Andrew B.

Engineering Director at @GoogleCloud, herder of cats (literal and figurative) and occasional sci fi author; tweets are my own. he/him

[Andrew B. @Andrew_Brook]

The connection between databases and generative AI continues to be underestimated. A ton of genuinely useful functionality can be unlocked this way.

[Google Cloud Tech @GoogleCloudTech]

Welcome to the post-training era.

LLMs are democratizing access to #AI for app developers. Now, you don't need to know how to train #ML models—you need the tools to take advantage of LLMs.

Here's why databases with vector indexing support can help ↓

[Google Cloud Tech @GoogleCloudTech]

Welcome to the post-training era.

LLMs are democratizing access to #AI for app developers. Now, you don't need to know how to train #ML models—you need the tools to take advantage of LLMs.

Here's why databases with vector indexing support can help ↓

[David Pfau @pfau]

This would essentially make it illegal for a foreigner to do a postdoc in the UK.

[Ferenc Huszár @fhuszar]

Says the guy who bought and paid for 𝕏.

[President Biden Archived @POTUS46Archive]

A billionaire minimum tax of just 25% would raise $440 billion over the next 10 years.

Imagine what we could do if we just made billionaires pay their taxes like everyone else.

[Bill McKibben @billmckibben]

Yesterday, temporarily, planet Earth took its first step over the 2.0 degrees Celsius barrier.

[Dr. Genevieve Guenther (she/they) 🪬 @DoctorVive]

Today @WilliamJRipple et al released the 2023 report on the terrifying state of our #climate.

It should be read by every policymaker, decisionmaker, and journalist on the planet.

Here is a thread of some key takeaways.

1/n

[Andrew B. @Andrew_Brook]

@YourFondestLove Markets: "WE WANT MOAR! MOAR CLOUD!"

[Andrew B. @Andrew_Brook]

@jxmnop I guess I shouldn't be too surprised. Not the first time developers have confused "obfuscated" with "secure". Hopefully as the tools and stacks get more mature this becomes less of a risk.

[Andrew B. @Andrew_Brook]

Very cool process (and useful for visualizing things like cluster centroids!) but headline is kind of odd. Was someone expecting embeddings to be unreversible and using that for security purposes? It's like saying a *database* is not safe because the data is readable...

[Jack Morris @jxmnop]

finally published our latest research on text embeddings!

TLDR: Vector databases are NOT safe. 😳 Text embeddings can be inverted. We can do this exactly for sentence-length inputs and get very close with paragraphs...

[Jack Morris @jxmnop]

finally published our latest research on text embeddings!

TLDR: Vector databases are NOT safe. 😳 Text embeddings can be inverted. We can do this exactly for sentence-length inputs and get very close with paragraphs...

[Firebase @Firebase]

📨 Firestore updates for Firebase 🔥

🧑‍💻 SUM/AVG functions for datastore mode
☁️ View and list multiple databases in the Google Cloud console
🗓️ Scheduled backups (preview)

Watch @coelho_dev break it down → https://t.co/air7jW57os

[Andrew B. @Andrew_Brook]

@neonepiphany Men smoke and wear higher heels on our boots. This checks out.

[Colin McCarthy @US_Stormwatch]

Massive wildfire outbreak has broken out in the Northwest Territories of Canada, burning hundreds of thousands of acres in just a few hours.

Thousands have been evacuated across various small communities, but just like Lahaina serious telecommunications failure is ongoing.

[Andrew B. @Andrew_Brook]

@LDrogen Same senator asks aide: "... and find out if I can invest in golf courses there soon."

[Corey Quinn @QuinnyPig]

I am the greatest Prompt Engineer in the world.

[Andrew B. @Andrew_Brook]

@puf It is truly one of the nicest officers around. And the view of the Bay Bridge is just the icing on the cake!

[Andrew B. @Andrew_Brook]

@pretentiouswhat @RealSexyCyborg Very cool - thanks!!

[Andrew B. @Andrew_Brook]

@RealSexyCyborg - I've been reading about China's massive progress in scaling up solar PV and other renewables. I'm wondering how intermittency is being addressed. Lots of utility scale batteries? Do retail electricity prices vary by time of day? Something else?

[Andrew B. @Andrew_Brook]

@pretentiouswhat @RealSexyCyborg It's a rapidly evolving situation in the US as EV adoption accelerates and changes the residential load patterns pretty significantly. An EV driven 50 miles per day might need 15 kWh to charge each night -- on par with the the electricity demands of the rest of the house.

[Andrew B. @Andrew_Brook]

@pretentiouswhat @RealSexyCyborg There are other programs like one where the utility pays you $50 up front to let them control the default charge time of your EV. You can override it but the default is set to an off-peak time.