softwaredoug

I gave up "keeping up" years ago. I just follow my curiosity mostly. If something is truly transformational in technology, you'll be reminded of it a lot, and eventually you'll fin…

Yes absolutely that's another good trick. Even better is to search the corpus first with like naive BM25 / embedding search, aggregate over top N to get most representative categories, then …

Yes what you're describing is a classic way of doing query understanding. I've found, though, getting it in the language of the vocabulary has generally improved performance. Further, when s…

Using a Nano model, a tad worse than shipping a vocabulary to a larger OpenAI model. (And it’s an huge improvement on not classifying the queries at all). But no classification is perfect. In search i…

I use OpenCode and I like knowing the direct token spend for doing tasks. A healthy repo can get a lot done with Luna + fresh context. Then I can spend $1-$2 a day when I'm doing development, and…

Beyond Meat is one such product, and it generates a lot fewer greenhouse emissions. > Based on a comparative assessment of the current Beyond Burger production system with the 2017 beef LCA by Thom…

Why do people take this stuff so personally? Eat meat. Don't eat meat. Do whatever you want. It's somewhat revealing to me that whenever this comes up people feel personally attacked by peop…

A couple of decades of not eating meat is a pretty significant improvement on you your carbon impact :)

I would say it’s important to emphasize people don’t need to go complete vegan. Reducing consumption of animal products can be more realistic for most people.

I don't know. Every big tech company I worked at has a lot of turnover. Then every Blind post says "its so over" or "everything is going to change" But that doesn't happe…

Thanks for doing this benchmarking Dylan. I wanted to teach people PCA in my original article, but had no idea it would stack up this well against Matroyshka! Feels like a “just use logistic regressio…

If I ran a dev team, I’d spend a day a week on deliberately hand coding. Even if the clankers write most of the code, IMO we need deliberate practice to develop taste. There’s a side of taste that’s R…

There’s not going to be much of a price difference from Luna (Luna might be a bit cheaper too) And Luna has actually been my favorite coding model that predictably just works at boring dev tasks.

To be clear, this isn’t wind power currently under construction. It’s proposed future wind power with leases being planned. Trump has largely failed to stop the nearly complete projects in New England…

Usually in these cases you don't need to do much tuning to the retriever. So you just give it BM25 or somesuch. I'm hesitant to say absolutely zero tuning, because there are cases where you …

*MixedBread https://www.mixedbread.com/

People are building agentic search one of three ways: 1. Actually good retireval. There’s been a lot of progress on serving the kinds of queries agents tend to serve, from places like Hornet, MoxedBre…

What I really mean is a difficult to revoke license. Not dependent on a server or DRM. I realize I do not actually own copies.

I can buy and own legal copies of movies and music. But I often really can’t with games.

There’s also a class of “detailed agent written technical blog” that’s you can just scan and get the shape that it’s long paragraphs, tables of statistics, and dry LLM writing. You notice the blog has…

Recently got a big fancy TV with 4k + Dolby Vision It’s a lot of work figuring out what movies support the format. And all the premium upgrades to Netflix, etc get them to stream premium formats. Then…