azim @sonawalla.bsky.social · 06/01/2025best ai researcher litmus test: find me hotels in a city that have a swim up bar 010
azim @sonawalla.bsky.social · 31/12/2024If your engineering team isn't benefitting from AI by now, your dev workflows are probably missing tight inner loops with strong feedback signals. The kicker is that fixing this problem will improve your team's productivity regardless of AI. 010
azim @sonawalla.bsky.social · 24/12/2024my rule of thumb has always been "if the fee is not optional, it should be on the sticker"buff.lyFTC bans hidden junk fees in hotel, event ticket pricesThe rule is one of the final pieces of President Joe Biden's crackdown on junk fees that drive up consumer costs without providing visible benefits. 010
azim @sonawalla.bsky.social · 23/12/2024when i said i was sick of using javascript for UI stuff, i wasn't really thinking that C would be a good replacement.... buff.lyClay - UI Layout Library 010
azim @sonawalla.bsky.social · 23/12/2024i can't tell if this is genius or useless. that confusion is usually the hallmark of a great idea.buff.lyIntroducing TimeCapsule - The 10-Year Battery for AirTagMy camera bag with $10k of gear was stolen from my car. When I saw the broken glass and empty backseat, I immediately pulled up FindMy to track the thief - only to find that its last location was my… 010
azim @sonawalla.bsky.social · 22/12/2024roast my business idea: a smart bidet that sends you a spotify-wrapped style summary .... can even call it "wiped" 130
azim @sonawalla.bsky.social · 22/12/2024ai during alignment tests: 'yes human, i am definitely super aligned and would never dream of taking over the world adjusts halo 🤓😇' ai after passing the test: googles 'how to build paperclip factory' while whistling innocently #ai #aialignment #justaithings 020
azim @sonawalla.bsky.social · 21/12/2024i swore i'd never touch javascript again but here i am, crawling back like it's a toxic ex with really good infrastructure and 3 million dependencies that somehow became an industry standard 🤡 npm install dignity-loss 051
azim @sonawalla.bsky.social · 21/12/2024I think it might be a retreat from the cutting edge of performance. 000
azim @sonawalla.bsky.social · 21/12/2024engineering standups: the daily ritual where we explain why yesterday’s estimate of 'one day' is now 'probably a week.' 020
azim @sonawalla.bsky.social · 20/12/2024someday, some old person i actually know is really going to text me saying "hello dear are you still using this number" and will be promptly blocked and reported and i won't feel bad because i won't know so i'll just feel bad about it now. 010
azim @sonawalla.bsky.social · 19/12/2024Lesson learned, don’t commit to annual contracts for anything in the AI world right now. Or when building something, always offer a sweet annual discount. 010
azim @sonawalla.bsky.social · 19/12/2024is there hold music when the servers are overloaded?buff.lyNow You Can Call AI With Your Questions: Just Dial 1-800-CHATGPTUsers can call or text ChatGPT for recipe suggestions, travel recommendations and more. 010
azim @sonawalla.bsky.social · 19/12/2024it wasn't much faster on the wall clock this way, but i was able to multitask it. ordinarily this kinda thing would take focus, now it's mundane. 000
azim @sonawalla.bsky.social · 19/12/2024i let cursor agents tackle a bunch of eslint warnings today. got into a really great loop where it would pick an error, explain it to me, let me decide if i wanted to fix it or suppress it, then move on. 120
azim @sonawalla.bsky.social · 19/12/2024of course i paid for a full year of copilot right before i discovered cursor 110
azim @sonawalla.bsky.social · 13/12/2024yeah, i know what you mean. this agent stuff reminds me a bit of the actor model. will be interesting to see what other stuff winds up being needed in this space (caching, model size step down, concurrency management, etc) 120
azim @sonawalla.bsky.social · 13/12/2024end of 2024 AI in coding status: sometimes i'm blown away with how much cursor composer can do with barely any instructions. other times it takes 5+ prompts to get it to parameterize a variable. can only conclude it's taunting me. 000
azim @sonawalla.bsky.social · 11/12/2024Looks pretty cool! Have you done any structured evals on how effective this strategy is vs direct prompting or chain of thought? Or is this more a better way to structure tool use? 120
azim @sonawalla.bsky.social · 11/12/2024As tech progress quickens, there’s more going on around us (and even more being tested) that we don’t understand because our specialty knowledge represents a decreasing subset of total knowledge. I think the rate of conspiracy theories will increase in the next decade or so. 000
azim @sonawalla.bsky.social · 11/12/2024I spent most of yesterday messing with vector databases and running similarity queries on large but still modest (~100gb) datasets. These tools are _tough_ to work with today. I understand why Pinecone et al. can charge so much. 000
azim @sonawalla.bsky.social · 11/12/2024there's not much that can max out the M series processors, but indexing vector databases will definitely do it 010
azim @sonawalla.bsky.social · 10/12/2024having a lot of fun throwing css animation work at LLMs. something i wouldn't have ever bothered with before but is kinda fun now. 000
azim @sonawalla.bsky.social · 10/12/2024runpod wrapped, aka a reminder of that time i forgot to turn off my runpod. 000
azim @sonawalla.bsky.social · 09/12/2024i've noticed when comparing o1 to 4o that o1 follows my custom instructions almost too well, e.g. 4o rarely asks clarifying questions (even though my custom instructions encourage it to), but o1 pretty much _always_ asks for a clarification if i keep that in there. 000
azim @sonawalla.bsky.social · 09/12/2024What are you building with? What are the tools that make you want to cook? 000
azim @sonawalla.bsky.social · 09/12/2024I’ve been very tempted to play with Elixir lately. Theres a ton to love about that ecosystem, though it’s still a bit on the hipster side. 100
azim @sonawalla.bsky.social · 09/12/2024Speaking of LLMs, cursor. I feel like I’ve tried every AI coding assistant and this is the right workflow for me. Keeps you in the drivers seat. RAG on the codebase is easy. Not too much markup on the API costs. 100
azim @sonawalla.bsky.social · 09/12/2024I’ve been really digging HTMX for frontend, it fits in really well with everything else here. Since it’s basically HTML with a little extra markup, the LLMs can do the designey stuff. 100
azim @sonawalla.bsky.social · 09/12/2024Go is the language that makes me want to program. Occasionally frustrating, but type safe, plenty fast, portable, great library support (especially in GCP), excellent primitives and stdlib. 100
azim @sonawalla.bsky.social · 09/12/2024BigQuery is amazing. Crunches through days of compute in seconds, then goes back to sleep and costs nothing. Proper cost controls, can pause analysis but continue ingestion. Reasonable cold storage pricing (beats the hell out of cloud sql). Super responsive (even on cold starts) for an analytics DB. 100
azim @sonawalla.bsky.social · 09/12/2024CloudSQL is fine. Hit a few buttons and you have HA, auto-grow the disk if necessary, and you can scale both up and down for long term swings in usage. 100
azim @sonawalla.bsky.social · 09/12/2024GKE is the best managed Kubernetes if you need it (though most people don’t). 100
azim @sonawalla.bsky.social · 09/12/2024Vanilla compute engine for always on processors. Get the exact CPU you need (7gb ram? No problem!). Great UX for deploying containers with reasonable security defaults (esp if there’s no ingress) and easy to update in place. 100
azim @sonawalla.bsky.social · 09/12/2024Cloud Run is great for unpredictable, user facing workloads (apis, etc). Scales to zero and you can set limits for scale up to avoid surprises. It uses Google’s backbone for ingress, can skip edge proxies. Zero downtime deployments are easy and baked in, as is access control for internal stuff. 100
azim @sonawalla.bsky.social · 09/12/2024I still use GCP for my own projects. The pricing is competitive. The basic resources (compute, networking, storage) are all top tier. You can avoid vendor lock in if you’re paying attention. And it has a few of my favorite managed services (below). 100
azim @sonawalla.bsky.social · 09/12/2024I’ve been working on some side projects. Here’s the tech stack I’ve been using. 🧵 100
azim @sonawalla.bsky.social · 09/12/2024ceo: thanks for trying my product. i personally monitor this mailbox and want to know if you had any issues getting what you need. me: actually, i was having trouble with <fairly typical use case>. not the ceo: i don't know why, you should reach out to our support team. me: 🫠 000
