Daily Reading List – May 28, 2024 (#327)

Whew, what a Tuesday. I had an outstanding 3-day weekend with sunshine, friends, and baseball. I also (mostly) completed a fun coding project that I’ll blog about later this week. Today was a blur, but a lot got done. I think.

[article] A Great Sales Pitch Hinges on the Right Story. It doesn’t matter if you’re in sales, engineering, program management, or most any other role. Get good at storytelling!

[blog] Effective large language model adaptation for improved grounding. Some cool work from Google Research that looks at a new framework for adapting a base LLM to self-ground responses.

[blog] “The Business” is BS. If you’re in IT, or a tech consultant, don’t refer to a set of people as “the business.” It creates an unnecessary separation, and treats tech as a far-off service provider.

[blog] The Boring Product Manifesto. Making products shouldn’t be so dramatic. John says that we need more of the “good kind” of boring.

[blog] Using LLMs to Learn From YouTube. This seems like a complicated architecture, but it gets the job done.

[blog] Lazy Work, Good Work. Massively important point. Our most creative work, and the moments where we connect the dots, doesn’t happen in meetings. Get more thinking time.

[blog] Don’t Get Lost in the Metrics Maze: A Practical Guide to SLOs, SLIs, Error Budgets, and Toil. Here’s a brief, helpful take on some of the core ideas behind Site Reliability Engineering and focusing on the right dimensions when keeping a system online and healthy.

[blog] Grounding Gemini with Web Search results in LangChain4j. Read this for an excellent example of how to call an LLM and ground the results in a trustworthy source.

[blog] The future of foundation models is closed-source. Those building “open” models aren’t doing charity work, There’s other motives, and John encourages thinking about which models you’re betting on.

[blog] What if…slower wasn’t safer? Instead of “getting it right” by slowing down, maybe it’s smarter to make the inevitable process of making mistakes cheaper and faster? That’s the argument here.

[blog] The Future is Now: TuringBots Will Collapse the Software Development Life Cycle Siloes. I like the work that Forrester has done on AI dev assistants. Diego talks here about the changing SDLC.

##

Want to get this update sent to you every day? Subscribe to my RSS feed or subscribe via email below: