When I asked ChatGPT what type of AI it is, this is what it said:

ChatGPT is a type of language model, specifically a variant of a transformer model called the Generative Pretrained Transformer (GPT). It is an example of artificial general intelligence (AGI), which means that it is capable of performing a wide range of natural language processing tasks, such as text generation, summarization, translation, and question answering, among others.

I know some of these words 🤦‍♂️.

I’ll never be an AI researcher, but I do want to have a laymen’s understanding of what the tool is capable of and how it works. I’ve been searching for educational resources that lie somewhere in the sweet spot of accessibility and depth. I want to understand the basic terminology, like what a transformer is, and also understand a large language model’s shortcomings. And I want to understand where a language model fits into the broader landscape of AI.

To that end, I’m compiling a few resources that seem to be well regarded. I’ll treat this post as a digital bookshelf, and will update it with my thoughts and notes as I work through the material.

We’ll start with 35,000 words from Stephen Wolfram as a primer, then move into Andrej Karpathy’s Zero to Hero lecture series.

• Stephen Wolfram: What Is ChatGPT Doing … and Why Does It Work? (2023-02-14)
• Andrej Karpathy: Neural Networks: Zero to Hero
• OpenAI Documentation
• Rodrigo Girão Serrão: Your first recurrent neural network (RNN)

In my mid-20s—okay, mid- to late-20s—I worked as the Assistant Manager of a restaurant. It was a formative time for me, though I didn’t fully realize it then.

In 2015 I jotted down three managerial principles on Medium that had been percolating in my mind. (Medium at the time was quite in-vogue). Having forgotten all about this account, I stumbled upon it and it struck me as uncharacteristically good advice from my otherwise uninformed young self.

The following is dated May 10, 2015.

I keep three things in mind on a day to day basis that help me decide on a particular course of action, how best to conduct myself in a given situation, or where to focus my energy where demand outstrips supply.

1. As a leader, your most critical function is teaching and supporting your people. You are not your business — your employees are, and your job is to develop them into strong ambassadors of the brand. The quality of your product, the happiness of your customers, the volume of your sales all follow from the attitude and competence of your staff. Interpersonal skills and the ability to make improvements and criticisms without being hurtful or discouraging are perhaps the most critical attribute of any manager. Positive feedback is important.
2. Organization and prioritization. Simply find a way to ensure that no details are missed and nothing slips through the cracks. Do what you can to minimize surprises; be flexible and adaptable when they do occur.
3. Managing your own attitude. You set the tone and energy. I work in a fast-paced, high stress business where this is particularly important. Letting small incidents send you into an outwardly visible tailspin is a quick and sure way of crashing a complex or time-sensitive operation. Your staff feed off your energy and positivity, and being mindful of that is critically important. A friend once told me, “head to work each day as if you were going to war.” — Expect and anticipate problems in a manner such that they won’t ruin your day when they occur. Keep it light and save the over reactions for incidents that warrant it.

Along with hard work and volition, these three points seem to work well for me. I’m still young and stupid, so take with a dash of salt.

Will update as I make more mistakes and learn from them.

Bonus: I also wrote this, titled reviews_cometh.txt:

The customers grow restless in the evenings. They arrive in numbers by moonlight and street lamp, hungry for bread and wine. It is in these hours, as dusk comes ever sooner with each revolution, they wait.

At the door, they wait.

For drinks, they wait.

For their meat and their honey…

They wait.

In these desperate moments — moments of hope then anger, denial then acceptance, they reach upon their mobile devices and tap.

For the negative reviews cometh.

# Make a clone of the repository
git clone <your_project> <new_submodule>

# CD into the new repository
cd <new_submodule>

# Use filter-branch to isolate the subdirectory
git filter-branch --subdirectory-filter 'path/to/subdirectory' --prune-empty -- --all

# Remove the old remote
git remote rm <remote_name>

git filter-branch lets you rewrite Git revision history and apply custom filters on each revision. It should be used with caution! From the Git Manual (emphasis mine):

git filter-branch has a plethora of pitfalls that can produce non-obvious manglings of the intended history rewrite (and can leave you with little time to investigate such problems since it has such abysmal performance). These safety and performance issues cannot be backward compatibly fixed and as such, its use is not recommended.

Nevertheless, since we live dangerously around these parts, here’s what’s happening with the filter-branch command should you choose to use it:

• --subdirectory-filter is the main command. It takes a path to a subdirectory and filters the repository to only include that subdirectory.
• --prune-empty removes commits that don’t change anything.
• -- --all is a way to pass arguments to the internal git rev-list command. In this case, it’s telling git to run the command on all branches.

Once the operation is done, you’ll have a new repository with only the subdirectory you specified. You can then push it to a new remote and add it as a submodule to your original repository.

git filter-branch is a destructive operation. While I’ve used the above command with success on my own repositories, your mileage may vary and I probably can’t help you if something goes wrong.

Jürgen Gmach on his personal blog:

While I need to use GPG pretty regularly, I always have to look up the commands - they just don’t stick :-)

Over the last couple of months I collected every command I had to use. Enjoy!

🔖 One for the bookmarks: GPG - All I Need to Know

This snippet goes in your .vscode/tasks.json file. It will run the current python file as the default build task.

• command will invoke the python interpreter that is configured in your workspace settings.
• group will make this task the default build task.
• presentation:focus will focus the terminal window when the task is run.
• presentation:reveal will reveal the terminal window when the task is run.

Change args to any python file if you’d like to run the same file each time.

{
  // See https://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=733558
  // for the documentation about the tasks.json format
  "version": "2.0.0",
  "tasks": [
    {
      "label": "Python: current file",
      "type": "shell",
      "command": "${command:python.interpreterPath}",
      "args": ["${file}"],
      "problemMatcher": [],
      "group": {
        "kind": "build",
        "isDefault": true
      },
      "presentation": {
        "focus": true,
        "reveal": "always"
      },
      "options": {
        "cwd": "${workspaceFolder}"
      }
    }
  ]
}