The Guardian’s The Winterkeeper: A Lifetime Spent Protecting Yellowstone National Park is a beautiful short documentary I truly enjoyed watching. A little research on Steven Fuller, the protagonist, allowed me to dig out some promising reading material.
I always struggle a bit with I’m asked about the “hallucination problem” in LLMs. Because, in some sense, hallucination is all LLMs do. They are dream machines. We direct their dreams with prompts. The prompts start the dream, and based on the LLM’s hazy recollection of its training documents, most of the time the result goes someplace useful. It’s only when the dreams go into deemed factually incorrect territory that we label it a “hallucination”....
Andrej Karpathy has a very well-done Intro to Large Language Models video on YouTube. As a founding member and research scientist at OpenAI and with a two-year hiatus working on Tesla Autopilot, Karpathy is an authority in the field. He is also good at explaining hard things. As a Kahneman reader, I appreciated the Thinking Fast and Slow analogy proposed at about half-length in the video: “System 1” (fast automatic thinking, rapid decisions) is where we’re now; “System 2” (rational, slow thinking, complex decisions) is LLMs next goal....
In a few days, on Monday, December 4, at 10 a.m., I will present at the .NET Conference Italia 2023, which will be held at the Microsoft House in Milan. My session is titled “C#12 What’s new and interesting” and is part of a rich agenda focused on the recent release of .NET 8. I presented on the same subject at a DevRomagna meetup a few months ago when C# 12 was in preview and still had several moving parts....
Today, I (re)learned how to serialize an XML to a UTF-8 string. Like all the other times I did this, I got backstabbed by StringWriter, which only supports UTF-16. A simple code snippet like this: await using var sw = new StringWriter(); await using var w = XmlWriter.Create(sw, new() { Async = true }); ... await w.FlushAsync(); return sw.ToString(); Will emit this output: <?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-16"?><... There’s nothing inherently wrong with UTF-16, but XML is usually UTF-8, so one must do something about it....
Fattura Elettronica for .NET v3.4.11 was released on NuGet today. The Fattura Elettronica project allows for the fixes a missing validation point. See the changelog for details (Italian). validation and de/serialization of electronic invoices following the Italian Revenue Agency standards.
Today I learned how to implement a custom Enumerable.DistinctBy extension method that returns distinct elements from a sequence according to a specified key selector function. .NET 6 and its successors have the method built in within LINQ, but I needed it in a .NET Standard 2.0 class library, so I was out of luck. My implementation is simple, not different from others I found online, and should also work fine with old ....
I’ve been reading a few books throughout the summer and needed to be more active in reviewing them here. Rather than writing five individual posts in a row (too lazy for that), I will catch up with this single post. Born to Run 2 I’ve been back to running after a long hiatus, and this book helped me get back on track with the right, lightly-hearted approach. The fundamentals are solid (the barefoot-like technique is the way), the 90-day training plan is a good platform, the nutrition hints are remarkable, and I appreciated the injury-treatment segments....
Today I learned how to rsync with a user different than the one connected to the remote. Why would one want to do such a thing? The data I need to download from that server is owned by ‘backup,’ a different, service-only user. I wanted to avoid going the change-permissions slippery route and allow my user direct access to the data. Looking at the rsync documentation, I learned about the nifty --rsync-path=PROGRAM option:...
Quoting Jan van den Berg: This weekend we learned that Bram Moolenaar had passed away at the age of 62. And this news affected me more than I expected. Like so many: I did not know Bram personally. But I’ve been using a tool made by Bram for more than half my life — at least weekly, sometimes daily. That tool is a text editor. The best one there is: Vim....