My friend Brad asked about what I've been reading lately in the AI/LLM space to keep up. Here's my link roundup! Things that have been on my rotation lately.
- AI Engineering: Building Applications with Foundation Models: Great January-2025 catch up on consuming LLM/AI usage in real world applications; enough background to Get It without being distracted by details
- Simon Willison Website: Follow for great links and chasing the dragon of new releases and thoughts
- LLM CLI (Datasette): From Simon Willison, a very handy CLI tool for interfacing with LLMs. Once set up, I use this as a unixy native tool. Like ...
cat some_file.txt | llm -s 'Turn this into a CSV of street, city, state, zip' > data.csv - /r/LocalLLaMA: Reddit community all about running local LLMs; even if you only ever run things on other people's computer (API) it is interesting to know what might be happening on the other side
- /r/ClaudeAI: Latest and Greatest with Claude Stuff
- Groq: Hardware accelerated LLM (also see Cerebras)
- Aider: Open source CLI coding assistant. They've been building up an Aider LLM Leaderboard which is interesting, especially the highlighted polyglot board (one model for architecture plan, another for low-level coding)
- Sourcegraph Cody: There are several VSCode-embedded code assistants in this space, Cody is one to keep an eye on. Recently Copilot Edits has stepped up to a similar cross-file assistant too. There are a bunch of others; I'm not really psyched about switching from vim to vscode, and I certainly don't want to switch to a proprietary editor, so I haven't spent much time with things like Cursor (yet)
- Matthew Berman (YouTube): He does videos with some demos and commentary that is pretty fun; I may not always agree, but even knowing what the latest topics are is very helpful!
- Practical AI Podcast: I listen to podcasts when I commute or go for longer drives, which isn't often but often enough that I've listened to some good episodes both here and on other ChangeLogs.
- Latent Space: The AI Engineer Podcast: I've only listened to a few of these, but it is on top of my feed list in AntennaPod currently
Notes from the Changelog interview with Cory Doctorow on Chokepoint Capitalism
Lemonade stand operated (or perhaps supervised?) by a robot. Image by Bing Image Creator.
While driving to and waiting for Millie (the car) to get maintenanced, I listened to Examining capitalism's chokepoints, an interview with Cory Doctorow discussing his book Chokepoint Capitalism. This touched on all sorts of things, but right up at the front was an off-topic question - How is Cory so prolific?
- Is Google Making Us Stupid?
- I have a big stack of books that I've made ... fairly little progress on
- Maybe the internet is eating my brain!
- So now I will post links and bullets
- Base-4 fractions in Telugu
- Interesting explanation of the traditional Telugu fraction numbering. Also draws comparison to the traditional English measures
- Git remote branches and Git's missing terminology
- Presents a better understanding of git remote branches, highlighting that to really comprehend what's going on you must acknowledge the implicit local branch that is your cache of the upstream (such as origin/master)
- I'm a little worried that I'm going to end up linking half of MJD's blog posts. Oh well, they are great. Example, /dev/null Follies has a hilarious nerdy punchline.