February 11, 2023

Use GPT-3 To Build A Code Translator

Once you know a programming language well, the process for learning a new language is not very hard. It is just time consuming. You need to read the documentation for basic syntax and flow control, get familiar with its idioms, memorize core parts of the standard libraries, and learn its tool chains. What can we do to speed up the learning process? One thing we can do is provide great examples in the documentation.

January 8, 2023

Using GPT-3 to write code

Writing code with ChatGPT. In the aftermath of ChatGPT’s debut, the Internet is abuzz with GPT’s ability to write code. I used it to write code yesterday, and this is what I thought. I wanted to create a command line program to interact with APIs from OpenAI and AI21. The design is a single program with subcommands for each company’s APIs: Usage: /bin/foo_to_be_named <command> A tool to interact with various LLM models from the CLI Flags: -h, --help Show context-sensitive help.

January 2, 2023

OpenAI and ChatGPT

I had two weeks off at the end of 2022. Telesign closed its operations on the last week of 2022 to give employees well-deserved time off for a year of hardwork and I took another week off in addition to that. Like many technologists, I became captivated by OpenAI’s release of ChatGPT in 2022, and I spent a lot of the last two weeks exploring what OpenAI has to offer.

December 9, 2022

AI Content Assistants

Since its release in Nov 2022, ChatGPT has been making waves in the tech world. Its user-friendly interface has made GPT-3 accessible to the general public, and its capabilities have captured the imagination of many. More and more, people are beginning to ponder a future where AI-generated writing is commonplace. Some of these ideas are shallow. The Atlantic has a guest essay titled “The End of High-School English” that discusses capabilities of ChatGPT but fails to make a compelling case for why English education should be changed and how it could be improved.

July 9, 2022

Book Review: Turn The Ship Around

My notes from Turn the Ship Around! A True Story of Turning Followers into Leaders. Early in the book, Marquet tells a story of having failed to empower officers under his command. The story of being unable to “empower” stuck with me. It reminded me of experiences, earlier in my career, of failing to empower people reporting into me. On empowerment, Marquet said “Empowerment is not how I want to be managed.

June 19, 2022

Book review - Bitch: On the Female of the Species

Bitch is a book from zoologist Lucy Cooke on correcting misunderstandings and cultural biases in our biological science. She explains, via animal studies, how existing notions of sex, male/female roles, and “what is natural” have been incomplete, if not incorrect. In Bitch, Lucy goes through the behaviors of lemurs, meerkats, hyenas, moles, orcas, elephants, bonobos, termites, birds and fish to challenge conventional wisdom on nature and the roles of male and females.

May 17, 2022

Optimisim

This is a story from Neil DeGrasse Tyson’s StarTalk podcast. He talked about being on Brian Cox’s show and discussing the futures of space travel. Neil was saying that chemical rocket engines are not going to cut it and we need to look into things like wormholes and warp drives. Then Brian cuts in and explains that wormholes are fundamentally unstable and they won’t work. Brian was absolutely correct, but that was not the point.

January 3, 2022

Distance of Things

The Earth is approximately 147 million km from the Sun. It is a tiny thing. You can fit 1,300 Earths into Jupiter. Jupiter, you think, must be huge. The diameter of Jupiter is 140 thousand km. This means you can line up 1050 Jupiters back to back between the Earth and the Sun. As big as Jupiter is, it is still less than 1% of the distance from the Sun to the Earth.

October 19, 2021

Things I Care About - Part 1

Fried broad beans are something I grew up with. They are delicious. Think of them as alternative forms of potato chips.

October 17, 2021

Interpreter in Go - 4

In Chapter 1.3 of [Ball’s Writing an Interpreter in Go][1], we encounter one design decision of his Monkey programming language. Here, the lexer has a NextToken() method that looks like this: func (l *Lexer) NextToken() token.Token { var tok token.Token switch l.ch { // [...] default: if isLetter(l.ch) { tok.Literal = l.readIdentifier() return tok } else { tok = newToken(token.ILLEGAL, l.ch) } } // [...] } This means the lexer itself does not do backtracking.