A Byte of Coding Issue 348

Soup?

My girlfriend got me a mocha pot recently and it’s generally great, but it feels like the first cup of coffee I made with it was amazing; smooth, creamy, not bitter, however every proceeding cup hasn’t been up to par. This, along with my recent exposure to a proper home espresso machine has made me realize that it’s actually pretty hard to brew a great cup of coffee. You often hear how a cup of coffee at the coffee shop is such a rip off (youtube finance gurus), but to be fair, it’s not trivial to reproduce. A great cup of coffee probably takes about 5 minutes of focused work. At $5 a cup, that’s $1 / minute, so you’d just need to be making over $60 / hour for it to be not worth your time (or $120k / year) to brew your own coffee (from a purely monetary perspective).

Anyway, here’s the issue.

Optimizing LLMs From a Dataset Perspective

Published: 15 September 2023

Tags: ai, machine learning, llm

An older article than usual, but still interesting. Sebastian Raschka “focuses on improving the modeling performance of LLMs by finetuning them”, specifically highlighting “strategies that involve modifying, utilizing, or manipulating the datasets for instruction-based finetuning rather than altering the model architecture or training algorithms”.

Some highlights:

• “Instruction finetuning is a method used to improve the performance of language models like ChatGPT and Llama-2-chat by having the model generate outputs for a range of example inputs paired with desired outputs”

• datasets for instruction finetuning can be created by humans or LLMs

• includes interesting datasets you can use and research directions to go further

Database Changes to Find Tagged Questions Faster: Answers and Discussion

Published: 6 February 2024

Tags: sql, database, optimization

Brent Ozar walks us through optimizing the data model for a typical blog posts + tags situation.

Some highlights:

• assumes database is already running in production, so a migration is required

• breaks out existing data into a child table

• update queries to use new tables

A Distributed Systems Reading List

Published: 7 February 2024

Tags: distributed systems

Fred Hebert published a page with definitions and descriptions of distributed system topics, as well as curated lists of resources for more in-depth studies. This is a curation of a curation, cura-ception.

Some highlights:

• quick descriptions of “foundational theory” topics

• “is meant to be used as a quick reference to understand various distsys discussions, and to discover the overall space and possibilities that are around this environment”

• “other interesting material” section