Saeed Esmaili

I have added several long conversational youtube videos into a playlist, hoping I’ll come back to the them some day, but in reality I never do that.

I quite liked this metaphoric view of the morning ritual from Herbert Lui: A good morning ritual needs to be flexible enough to adapt to these shifts.

I started using Claude Code in July last year.

Welcome to the Netherlands!

When you’re independent you feel less desire to impress strangers, which can be an enormous financial and psychological cost.

In a discussion about LLMs and their impact on learning, gchamonlive writes on Hackernews: We can finally just take a photo of a textbook problem that has no answer reference and no discussion about it and prompt an LLM to help us understand what’s missing

Recently I started using Simon Willison ’s CLI tool which is conveniently called llm .

I’m always interested in reading how people use language models for automating boring tasks or performing what they wouldn’t be able to do manually.

I liked this post’s rules of thumbs for when to avoid scheduling meetings at work: Before calling a meeting, ask yourself: What’s the goal?

In part one of this blog series , I explored the motivation behind developing a personal recommendation system.

I love taking photos , taking my Sony A7cii wherever I travel.

LLMs are being experimented with to do so many things today, and one of the use cases that sound compelling is getting their help to generate insights from data.

Every morning, my RSS reader greets me with hundreds of new posts.

When working with LLMs sometimes you want to know if the response you’re getting from the model is the one that at least the model itself is sort of confident about.

I read this blog post from Jordan on how he created a simple feature request form on his iOS app using Supabase’s Swift library.

I purchased a Sony a7ii in 2023, while having zero understanding of the basics of cameras and photography.

A few months ago I used streamlit to build a simple UI, so I can collect manually labeled data for a LLM fine-tuning task at work.

Today I came across this brilliant python library called leopards which allows you to do some basic but frequently used filters and aggregations on python lists.

I’ve been using sentry for automatically logging the errors and exceptions of my python projects.

If you want to make a good RAG tool that uses your documentation, you should start by making a search engine over those documents that would be good enough for a human to use themselves.

Google Gemini now can be accessed via OpenAI python library: from openai import OpenAI client = OpenAI( api_key="GEMINI_API_KEY", base_url="https://generativelanguage.googleapis.com/v1beta/openai/" ) ## rest of the code as you would use openai…

This excellent essay from Karolina was the best I’ve read this year.

Philip writes about how small cost saving policies at Microsoft irritated him as an employee: We used to get Dove Bars and beers all the time.

I’m an aspiring photographer , and I love taking photos of moments of life on streets.

I’ve been using conversational alpaca or sharegpt formats for fine-tuning LLMs with Axolotl , but it always felt unnecessary to limit the model on a conversational format when the use-case doesn’t require so.

I’ve been using Home Assistant to control many things at my smart home, including a couple of lights which are toggled on and off with motion sensors.

I like this emphasis on the impact of health on productivity: Biological health is upstream of mental health and mental health is upstream of productivity.

Interesting point about various types of content a creator can focus on: A surprising learning is that content funnels do not work.

In his excellent write up on state of the art embedding models, Aapo Tanskanen compares the retrieval score for when the source documents are split into chunks and when they’re not: Transformer-based single embedding models have traditionally had 512 token

Do you have an idea for a new business or product?

Ken writes about the lessons they’ve learned building new LLM-based features into their product.

“Luck” is one of the most interesting topics to me, and I always find myself paying extra attention to anyone talking about what “luck” is and how it can be somehow controlled.

I was experimenting with some speech-to-text work using OpenAI’s Whisper models today, and transcribing a 15-minute audio file with Whisper tiny model on AWS Lambda (3 vcpu) took 120 seconds.

This is a fantastic reminder from Herbert: If you want to do something, like really want to do it, you need to prove it.

Them: Can you just quickly pull this data for me?

Melody is basically describing me: Many introverts value depth and thoughtfulness in their work over noise and showmanship.

After reading this post from Lara, I finally understand why I’ve been feeling strangely uncomfortable whenever my work desks have been moved in the past.

Every day a new tools pops out claiming “Throw the data analysts and data scientists of your company away, you don’t need to write SQL anymore, everyone can use data with our groundbreaking ’talk to your data’ tool”, and Benn discusses this: There are tho…

From a hackernews thread on dealing with spammers on your platform: … one of the most effective ways of dealing with spammers is to “shadowban” them.

A few days ago a question was asked on Hackernews on how slow thinkers compensate for their lack of quick-wittedness .

Many companies are integrating LLM question answering tools into their DevEx toolchain.

This post from Dan is one of the best reads in the past few months for me.

If you’re into either Alfred or Raycast , Josh has a nice comparison of these tools from his experience using them: … for me, in the era of paid subscription software overtaking everything, I don’t need yet another $8–10/month siphon on my bank account.

Hamel dives deep into how LLM frameworks like langchain , instructor , and guidance perform tasks like formatting the response in a valid JSON output.

I came across this Linkedin post from a Google engineer, on a new (in preview) and very interesting BigQuery syntax: GROUP BY ALL.

For small web projects that you don’t want to get large CSS frameworks like Tailwind to be involved, the classless CSS libraries can be very handy.

TLDR: Here is a simplified diagram of how I keep reading articles, books, and other materials without overwhelming myself or having a never-ending pile of to-read items.

I stumbled upon a hackernews thread where people have recommended many interesting tools to help with generating color palettes for various use cases.

There is a huge gap in generative AI between the quality you observe when you’re playing with it open endedly, and the quality you observe when you try to use it for a task where you have a specific end goal in mind.

If you need another reason to hate office politics, Dave Anderson shares some awful advice on how to join office politics, one of them is: Slow down other teams If other teams move quickly, your team can become a bottleneck.