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These are a mix of stories from Norway, Croatia, and Slovenia from some past trips. Make Serbia Great Again Our first stop is the city of Dubrovnik in Croatia, which has become well known being the primary filming location for Game of Thrones seasons 2 – 8. I watched the series, and am kind of […]
AI Updates There is a lot of chatter about 2025 being the year of agentic frameworks. To me, this means a system in which a subset can allow AI models to take independent actions based on their environment, typically interacting with external APIs or interfaces. The terminology around this concept is still evolving, and definitions […]
Prompt Engineering – Meta Analysis Whitepaper One of my favorite AI podcasts, Latent Space, recently featured Sander Schulhoff, one of the authors of a comprehensive research paper on prompt engineering. This meta-study reviews over 1,600 published papers, with co-authors from OpenAI, Microsoft, and Stanford. [podcast] https://www.latent.space/p/learn-prompting [whitepaper] https://arxiv.org/abs/2406.06608 The whitepaper is an interesting academic deep dive into prompting, […]
Data Engineering and AIChip Huyen, who came out of Stanford and is active in the AI space recently wrote an article on what she learned by looking at the 900 most popular open source AI tools. https://huyenchip.com/2024/03/14/ai-oss.html In data engineering, one of our primary usages of AI is really just prompt engineering. Use Case 1: Data Migration Before LLMs, when we […]
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A large part of our civilisation rests on the shoulders of one medieval monk: Thomas Aquinas. Amid the turmoil of life, riddled with wickedness and pain, he would insist that our world is good. And all our success is built on this belief. Note: Before we start, let’s get one thing out of the way: Thomas Aquinas is clearly a Christian thinker, a Saint even. Yet he was also a brilliant philosopher. So even if you consider yourself agnostic or an atheist, stay with me, you will still enjoy his ideas. What is good? Thomas’ argument is rooted in Aristotle’s concept of goodness: Something is good if it fulfills its function. Aristotle had illustrated this idea with a knife. A knife is good to the extent that it cuts well. He made a distinction between an actual knife and its ideal function. That actual thing in your drawer is the existence of a knife. And its ideal function is its essence—what it means to be a knife: to cut well. So everything is separated into its existence and its ideal essence. And this is also true for humans: We have an ideal conception of what the essence of a human […] The post Thomas Aquinas — The world is divine! appeared first on Ralph Ammer.
My April Cools is out! Gaming Games for Non-Gamers is a 3,000 word essay on video games worth playing if you've never enjoyed a video game before. Patreon notes here. (April Cools is a project where we write genuine content on non-normal topics. You can see all the other April Cools posted so far here. There's still time to submit your own!) April Cools' Club
Everyone wants the software they work on to produce quality products, but what does that mean? In addition, how do you know when you have it? This is the longest single blog post I have ever written. I spent four decades writing software used by people (most of the server
The Ware for March 2025 is shown below. I was just taking this thing apart to see what went wrong, and thought it had some merit as a name that ware. But perhaps more interestingly, I was also experimenting with my cross-polarized imaging setup. This is a technique a friend of mine told me about […]
