Everything I did in 2024

Favorite books of 2024 Like last year, I spent a fair amount of the year reading code and technical books. Every year I have this struggle. There is a lot going on in machine learning and engineering and I need to stay on top of it. Yet, I also need to read fiction because if I only read tech books, they take away my creative energy rather than...

There is a lot of debate in the software community around whether LLMs can replace developers. Part of the reason is the way we formulate the problem of what it means to write software. In industry, we still give outsize cultural deference to software developers as lone wizards who come into the room, put on their hoodie, crank up the techno, and...

We keep trying to get LLMs to do math. We want them to count the number of “rs” in strawberry, to perform algebraic reasoning, do multiplication, and to solve math theorems. A recent experiment particularly piqued my interest. Researchers used OpenAI’s new 4o model to solve multiplication problems by using the prompt: Calculate the product of x...

In the 1800s, before serfdom was abolished in the Russian empire, landowners paid taxes based on how many serfs they had. A census was conducted every few years by government employees traveling across the empire and doing counts; a manual map-reduce of epic proportions. If a person was dead, it would often be years before the government cleared...

This is a near-transcript of the talk I gave at PyCon Italia 2024 in May in Florence. Introduction Buongiorno PyconIt, grazie per avermi invitata a parlare! Avrei voluta fare tutto il discorso in italiano, ma lo sto ancora imparando. Per adesso posso parlare soltanto di gelato o colori. Perché non so ancora dire, “don’t worry about LLMs”, il...