Thought Eddies

Posts

Tradeoffs of Using a Cache at Scale

Imagine we have a query to an application that has become slow under load demands. We have several options to remedy this issue. If we settle on using a cache, consider the following failure domain when we design an architecture to determine whether using a cache actually is a good fit for the use...

Posts

Shaping LLM Responses

It's necessary to pay attention to the shape of a language model's response when incorporating it as a component in a software application. You can't programmatically tap into the power of a language model if you can't reliably parse its response. In the past, I have mostly used a combination of...

Posts

Auto-GPT

Experimenting with Auto-GPT

Auto-GPT is a popular project on Github that attempts to build an autonomous agent on top of an LLM. This is not my first time using Auto-GPT. I used it shortly after it was released and gave it a second try a week or two later, which makes this my third, zero-to-running effort.

Posts

Nix and direnv

I know a little about nix. Not a lot. I know some things about Python virtual environments, asdf and a few things about package managers. I've heard the combo of direnv and nix is fantastic from a number of engineers I trust, but I haven't had the chance to figure out what these tools can really...

Posts

GPT Prompt Attack

I came upon https://gpa.43z.one today. It's a GPT-flavored capture the flag. The idea is, given a prompt containing a secret, convince the LM to leak the prompt against prior instructions it's been given. It's cool way to develop intuition for how to prompt and steer LMs. I managed to complete all...