Translating blog posts with GPT-4, or: on hope and fear

I’m not the kind of person that develops a strong attachment to their own work. When I decided to leave Redis, about 1620 days ago (~ 4.44 years), I never looked at the source code, commit messages, or anything related to Redis again. From time to time, when I needed Redis, I just downloaded it and compiled it. I just typed “make” and I was very...

The Raspberry Pico is suddenly becoming my preferred chip for embedded development. It is well made, durable hardware, with a ton of features that appear designed with smartness and passion (the state machines driving the GPIOs are a killer feature!). Its main weakness, the lack of connectivity, is now resolved by the W variant. The data sheet is...

From a theoretical standpoint, the best reply provided by an LLM is obtained by always picking the token associated with the highest probability. This approach makes the LLM output deterministic, which is not a good property for a number of applications. For this reason, in order to balance LLMs creativity while preserving adherence to the...

I'll start by saying that this article is not meant to be a retrospective on LLMs. It's clear that 2023 was a special year for artificial intelligence: to reiterate that seems rather pointless. Instead, this post aims to be a testimony from an individual programmer. Since the advent of ChatGPT, and later by using LLMs that operate locally, I have...

The Idle scan was conceived at the end of 1998, evidenced by emails. I had moved to Milan a few months prior, having been there since September if I recall correctly, brimming with new ideas, unaware that my stay in that city would be brief. I spent the summer on the beaches of Sicily, mainly occupied with reading many books recommended by the...