CIDR 2024 I helped kick off CIDR2024 yesterday with the keynote, Constraint Driven Innovation. My core thesis is that constraints force innovation. For example, it was slow hard disks that drove the invention of Write Ahead Logging. But constraints also block innovation. In memory databases first described in the 80s remained largely irrelevant for

First Token Cutoff LLM sampling From a theoretical standpoint, the best reply provided by an LLM is obtained by always picking the token associated with the highest probability. This approach makes the LLM output deterministic, which is not a good property for a number of applications. For this reason, in order to balance LLMs creativity

Translating blog posts with GPT-4 or on hope and fear My usual process for writing blog posts is more or less in two steps: 1. Think about what I want to say for weeks or months. No, I don’t spend weeks focusing on a blog post, the process is exactly reversed: I write blog posts about things that are so important

2023 year in review A lot has happened in the last year, so I thought it would be good to write up a review. My biggest change in 2023 was that my wife and I had a baby! This has brought a mixture of joys and frustrations, but overall it has been very

LLMs and Programming in the first days of 2024 I’ll start by saying that this article is not meant to be a retrospective on LLMs. It’s clear that 2023 was a special year for artificial intelligence: to reiterate that seems rather pointless. Instead, this post aims to be a testimony from an individual programmer. Since the advent of ChatGPT,

The origins of the Idle Scan The Idle scan was conceived at the end of 1998, evidenced by emails. I had moved to Milan a few months prior, having been there since September if I recall correctly, brimming with new ideas, unaware that my stay in that city would be brief. I spent the summer on

Amazon Elastic Block Store at 15 Years Just after joining Amazon Web Services in 2009, I met with Andrew Certain, at that time a senior engineer on the Amazon Elastic Block Store (Amazon EBS) team, to get into the details on how EBS was implemented and what plans were looking forward. Andrew took me through the details

An AI Miracle Malcontent The stark success of OpenAI’s GPT4 model surprised me shifting my view from “really good autocomplete” (roughly inline with intuitions here) to a dialog agent exhibiting a significant scope of reasoning and intelligence. Some of the MSR folks did a fairly thorough study of capabilities which seems like a good

The 95 It’s easy to get carried away with the notion of productivity. It’s important but it’s also important not to single out highly productive people and compare them to others. It’s the varied differences in teams which are both unavoidable and can be harnessed to do better work. Not talking about 10x developers is good for team diversity and avoiding tech-bro monocultures.

Blockchain and The Third Web The second in a two-part series looking at the evolution of the architecture of the web and its future. This article interactively explores blockchain technology and Web3 (vs Web 3.0) to predict that Web3 will fade away and probably take blockchain with it.