TWIL ~ This week I learned

Thesis implementing K8s into Backstage

Thesis from CZ uni implements K8s support into Backstage (popular SRE portal from Spotify). And as a nice biproduct, describes well common terms and tools as SRE, Backstage, and so much more. Nice entry material and what you should expect from SRE. On theoretical level.

MM1

Finally some paper, that is open and contributes to the level of understanding current methods. Suprisingly, it is not from OpenAI or Google (which are, from mine POV, closed companies and share almost nothing meaningful), but APPLE! Who would have thought that.

They try a lot of techniques and via [ablations](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ablation_(artificial_intelligence) evaluate their contribution. It is not suprising, that better data leads to better results (in this case better resolution of images and good choice of datasets for training given the target task).

Re-ranking in RAG applications

https://www.pinecone.io/learn/series/rag/rerankers/ - important because more stuff retrieved for answer generation diminishes LLM Recall

DuckDB is the new Hype

I stumbled upon DuckDB and I am yet to try it in some real use case. I really like the consciousness of being a opinionated product, not trying to solve all the problems. By being “DB designed for analytical workload” and having " a columnar-vectorized query execution engine" you have possible users. Another smart use case is to just use it for data exploration.

What goes around comes around

https://db.cs.cmu.edu/papers/2024/whatgoesaround-sigmodrec2024.pdf

The movement of computing from on-prem to the cloud generates a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity for enterprises to refactor codebases and remove bad historical technology decisions.

Non technicals inspirations

Just as podcast “oddly influenced” try to draw inspiration from non-software fields, I tr Dreyfus model and Porters model

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aSiJ4YTKxfM Elon’s leadership

Simple connecting to devices

Issue I was having for some time. How to expose internal network component for development when on the road.

• Go Teleport
• SSH tunneling
• ZeroTier