PicoBlog

I actually had a moment, the day before yesterday, sitting on the cold cement floor of my parents’ basement reading the entirety of a journal I had kept on a high-school trip to Belize. In between passages describing my wonderment at seeing the rainforests and coral reefs for the first time in my life, I expressed feelings of profound sadness and isolation from the rest of the group, describing a moment where I walked into a room and a clique of girls was talking about me behind my back, and another time they claimed their bunk room was full because they didn’t want me in it.

Yang's Kitchen in Alhambra! The mochi/cornmeal pancake is worth the drive!!! Been loving Barra Santos lately, have tried to recreate the endive salad at home. Courage is pretty amazing - if you are in town on a Monday, I've had the quickest line experience then! And if you go, as a part of your order, ask for a hottie with butter - burnt everything is my fav. Expand full comment

Hello from Castrum Lusitania, my fortress in northern Portugal. Welcome to another edition of our weekly newsletter. After a week off, we’re back with a promised deep dive into my latest commission: Doctor Strange and Shuma-Gorath. I’ve shown many bits through the last few weeks but now it’s time to show the whole piece and a proper scan of all the steps. Without further ado, let’s go ahead and take a look of a photo of the finished thing:

The most wholesome, feel-good show I have ever watched is The Great British Baking Show. Season 11 aired in September of 2020, during peak Covid chaos and it saved my life. It was a religious experience. I cried at the end of every episode. The current season, 14, just ended and once again, I was moved by the overall goodness and purity of the show. It’s a competition, contestants are eliminated week after week and one person is given the title of “Star Baker” at the end of each episode.

Whelp, the beer world is increasingly silly, weird, and tenuous right now. In the Finger Lakes region, we just saw that with the recent news of Other Half’s takeover of Young Lion Brewing in Canandaigua. And now we’re getting more evidence of this new reality with the latest regional seismic shift, this one coming from the city of Buffalo. Community Beer Works, founded in 2012, is taking over its rival Thin Man Brewery, the brewery announced exclusively to me Monday.

This week’s post is about an amazing tool that is useful for anyone with an interest in compilers or computer architecture. It’s Compiler Explorer, which we’ll abbreviate to CE from now on. CE is an amazing tool. If you’re not familiar with CE, then it’s worth stopping right now and going to the CE website, where you will be presented with a screen that should look something like the one below.

In RNNs, the hidden state gets updated using the current state and past timestamps. However, transformers don’t naturally grasp the order of a sentence.  This is because the attention mechanism calculates relationships between tokens, with each token paying attention to all others in the sequence, without considering their order. This means both of these sentences are the same to a transformer Or any combination of those words. To address this, researchers suggested ways to introduce the idea of order.

An overview of ReWOO as an LLM reasoning method. A review of ReWOO’s research paper. An introduction to LLMFlows, a framework for building LLM applications. Augmenting LLMs with external data with techniques such as RAG is one of the most common patterns in generative AI applications. Often overlooked is the impact that RAG-type techniques have on the reasoning abilities of LLMs. Typically, a RAG system needs to coordinate reasoning and action with LLMs.

“Winning breeds confidence and confidence breeds wins, just as losing breeds losses. This has an unfortunate circular ring to it, but without victories, real confidence is an unlikely occurrence.” — Tennis: Winning the Mental Match, by Allen Fox I recently came across a podcast episode with Jonah Oliver, an Australian sports psychologist who notably works with Cameron Smith, as well as a host of other professional athletes across motorsport, football, and tennis.