ISSUE 454 · September 26, 2023

Talks & Conferences

A Hackers' Guide to Language Models

Great, code-first approach to understanding how to use language models in practice. Covers foundational concepts, limitations and capabilities, practical uses of language models in code writing and data analysis, fine tuning, testing, and more. There's a lot here but it's easy to jump around using the linked outline in the notes.
YouTube | Jeremy Howard (1.5 hours)

Sponsored Link

Alexa unveils new speech recognition, text-to-speech technologies

Amazon's new speech technologies will make conversations with Alexa more natural. Those technologies include a multibillion-parameter speech recognizer and a text-to-speech model built atop a fine-tuned large language model.

Posts & Tutorials

Inside the Matrix

This post introduces a new tool, called 'mm', for visualizing matrix operations. It runs in a browser and helps build intuition about matrix multiplication expressions, attention heads with real weights, and more. This is an awesome introduction, including short demo videos and links to live interactives that make it easy to understand matrix operations.
PyTorch Blog

AB Testing 101

Great introduction to AB testing from deep in the trenches. Jonathan Fulton has been involved with testing in roles as an engineer, as an architect at ID.me, and is currently with the AB testing platform, Eppo. This is a practical, in-depth guide that's subtitled, "What I wish I knew about AB testing when I started my career."
Jonathan Fulton

Upsert in SQL

Upsert is an operation that inserts new records into a database and updates existing ones. This post shows how to do SQL upserts in all major databases, with tips, issues, and alternatives along the way. Includes interactive examples within the post so you can try things out while reading.
Anton Zhiyanov

Applied Data Science with Python

In this intermediate level course from Coursera, learn how to conduct statistical analysis, critique data visualization, apply machine learning, analyze social network connectivity, and much more. Enroll for free.
// sponsored

Tools & Code

Perspective

Perspective is an interactive analytics and data visualization component that's especially well-suited for large and/or streaming datasets. Use it to create user-configurable reports, dashboards, notebooks and applications, then deploy stand-alone in the browser, or in concert with Python and/or JupyterLab.
GitHub | Fintech Open Source Foundation

Harlequin

Harlequin is a new open-source drop-in replacement for the DuckDB CLI. It offers features you'd expect from an IDE, running right in your terminal. Runs anywhere: any shell, any terminal, any machine.
Ted Conbeer

Magentic

This new Python package lets you easily integrate LLMs into your Python code. Simply use the @prompt decorator to create functions that return structured output from the LLM. Mix LLM queries and function calling with regular Python code to create complex logic.
GitHub | Jack Collins

Resources

Software Design by Example (Python edition) 

The best way to learn design in any field is to study examples. In this tool-based introduction to software design, Greg Wilson, co-founder of Software Carpentry, shows how to build small versions of common tools to show how experienced software designers think. This is a great book that combines theory, pragmatism and best practices. Free to read.
The Third Bit | Greg Wilson

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