March 7, 2025

Python And The 'src-vs-flat' Layout Debate

I recently needed to setup a new Python project and in the course of doing so, learned about uv¹ , “an extremely fast Python package and project manager”. uv is great. It is easy to install (just a single executable!), and it takes care of all the essential elements of a Python project. Unfortunately, I immediately came across one major problem–uv uses the wrong default for project layouts.

This is the default layout of a project created by uv:

January 29, 2025

Deep Research Review

Farewell to Google Search

Let’s say you were in the market for a new laptop. What would you do? You certainly would not go on Google and search for “A good laptop under $1000”. That’d be madness. It used to be that Google could be a trusted source of information. These days, however, the top results on Google are mostly advertisements.

What Google search results look like

December 31, 2024

Generative AI 2024 Retrospective

2024 witnessed a parade of increasingly more powerful AI model releases, culminating in OpenAI’s groundbreaking “o3”. While I’m certain these advancements really are significant, I don’t think they have translated to noticeable improvements for the average user.

What people are paying attention to, though, are the really amazing product features that are coming out of Anthropic and Google. I’ve heard a lot about people building software Claude’s Artifacts. And Google’s Deep Research product, released a few days ago, has just completely changed search.

August 20, 2024

Running Your Own LLM UI

This is a review of Open WebUI, an extensible and user-friendly self-hosted WebUI for LLMs.

I recently decided to run my own UI layer for LLMs, as I have some exciting ideas. For those who are not familiar with chatbots, their architecture basically looks like this:

While I’m pretty good at customizing the middleware, I’m not as skilled at customizing the UI layer.

I tried writing my own UI at first, but I quickly gave up when I realized it was beyond my skills as a frontend developer. The next thing I did was look into open-source solutions. There were a lot of choices, but I narrowed them down to these three:

December 7, 2023

My thoughts on AI in 2023

OpenAI took the world by storm in 2023 with the relase of ChatGPT. Other companies quickly followed suit, introducing their own competitors to ChatGPT. In this update, I want to write down my thoughts on some of the biggest players in the field of generative AI.

When I use the term “generative AI,” I am referring to a computer program that can generate text, images, or other types of content. These programs can understand natural language and follow complex instructions. One notable example of a generative AI is OpenAI’s “GPT-4,” commonly known as ChatGPT. Another well-known generative AI is Midjourney, which specializes in generating images from text descriptions. In this update, I will focus on AI with text output, as that is the area I have the most experience with.

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. Can we do better? What if you have working examples for every problem you encountered? What if you can describe your intents in a familiar language and see how it should look in a new language? As it turns out, GPT-3 is really good at this task.

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.
      --conf-file="llmcli.conf"    file with api keys, created with http://localhost:8080/v1/p/tools

Commands:
  openai create-completion
  openai create-edit
  ai21 complete

Run "/bin/foo_to_be_named <command> --help" for more information on a command.

I like to use Kong as the framework for command line parsing and I wanted to know how to use its subcommand features. Being too lazy to read the documentation, I asked ChatGPT to write me a short program using sub-commands. This is the example it came back with:

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.

ChatGPT is a chatbot developed by OpenAI. It has been widely recognized for its impressive capabilities, such as imitating human writing, transforming plain English into code, and making glaringly stupid mistakes. The underlying technology of ChatGPT is a machine learning model known as GPT-3. This model is designed to predict how a human might continue a previous piece of text. For example, given what I’ve written so far, GPT-3 predicted what the rest of this blog post will look like:

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.” and “Empowering others feel manipulative. I believe people are empowered by nature.” This is often how I felt about empowerment.
- If not empowerment, then what? While he doesn’t mention this specifically, the way I interpreted his leadership style throughout the book is that he applied the Situational Leadership style.
Marquet tells a story of being reprimanded after coming up with a brilliant ruse to sink an enemy submarine (during practice). The moral of that story is that a great plan which is too complex for others to execute is, in fact, a bad plan.
- tldr; KISS
His story of being assigned to Santa Fe, of feeling dejected and finding the motivation to carry through is very inspiring. It is also a good example of how to be a good leader – his commander applied great leadership skills to help Marquet through it.
- On being told he’d have the full support of his command officer to succeed, then being told… “But, I don’t think it’s a good idea if you ask for A, B, and C” gave me a new perspective on “support.”
- One view of support is that “I trust you to do this” and “I think you are the best person for this job.”
- There are good ways (better than I have been doing) to communicate “these are the limitations to what we can provide to you.”
Watch out for signs of low morale! People avoiding mistakes, meeting the minimum requirements, and “do whatever they tell me to do.”
In chapter 13, Marquet tells a story of giving more responsibility to department heads too soon. In chapter 17, he talks about the importance of training in order for delegation to succeed. It feels like these two points should’ve been tied together more closely. Though I’m really just nitpicking now.

I suspect, if you are in the tech industry where there is already a lot of talk about autonomy and ownership, you like already understand the theme of this book. If you believe that people need to be led or that a great personality is needed to inspire others, then you should check this out; It will offer you a useful counter perspective.

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. This alone makes for an engrossing read. I cannot help but to be delighted by learning brand new things about nature and animals. It brings me back to being a child again. What makes things better is her amusing way with words. (I am jealous.) Some choice phrases from the book: