Why are we using LLMs as calculators

If you’re building a new Python web app these days, there’s a good chance you’re using FastAPI. There are a lot of features that make FastAPI easy to get started with. There are also a lot of nuances that take a while to understand. One feature I’ve been untangling is the way FastAPI manages calls to API routes via decorated path parameters. The...

I want to get back into writing more regularly this year, so in light of that, here’s my last year in review. Evaluating LLMs Like many of us in tech, I spent a large portion of 2024 thinking about and working with LLMs, but I was lucky enough to do it for work. I spent the year designing, building, open-sourcing, (and naming! 🐊) an application...

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...

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...