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We come back with a new issue this week. If you like BetterDev, please help spead word out by refer to your friends. Buy me a coffee would be great too.
Many link about LLM this week, especially focus on fundamental knowledge and using them locally on your own hardware, instead of just a wrapper of OpenAI.
A fun side project for a great cause featuring Core Motion, SwiftUI, a little help from AI, and a pair of AirPods to count 100 push-ups a day.
A basic question I think a lot of people have about the GenAI revolution is where does the apparent intelligence these models have come from. In this article, I’m going to attempt to explain in simple terms and without using advanced math how generative text models work, to help you think about them as computer algorithms and not as magic.
walk through the process of fine-tuning step-by-step. It won’t cost you a penny because we’re going to do it all on your own hardware using Apple’s MLX framework.
The first thing I check when debugging latency issues in distributed systems is whether TCP_NODELAY is enabled. And it’s not just me. Every distributed system builder I know has lost hours to latency issues quickly fixed by enabling this simple socket option, suggesting that the default behavior is wrong, and perhaps that the whole concept is outmoded.
Using time for animation is very common in shader programs and various other places. CSS can not start a timer like JavaScript does, but nowadays it’s possible to define a custom variable with the CSS Houdini API to track time in milliseconds. The value of animation is calculate based on this custom variable. It’s a different approach to perform animation compare to keyframes. This goes beyond my ability to understand, I’m not super good at CSS animation. But still a good read to dabble, I always like to perform animation with pure css.
One of the surprises that comes with developing applications and operating a database cluster behind them is the discrepancy between practice and theory, development environment and the production. A perfect example of such a mismatch is changing a column type. Super easy to change stuff in dev, but I dare you to randomly go in a prod db and change data type
When you generate SSH key like RSA or ECDSA and peform encryption and signature verification. What is the math behind them? I always though they are complicated, but they are way more straighforward when you dabble into its math.
In database, there is always a trade off. You trade storage tooling gain cpu time. trade fragment for speed. all of that become bloated. How can we minimize these?
discusses how to develop eBPF programs with Go, with practical example at Edgedelata. A bit Go specific but learning about eBPF will boost your system programming knowledge.
We’re going to speed up some numpy code by 100x using “unsafe Python.” Which is not quite the same as unsafe Rust, but it’s a bit similar, and I’m not sure what else to call it… Python specific but please read-on, I’m sure the same concept can be apply to any language that has a C-binding to native C library.
an API created by LlamaIndex to efficiently parse and represent files for efficient retrieval and context augmentation using LlamaIndex frameworks.
PythonPretty fancy and modern terminal file manager. Even though I cannot see myself use this tool, I absolutely want to dig into its source code and see how it’s done. One thing I always wanted to understand about the event/gui loop in these GUI/TUI app.
Goa minimal TLS implement that is well enough to make a simple HTTPS request to most web servers. Very nice to understand what happen at the byte level in a TLS session
BashAn extensible text-to-diagrams library that works in both browser and node.js. Similar to tool like MermaidJS to draw diagram with text.
Fully private LLM chatbot that runs entirely with a browser with no server needed. Supports Mistral and LLama 3
Perf monitoring CLI tool for Apple Silicon
a terminal-based monitoring tool “top” designed to display real-time metrics for Apple Silicon chips. It provides a simple and efficient way to monitor CPU and GPU usage, E-Cores and P-Cores, power consumption, and other system metrics directly from your terminal!
a PDF viewer with a focus on textbooks and research papers
A collection features over 3,800 stroke React icons, available at no charge and crafted to meet a diverse array of design requirements.
a backup / restore solution for PostgreSQL.
A Postgres extension to tier data to external storage such as AWS S3.
not monitoring pgslot closely and if a consumer die, you may wake up with a full disk of pgslot WAL. This small tool monitors their growth and alert via slack
PostgreSQL Database Security Assessment Tool
ChatGPT at home! Basically a better Google Nest Hub or Amazon Alexa home assistant. Built on the Raspberry Pi using the OpenAI API. A very cool hardware project with DIY style
a data framework for your LLM applications
A Mail server with a built-in admin ui. Replace all the tradition tooling like Postfix, DoveCot, roundcube or rainloop etc.
a modular and customizable javascript package that directly brings language model chats directly onto web browsers with hardware acceleration. Everything runs inside the browser with no server support and is accelerated with WebGPU.
an observability platform built by Pydantic team. Yes, it does has a web ui to help you view log and meric.
an automated email assistant customized to your writing style and past email history. You can run in on your laptop, train it with your mbox data. The mbox data format can be easily export from thunderbird or mac mail app or many modern mail client.
Wag adds MFA, route restriction and device enrolment to wireguard.
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