What a misfortune, although you are made
for fine and great works
this unjust fate of yours always
denies you encouragement and success;
that base customs should block you;
and pettiness and indifference.

And how terrible the day when you yield
(the day when you give up and yield),
and you leave on foot for Susa,
and you go to the monarch Artaxerxes
who favorably places you in his court,
and offers you satrapies and the like.

And you accept them with despair
these things that you do not want. …

Grahame Sydney’s book The Art of Grahame Sydney has been on the coffee table the last couple of months. Central Otago landscapes are difficult to capture in central Melbourne, but I’ve taken inspiration from his other works and created this frame.

All photos were shot on the Olympus OM-1 with …

No analogies, no metaphors. This model is based off the excellent paper Defining, Measuring, and Managing Technical Debt by Ciera Jaspan and Collin Green. The findings come from the Engineering Productivity Research Team at Google based on five years of company-wide engineer surveys. This post is largely copied verbatim from the paper. Full credit to the authors.

Tech Debt is omnipresent and nebulous. We narrow it to only refer to the detrimental: Technical Debt or un-necessary complexity which …

August 2024 Update: Now a solved problem. Use Structured Outputs.

Large language models (LLMs) return unstructured output. When we prompt them they respond with one large string. This is fine for applications such as ChatGPT, but in others where we want the LLM to return structured data such as lists or key value pairs, a parseable response is needed. In Building A ChatGPT-enhanced Python REPL I used a technique to prompt the LLM to return output in a text format I could parse. Here I explore …

You’re in a new city for a weekend and take a bunch of photographs. When you get home you review your shots and delete some of them. The Keeper Rate is the ratio of shots you keep versus those you throw away. It’s a concept, not a literal metric.

I’ve got a camera on my phone, a Sony digital camera, a 35mm film camera, and a medium format film camera. Shooting film made me start thinking about Keeper Rate. A roll of film in a 35mm film camera can store thirty five images. Film …