Lake Union's Lonely Trolley: SLU Streetcar Ridership

The impetus for this post was my recent realization that I’ve developed an involuntary reflex for spotting AI-generated content. The tells are subtle now, but (sadly? tellingly?) this sort of content is seemingly everywhere now once you start looking. The Rise of AI Slop One bit of hipster cred I get to claim is that I followed Simon Willison...

Recent advances in LLMs have demonstrated increasingly powerful reasoning capabilities, primarily through eliciting chain-of-thought outputs from models. While these methods have proven effective, they rely on discrete, tokenized representations of reasoning steps. A recent research paper from Meta introduces a novel approach that steps away from...

I haven’t been writing much recently (sound of crickets coming from this year’s blog archive), but this is such an OnBrand™ post that I couldn’t not write it. At work, I’ve been shifting into more of a TL role, and as such I’ve been tracking an increasingly large number of streams of information. We use JIRA for bug/feature level work, but a lot...

I’ve been in a mode of trying lots of new AI tools for the past year or two, and feel like it’s useful to take an occasional snapshot of the “state of things I use”, as I expect this to continue to change pretty rapidly. Claude 3.5 Sonnet (via API Console or LLM): I currently find Claude 3.5 Sonnet to be the most delightful / insightful /...

I’ve recently been contemplating a recurring pattern that I’ve observed in several teams I’ve worked on – the ‘Load-Bearing Script.’ The outline of this pattern goes like this: A team member writes a portion of a system as a shell script for a quick prototype. That shell script, initially quite simple, grows in complexity over time. Eventually,...