D-Squared Musings – Week 29
Tech
🏗️ NEW AI Coding Assistant 🤖 Use Prompts To Build New Or EXISTING Apps! (Aider, The Holy Grail)
- I’ve not used this tool myself, but it seems promising. This tool allows you to use “universal ctags” to compress large existing code bases so that you can build on top of the code base. It’s like smol developer or GPT-Engineer with the ability to build on top of existing code bases.
🧑💻 The Golden Age of Open Source in AI Is Coming to an End
- Interesting take here. The open-source nature of LLMs is changing rapidly and in a way where whatever base model you’re building on top of limits the commercial use (see chart below). The author makes the case that the companies spending millions of dollars on computing and training aren’t doing it out of the goodness of their hearts… Fair.
- This paper alongside a series of others referenced in the video is highlighting a shift in LLM advancements. One… We’re seeing more high-quality synthetic datasets enable these LLMs to improve their accuracy. This wasn’t obvious only months ago. Two… We could see a rise in many task-specific smaller LLMs, instead of what the consensus thinks currently – a world with a few generalized big LLMs.
Education
- This is a long one, but well worth the time. I appreciated that Paul focused on how one figures out the kind of work they should be focusing on. → “You need to make yourself a big target for luck, and the way to do that is to be curious. Try lots of things, meet lots of people, read lots of books, ask lots of questions.”
💰 How to Get Ahead of 99% of People
- Many of the thumbnails and titles for Alex’s videos are offputting to me, but the content of this video resonates. Alex basically spends an hour expanding on Naval’s original discussion on the importance of leverage in one’s life/career. The points of leverage are labor, capital, code, and media. Code and media are the newer forms of leverage that are permissionless and Naval leans toward.
🎨 The Actual Way to Succeed as a Creative Person
- Wheezy is a hilarious creator and sometimes has meaningful lessons learned to share. This is one that I needed. The takeaway is that you need to lower the expectations about what you’re creating and equally as important keep creating. Create a lot of stuff!
Miscellaneous
🎂 Artificial Sweeteners? – Layne’s perspective
- I confess I put artificial sweeteners in my tea and coffee. This is commonly frowned upon in many of the diehard health communities, but I’ve always been skeptical when running into someone with an ideological stance. Layne does a great job breaking down the actual science and the known impacts of artificial sweeteners on the body. Check out 1, 2, and 3. I’m not saying they’re healthy, I’m just stating that the harm is unknown and unfounded.