradeoffs

[Read time: 5 minutes] The two main types of crawlers that are deployed in the wild are typically raw or headless. Hybrid crawling can make use of the strengths of both while trying to minimize their weaknesses.

- September 6, 2022
Busses can fool me thrice

[Read time: 4 minutes] For public transit to really work, it needs trust. The main KPI for a transit system has to be adherence to schedule.

- August 30, 2022
Falling for Kubernetes

[Read time: 12 minutes] I default to bare metal where I can. But recently I had to adopt a more complicated server management solution. And after a couple months of building for kubernetes, I must admit I'm falling for it more every day.

- August 7, 2022
Content that I'm obsessed with

[Read time: 2 minutes] A constantly updating collection of content that I highly recommend to others. Movies, TV, and Books.

- August 2, 2022
Remote work is a better tourism

[Read time: 2 minutes] Over the pandemic I've been able to work from a variety of places. I've vacationed to most before. In almost all cases, I've vastly preferred working there.

- June 9, 2022
The new opportunity in travel

[Read time: 3 minutes] There is going to be a new class of travel option: working by day and socializing by night. This model upends traditional tourist activities since it encourages a participation in local cultural life, like the working professionals that live in that city full time.

- May 29, 2022
Labor markets calibrate satisfaction

[Read time: 2 minutes] What explains the differing pay between talented people in different careers? Something is clearly lost in our typical conversation about what a salary includes.

- May 10, 2022
Installing FastText on an M1 Mac

[Read time: 1 minutes]

- May 5, 2022
Architecting a blog

[Read time: 8 minutes] An obligatory post on blog architecture. I started focusing more on writing this year and wanted to rethink my workflow to make it a bit more frictionless.

- January 4, 2022
Write where you are

[Read time: 2 minutes] Publishing has always been my bottleneck. During stints on Wordpress or Medium, I was overly focused on how articles looked that it often got in the way of what they said. This year I want to change that trend.

- January 3, 2022
Treat engineers as users

[Read time: 6 minutes] It's an underemphasized asset of successful engineering startups: they make developing enjoyable. More companies need to follow their lead and treat their internal teams like users. Give them a UX that they can enjoy.

- December 30, 2021
Scoping an ML feature

[Read time: 11 minutes] Most confusion when building ML features comes at the beginning of a project. The goals are vague, the data isn’t in the expected format, or the metrics are ill-defined. This is a key place for product managers to articulate user needs in a way that machine learning researchers can translate into a well-defined research problem.

- April 26, 2021
AI needs a better definition

[Read time: 5 minutes] People label AI as anything and everything these days. You have search systems, you have process automation, you have spam filters. If motion activated supermarket doors were invented today, I guarantee they’d be branded AI too.

- April 14, 2021
NFTs are nothing new

[Read time: 15 minutes] Are the principles behind NFTs anything new? And what can collector culture tell us about the investment opportunities with these new tokens?

- April 5, 2021