Posts

Recently March 2024 Favorite reading and miscellanea from the month of March.

Playing audio files in a Pi Pico without a DAC The Raspberry Pico is suddenly becoming my preferred chip for embedded development. It is well made, durable hardware, with a ton of features that appear designed with smartness and passion (the state machines driving the GPIOs are a killer feature!). Its main weakness, the lack of connectivity, is now resolved

On being a insert favorite technology here guy Thoughts on the advantages and disadvantages of identifying too strongly with a technology or framework.

Pat Selinger The best way to hire great women is to have great women at the top of the company. IBM is a lot stronger for employing Pat Selinger for 29 years . She invented the relational database cost-based optimizer, a technology that sees continued use in relational database management systems today. But more

Seagate HAMR Yesterday, I visited the Seagate Normandale Minnesota hard disk drive wafer fabrication facility. I’m super excited about HAMR (Heat Assisted Magnetic Recording) and the areal density it supports. Seagate’s Dave Anderson first introduced this to me technology nearly 20 years ago and it’s wonderful to see it delivered to

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,