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Best Practices for Working with Large Language Models

We’re all doing it now, right? Using LLMs for all kinds of things? Well here are some useful rules of thumb. By the way, as far as employing a team of assistants, take a look at Poe.com. It’s a single front end to all (almost all) the LLMs out there. And in fact it bakes in the question of what would the other LLMs say to the same prompt.

A brave new world!

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Grading for Growth

This article lays out many of the things that worry and bother me about the way we teach, assess and grade.

  • Web site excerpt: Research and ideas about reforming grading practices in higher education and beyond. Click to read Grading for Growth, a Substack publication with thousands of subscribers.

  • Link to site: Grading for Growth

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Software Needs To Be More Expensive

I agree with the high level argument. The open source situation does need a solution. But in general, we need to find ways to pay software developers more for the work they put into writing software. Wait! What do I mean? We have trained the world to expect to pay $0 for software that took huge numbers of person months to create. $4.90 is expensive! I know this is how the market weeds out useless products. But lots of useful ones need to fight this too. Try-before-you buy should remove the risk factor. But once you adopt an app and use it regularly then be willing to pay a serious amount for a serious app. People just don't have a sense of how much time and effort it takes to create even something as simple as an exellent solitaire game.

  • Web site excerpt: Software, like coffee, is too artificially cheap, and we need to make it more expensive. I have one suggestion for how to do that.

  • Link to site: Software Needs To Be More Expensive

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Pydantic: Simplifying Data Validation in Python – Real Python

Excellent introduction and overview of one of the most used python packages: Pydantic.

  • Web site excerpt: Discover the power of Pydantic, Python's most popular data parsing, validation, and serialization library. In this hands-on tutorial, you'll learn how to make your code more robust, trustworthy, and easier to debug with Pydantic.

  • Link to site: Pydantic: Simplifying Data Validation in Python – Real Python

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So your teacher wants you to do open source

Teachers, like me, might think it’s a good idea to suggest that students do a quick open source contribution. This article explains why that might be doing harm to the project’s.

  • Web site excerpt: If your teacher (or tutorial/video/hackathon/etc) says "go do X in an open source project" and then sends you off unsupervised, they haven't adequately prepa...

  • Link to site: So your teacher wants you to do open source

  • 1 min read

Kamal: hot deployment tool to watch—or a total game changer?—Martian Chronicles, Evil Martians’ team blog

An excellent review and investigation of the new hotness in cloud deployment, Kamal. Alternative to K8S and k3s, supposedly much simpler.