Back It Off a Quarter Turn

A friend actually educated in the workings of LLMs described some aspects of LLM training. A sequence of train-then-verify loops produces models of varying quality. The trainers look for increasing performance, and eventually see it level off or start to decline with overtraining…

Sorting Networks

Today I learned about sorting networks and bitonic sequences. Despite being aware of djbsort since its initial publication, I never looked at any implementation details. Today I ran across this introduction and this apparently canonical reference. Fun stuff!

A Judgement Amplifier

At a recent Austin CTO Club meeting someone remarked that AI tool use amplifies the quality of the technology development team members. That is, good developers become better, and bad developers become worse. How can this be so? AI Tool Effects If an AI toolkit is worse at progra…

Making the Cut

“I put the ticket in more than two years ago and it still isn’t done. When will you get to it?” Our Product lead apparently looked at our backlog as a queue, in which everything that goes in is implemented sooner or later. That makes sense if your tickets are for customer support…

Prototype vs Implementation

The Austin CTO Club recently met to discuss Managing C-Suite Expectations. One specific point received little attention that evening, and in my opinion deserves additional thought: prototype versus implementation. When presented with a prototype, executives frequently think of it…