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Why You Need a Thinking Partner (like this Genius)
You may not have heard of him, but James Clerk Maxwell wrote down what we now think of as four equations that define ALL of electromagnetics. You can get a T-Shirt with them emblazoned on it. If you want to know how radio waves propagate, or how a radio functions, or how anything running on electricity…
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A change of perspective is worth 80 IQ points
We’ve all done it–struggled over some problem until a frustrating end of the day. But after “sleeping on it” and stepping into a hot shower, a breakthrough idea pops up, as if out of nowhere. This often comes from getting too close to the problem. A little distance can make a decisive difference. The quotation…
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Boom! Portable Tetris Notation
New website, but it hardly seems worth a blog post to just mention a new welcome mat. So here’s something that doesn’t really fit into convenient categories. (Lots of things I work on end up in this non-category…) What is this? The idea behind of this micro-project comes from the old-fashioned notion of Sunday newspapers…
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Security in Generative AI Models
I don’t know if generative models are ever going to get trained on sensitive internal data, but it’s a pretty safe bet someone’s going to try it (if not already). This raises a new set of problems that modern IT hasn’t ever had to grapple with. Databases, even multimodal ones like MarkLogic, store particular pieces…
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Notes on “Systems Thinking for a Better World”
From this video. Talk by Peter Senge at Aalto Systems Forum 2014. Also the author of The Fifth Discipline: The Art & Practice of Learning Organizations. There’s no such thing as “living separate”. We are all connected. We get dazzled by technology, but we don’t think about (for example) where the power comes from when…
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Omni Models Reboot the Whole Game for RAG (GPT-4o)
“Chat with your documents” already seems so 2023. The new “omni” model can fluently switch among text, audio, still images, and (live) video. RAG, or Retrieval Augmented Generation (see my LinkedIn Learning course for details) is a technique where you pair up a language model with a database to extend it’s capabilities. This includes the…
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Free email course: Systems Thinking for the AI Era
I’m launching a new FREE email course in May, and it’s all about one of the most important skills in this age of layoffs, rapid technological change, and AI: Systems Thinking. This training is specially crafted for software engineers and developers who have mastered basic computer science and are ready to elevate their thinking to…
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Running DBRX on your local network
DataBricks released their DBRX model, and it appears to be quite capable, beating Llama 2, Mistral, and Grok. It uses a slightly novel architecture, so existing tools don’t work with it out of the box, though they are making rapid progress to add support. I haven’t yet been successful in converting this new format into…
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FREE Live Training: Generative AI for Technical Professionals
This Friday, March 22nd, at 4pm Atlanta time, join me for live recording some new training! AI fundamentals for technical professionals. There is no code or math–instead focusing on intuitive explanations of how generative AI works, and how to effectively use it for things we already work on every day–while avoiding pitfalls for the unsuspecting.…
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Massive update to GitHub repo for LinkedIn Learning course
Check out all these changes. In a fast-moving technology, this is how much has changed since recording in December (at which time I also had to make a bunch of changes, relative to the November script). Even if you’re not enrolled in my course: Introduction to AI Orchestration with LangChain and LlamaIndex, this is a…
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Live coding: Refreshing the Github Repository for my LinkedIn Learning course
AI is changing so fast it’s hard to keep up. But I’m going to try… Some of the API features I used in my LinkedIn Learning course are already “deprecated”. In a free, live coding session I’m going to look at the announcement(s), figure out the best way forward, and update the GitHub repo for…