A very underrated paper
On System Design, by Jim Waldo 2006
Jim distinguishes "system design" from "programming" and argues that the skills required for system design are distinct and increasingly rare.
He famously observes that many of the best system designers he has worked with did not come from a pure computer science background. Instead, they are "mutts" with backgrounds in liberal arts.
When I first spoke out about the genocide, I was one of the few voices in tech, and it came at a cost.
I faced sabotage especially from the VC class: lies, leaks, threats, and blocked investments.
It was painful, but I never once regretted standing up for the children in Gaza.
Today, the tide in tech has shifted. The truth is undeniable.
If you’ve been holding back, now is the time to speak out and call out anyone supporting or celebrating genocide. It won’t cost you much—in fact, it will earn you respect, and more importantly a clear conscious. Plus, alienating those who will hate you for speaking is a feature, not a bug.
Attention is all you need - but how does it work? In our new paper, we take a big step towards understanding it. We developed a way to integrate attention into our previous circuit-tracing framework (attribution graphs), and it's already turning up fascinating stuff! 🧵
Wake up babe, a new highly-performant language model just dropped!
QwQ-32B outperforms 20x bigger model DeepSeek-R1.
R1 was released in January and completely shocked the world.
2 months later, Qwen decided they couldn't let DeepSeek just take all the glory...
Input optional product
Don't ask your users for input. Coming up with input is hard, and a barrier to use. Think of users as wanting to play. We have AI - predict the input! Design products into autonomous environments. Allow users to play by steering a bit.
This is not comparable at all.
Google has an AI product that is used by Israeli military, an organisation currently being investigated for genocide by the International Court of Justice.
How can you NOT discuss how your work in a company is actively being utilised for both genocide and political changes on the ground.
If the tool you are building is doing that you have a DUTY to discuss it at work.
In fact, UK civil servants have been trying to stop work that involves arm sales to Israel as they may be deemed complicit if Israel is formally charged with war crimes.
All tech CEOs should stand firmly against their tools being used for war crimes / genocide, and if they don’t it’s up to employees and the public to remind them of their ethical responsibilities.
🦜🧮Building An LLM-Powered Analyst
This great article deep dives on how to empower LLMs with external tools using OpenAI functions
At a **19 minute** minute, it's pretty comprehensive
It examines two use cases: extraction to get structured output and routing to use external information for questions
s/o Mariya Mansurova
Blog: https://t.co/QZ32WZ0r9X
Code: https://t.co/sxHT0qCeOj